A couple of weeks back (June 9), I posted my assessment of Donald Trump’s intensifying assault on democracy: “Make no mistake. Troops occupying LA uninvited isn't a preventive measure. It's an authoritarian invasion for political ends.”
Shortly afterward, a statement by
General James Mattis, from June 2020, during the George Floyd riots in
Minnesota went viral. Although the general’s concise essay on freedom wasn’t
new, it could not have been more apropos of the current Trump
administration’s intervention in California, and, in general, ICE raids and
deportations without due process of people who have lived, worked and raised
families in the US for decades. The 2020 essay is entitled, In Union There
Is Strength.
You’ll recall that Mattis was Trump’s
Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2019 (before he’d had enough and withdrew).
He previously commanded troops in the Gulf War, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
In his statement, General Mattis says,
in part: The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of
the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly
demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be
able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers.
The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are
insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as
a nation.
When I joined the military, some 50
years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I
dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance
to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to
provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military
leadership standing alongside.
It was a bold statement then, and
remains so now. One that, having served in the Army for three years, also a
half-century ago, and having sworn that same oath as Mattis, I celebrated, and
was filled with gratitude, since today, it seems, that vow, sworn to as well by
the president, cabinet, and all members of Congress, is being taken lightly,
almost anecdotally. And as a result, we are losing the battle to maintain
democracy. Not since the Civil War has there been such a direct and urgent
threat to democracy and to the nation’s founding principles.
Truthout, an
online independent medium that reports the news from a left-leaning viewpoint,
but which is highly respected among the independent media for its factual
accuracy and uncommon investigations, made clear just how overblown Trump’s
federal action was. According to Truthout: “President Donald Trump’s
latest deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to Los
Angeles means that there are now more troops carrying out Trump’s anti-protest
crackdown in southern California than in both Iraq and Syria…
“Trump has dispatched roughly 4,000
National Guard members and 700 Marines to respond to L.A.’s protests of his
immigration raids, for a total of roughly 4,700 troops. Meanwhile, according to
publicly reported Pentagon figures, the US has roughly 2,000 troops deployed in
Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq, for a total of 4,500.”
General Mattis continues: We must
reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed
military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only
when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors.
Militarizing our response…sets up a conflict—a false conflict—between the
military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a
trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to
protect, and of which they themselves are a part. Keeping public order rests
with civilian state and local leaders who best understand their communities and
are answerable to them.
James Madison wrote in Federalist 14
that “America united with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier,
exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited,
with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” We do not need to
militarize our response to protests. We need to unite around a common purpose.
And it starts by guaranteeing that all of us are equal before the law.
While vilifying protesters in California
and elsewhere, the president’s supporters seem to forget that this is the same
Donald Trump who, in one of his first actions as president, gave a blanket
pardon to the fifteen hundred MAGA supporters convicted of crimes perpetrated
during the January Sixth Insurrection in which millions of dollars in damage
was done to the Capitol and in which one hundred forty police officers were
attacked and injured and one died.
The difference? The insurrectionists backed
Trump in his authoritarian designs. Today’s protesters do not.
While that was the most stunning example
of blatant authoritarianism by an American president in the history of the
United States, it was, as it turns out, only the beginning. In the second term
that he has been handed—shamefully, for the GOP, considering the thirty-four felony
convictions handed down against him, and the multiple indictments for high
crimes and misdemeanors that he was facing in the run-up to the 2024 election—his
disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law in general is now on steroids.
Since taking office for the second time,
six months ago, Trump has brazenly violated major tenets of federal law no
fewer than nine times.
His unilaterally federalizing of the
California National Guard as a repression force, in flagrant disregard for the
express demands to the contrary of that state’s governor, and in violation of
the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution, is just the latest, if clearly the
gravest to date, a fact confirmed by California District Senior Federal Judge
Charles Breyer.
In a subsequent appeal to the 9th
District Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel—two appointed by the first Trump
administration and the third by former President Joe Biden—Trump won temporary
continued control of the California National Guard. Trump celebrated this as a
full-blown victory, but the decision was handed down along with a number of
caveats. First, that control was indeed temporary, while Governor Gavin
Newsom’s legal action against the Trump administration continues to play out.
