The president is escalating the situation to justify greater force and repression. Now he’s talking about sending ‘troops everywhere’
D
onald Trump was on his way to Camp David for a meeting with military leaders on Sunday when he was asked by reporters about possibly invoking the Insurrection Act, allowing direct military involvement in civilian law enforcement. Demonstrations against Trump’s draconian immigration arrests had been growing in Los Angeles, and some of them had turned violent. Trump’s answer? “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he said.
I know Trump is “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag”, to borrow the words of the Republican senator Rand Paul, and that this president governs using misdirection, evasion, and (especially) exaggeration, but we should still be worried by this prospect he raises of sending “troops everywhere”.
Already, Trump and his administration have taken the unprecedented steps of calling up thousands of national guard soldiers to Los Angeles against the wishes of the California governor, of deploying a battalion of hundreds of marines to “assist” law enforcement in Los Angeles, and of seeking to ban the use of masks by protesters while defending the use of masks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents. Needless to say, none of this would be happening if these times were normal.
