Some of Trump’s critics are warning of just that
“Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state.”
From the opening above, historian Heather Cox Richardson, a professor at Boston College, went on in her popular Substack to paint a bleak picture of the use of military and law-enforcement forces under the orders of the president.
She noted that the administration has insisted that many immigrants – even some in the U.S. legally – are criminals with no right to due process. Thus, masked officers dressed in black could grab people up off the street or pick them up when they appeared for legal appointments in courthouses. And thus officials could rush immigrants off illegally to the equivalent of a U.S.-funded penal colony in El Salvador.
Richardson also quoted the president’s point man on immigration – deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller – as saying that recent protests at a federal detention center in Los Angeles constituted an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” Thus, the administration could order some 700 Marines to join some 2,100 National Guard troops Trump dispatched to quell protests, even though California Gov. Gavin Newsom did not request the military help and is suing to oust these uninvited soldiers.
Unsettling as all that may be, does it constitute the actions of a “police state?” A usually thoughtful nephew who works in law enforcement panned Richardson’s comments. Everything she writes, he argued in a post to me, is “skewed” and those who don’t see that are “willfully blind.”
While my nephew offered no details on what, if anything, is amiss in her comments on the police and military actions in California, there is no question that the term “police state” is strong stuff. So, too, is the argument that Trump is steering us into one. And so, too, is some of the rhetoric by Democratic officials.
For instance, consider a comment in The Wall Street Journal from Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat who as a Marine officer served multiple tours during the war in Iraq. “This is Trump’s dream,” Moulton said. “This is exactly what he has wanted to do: turn the military against the American people. Donald Trump has never respected what Marines do overseas but has always wanted to use them to force his political agenda at home.”
So, the questions arise: Is Richardson’s argument that Trump is out to “establish a police state” unhelpful and “skewed” hyperbole? And is Moulton’s contention correct that Trump – who himself dodged the draft in the Vietnam era – is using the military to force his agenda regarding immigrants and perhaps other elements on us all?
On the first point, let’s turn to Merriam Webster. A police state, the dictionary tells us, is “characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures.”
So, one must ask, is it repressive federal control when a president overrides the wishes of an elected governor to deploy force? Moreover, do masked ICE officers constitute “secret police?” And does disregarding the “judicial organs” of the government – the courts – reflect the actions of a would-be tyrant out to enforce his will through the military and police?
If the answer to any of those questions is “yes,” then the term “police state” doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Moreover, when combined with the imagery of a military parade in the nation’s capital slated for that would-be dictator’s 79th birthday, is it overwrought to think that suppression of dissent by force is out of bounds? Is not such imagery designed to intimidate both those from abroad who might threaten the U.S. and those at home whom Trump wants to crush?
Is a parade of weaponry and soldiers in the nation’s capital — à la North Korea or Russia — not the action of a would-be fascist (a loaded term, too, but perhaps an apt one)?
One must note that most of the normal checks and balances in our government have evaporated under the one-party control of the Senate and the House, since that controlling party operates under Trump’s thumb. The president has cowed nearly all the potential critics in his party. Stepping up his control of the military seems likely to eliminate one other potential stumbling block.
To their credit, however, one force for checking tyranny – the judiciary – still seems to be operating properly. The courts, right up to the Supreme Court, have been a last bastion of resistance, often on immigration questions.
Indeed, it is heartening that the administration after insisting that one illegally removed immigrant – Kilmar Abrego Garcia – would never return to the U.S., has brought him back in the wake of a Supreme Court order demanding that. Abrego Garcia will soon face charges in a court of law, as he perhaps should have earlier, and we’ll see whether the administration’s accusations against him have any merit.
And yet the courts can act far less quickly than Trump can. At this point, the administration is battling an extraordinary 269 lawsuits (and many more if one regards scores of suits involving foreign student visa cancellations as more than just one giant action). Many of those suits could take years to wind their way through the system, perhaps even long after Trump is out of office. Certainly, they will gum up the courts.
Will judges decide that Trump’s actions in California are improper? That they amount to the uninvited actions of someone seeking to create nothing less than a police state? We’ll find out in time. For now, we do have the comments of academics such as Richardson, partisan critics such as Rep. Moulton, and writers such as those at The Atlantic.
Consider the insights of Tom Nichols, a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College who writes for the magazine. He called Trump’s military callup “yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations.” He argued that Trump’s advisers “seem almost eager for public violence that would justify the use of armed force against Americans.” And he held that the president “sees the U.S. military as his personal honor guard and his private muscle.”
Alarmingly, Nichols theorized that Trump may be looking long term here, “trying to create a national emergency that will enable him to exercise authoritarian control.” And he pleaded for Angelenos to not rise to the bait, to remain peaceful, saying “the last thing anyone should do is take to the streets … and try to confront the military or any of California’s law-enforcement authorities. ICE is on a rampage, but physically assaulting or obstructing its agents … will provide precisely the pretext that some of the people in Trump’s White House are trying to create.”
As Nichols perceptively put it, “The president and his coterie want people walking around taking selfies in gas clouds, waving Mexican flags, holding up traffic and burning cars.” Of course, most of the demonstrators in Los Angeles have been peaceful, as here:
From his “invasion” rhetoric on, however, Trump has tried to cast himself as the leader of a war. It’s the responsibility of intelligent observers – such as Richardson and Nichols — and of officials such as Moulton to point up the hollowness and buffoonery he instead exhibits.
One could argue that their strong language is over the top. But do we want to wait until there are armed soldiers occupying the other arms of government or patrolling the streets all across the country to find out? Their warnings bear attention.