Second, it gives Trump no power to take over law enforcement in the state. The
troops he mobilizes can only be used to protect federal agents and federal
property. Third, it contradicted the Trump Justice Department’s claim that,
once the president decided that an emergency merited the intervention of
troops, no court or governor can review that decision. The Court of Appeals
rejected that argument out of hand.
Furthermore, of the three conditions set
out under the law in which a president can federalize a state’s National Guard,
Trump’s decision in California objectively only met one: arguably, the idea
that a situation is created in which the US government is unable to execute the
country’s laws using regular forces. In short, a few violent protesters, out of
a generally peaceful protest, who clashed physically with ICE agents gave Trump
the excuse he needed to intervene. The other two factors—rebellion, or danger
of a rebellion against the federal government—simply didn’t exist.
The appeals court said that the one plausible
condition had “probably been met,” because protesters hurled items at
immigration authorities' vehicles, used trash dumpsters as battering rams,
threw Molotov cocktails and vandalized property, “frustrating law enforcement,”
meaning the continuing ICE raids.
 |
| According to Gov. Newsom, troops were deployed in LA without adequate food and water provisions and with no arrangements for their comfort. |
Other Trump violations of the
Constitution and/or Federal Law include:
·
An attempt to restrict
Americans’ Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. On January
20th, Trump issued an executive order—one of one hundred sixty-two
he has signed in the less that six months since he returned to office—in which
he pretended to wipe out this constitutional right with the stroke of a
Sharpie. Four federal judges immediately blocked execution of the authoritarian
decree, citing it as a direct violation of the Constitution.
·
Trump had his Office of
Management and Budget issue an official directive immediately freezing federal
spending on grants. This was a heavy-handed violation of the Appropriations
Clause under federal law, since funds appropriated for grants are under the
authority of Congress, not the president. As a result, nearly half the states
in the Union sued the administration over the move, and a Rhode Island federal
judge blocked execution of the directive—almost before the Sharpie ink dried.
·
Trump again violated
the powers of the co-equal Legislative Branch when he unilaterally sacked
seventeen inspectors general. It should be noted that the job of inspectors
general, as the name indicates, is to oversee government operations and ensure
that they are above board and corruption-free—making them an apparent thorn in
the side to the Trump-Musk billionaire team. This was a flagrant violation of
the Inspector General Act, and of the so-called Take-Care clause under federal
law.
·
He further violated
federal law, under the Equal Protection and Administrative Procedure statutes
when he issued a brace of orders both banning transgender individuals from
serving in the Armed Forces, and
withdrawing federal support for gender-affirming care. Multiple courts handed
down immediate injunctions, citing constitutional rights issues.
·
Clearly no friend of
First Amendment rights (unless they’re his own) in May, Trump signed an order (EO14290)
to withdraw Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, which mainly supports
National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), two
stellar outlets for accurate information and cultural dissemination in the US
today.
They are also two of the most
professional, accurate and objective sources of news and commentary in the
United States. The Trump administration views that accuracy and objectivity as
a “lack of loyalty” to the head of state. If Trump can’t turn them into a
propaganda tool for MAGA, he prefers to gut them.
The administration has also gutted Voice
of America. VOA was founded during World War II as an international tool to
unmask Nazi propaganda. Throughout the Cold War and beyond, VOA has become one
of the most important international sources of objective news and information
available to people in countries where the local media are censored and where
disinformation is rife. The Trump administration apparently feels VOA’s
important mission is trivial when it comes to clawing back funds to help make
up for billionaire tax breaks.
·
Use of the Alien
Enemies Act for Mass Deportations, in violation of the constitutional tenets of
Due Process and the Separation of Powers. In March 2025,
the administration erroneously employed the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel
alleged gang-affiliated individuals, including Venezuelans—not
a declared enemy nation, which that legislation addresses. A federal judge
issued a restraining order citing constitutional concerns, but the ultra-conservative
Supreme Court once again gave Trump a pass and temporarily allowed the policy.
·
In an outgrowth of
Trump’s anti-immigration challenge to due process and the rule of law, his
administration further disregarded the principle of judicial supremacy, by defying
court orders in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia Case, in which a man who was
apparently not related to gang activity—something that only could have been
determined through appropriate due process—was picked up in an ICE sweep and
directly deported, with no legal recourse, to one of the world’s most notorious
foreign prisons. In April 2025, courts ordered the return of Maryland resident
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who, it
was determined, had been wrongly deported. Trump’s DOJ team ignored the order,
prompting legal experts to flag this omission as a direct challenge to judicial
authority, establishing a constitutional crisis.
·
Misappropriation of
executive power to retaliate against law firms and media outlets for not toeing
the administration’s line, in direct violation of their First Amendment rights.
The
courts eventually blocked the retaliatory actions of the Executive Branch,
which targeted the law firms Jenner & Block,
and WilmerHale, as well as several media outlets including the Associated Press,
stating that the arbitrary retaliation violated their constitutional rights.
In the specific case of the Trump
administration’s heavy-handed intervention in California, MAGA Republicans—who,
it has become apparent, are willing to toss the Constitution and the nation’s
laws out the window in bending over backwards to justify any outrage that Trump
perpetrates—have sought to excuse Trump’s dispatching of US troops to
intimidate state authorities by citing President Lyndon Johnson’s use of
federal troops to respond to state-sponsored racial segregation in Alabama
under Governor George Wallace.
If there was ever a case of comparing apples to oranges, this is it. That was not a case of rival policies, or even of rival parties, since Wallace, like Johnson, was a Southern Democrat. It was, rather, the case of a governor who was willfully and flagrantly violating federal law, and doing so at the service of racial discrimination that directly violated his black citizens’ constitutional rights.
 |
| Alabama’s Governor George Wallace faces General Henry Graham in Tuscaloosa on June 12, 1963, at the University of Alabama. Federal troops under General Graham intervened after Wallace blocked the enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. Despite an order of the federal court, Governor George Wallace appointed himself the temporary University registrar and stood in the doorway of the administration building to prevent the students from entering. -Getty Images- |
Wallace’s stubborn refusal to embrace
and materially support the principle of racial desegregation as espoused by the
Civil Rights Act and other federal legislation led to Johnson’s decision to
send Federal Marshals, and to mobilize federal troops in order to ensure that
the rule of law prevailed in the face of Wallace’s flagrant lawlessness.
Make no mistake, Trump's intervention in
California has nothing to do with riot control and everything to do with taking
over power. It is, as I posited earlier, a litmus test to see if anyone makes a
serious effort to stop him, as a prelude, in my opinion, to the possibility of
declaring martial law and taking over power entirely. This last seems clear to
me from the fact that the Trump administration is doing everything it possibly
can to further inflame situations in the cities where he is seeking to take
federal control, instead of helping de-escalate them.
Just to be clear, when Trump, during his
first campaign for president, said that he could “shoot somebody on Fifth
Avenue and not lose a vote,” this is what he meant. And it is only possible
because the GOP has been corrupted, and has lost its way. Trump Republicans
will justify everything he does, given that, for them, Constitution is
"just a word" and the oath they took to it means about as much as their
consistently broken promises and duplicitous discourse.
To again (and in conclusion) quote
General Mattis’s 2020 essay:
Instructions given by the military
departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that
“The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American
answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount
this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in
my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend
to try. Instead he tries to divide us…
We can unite without him, drawing on the
strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few
days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that
bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
We can come through this trying time
stronger, and with a renewed sense of purpose and respect for one another. The
pandemic has shown us that it is not only our troops who are willing to offer
the ultimate sacrifice for the safety of the community. Americans in hospitals,
grocery stores, post offices, and elsewhere have put their lives on the line in
order to serve their fellow citizens and their country. We know that we are
better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square.
We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of
our Constitution. At the same time, we must remember Lincoln’s “better angels,”
and listen to them, as we work to unite.
Only by adopting a new path—which means,
in truth, returning to the original path of our founding ideals—will we again
be a country admired and respected at home and abroad.
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