Commentary
President Donald Trump’s illegal moves to turn the U.S. military against American citizens on American soil are the latest and most dangerous actions in a scheme by MAGA figures to erode constitutional checks and balances and allow Trump to impose his will on the country by asserting dictatorial powers like a tyrannical king or an American Caesar.
The protests in Los Angeles were apparently sparked by White House official Stephen Miller’s lust for higher deportation numbers and demand that ICE make more arrests of people without criminal convictions—despite the administration’s claims to be prioritizing deportation of violent gang members.
Miller has falsely described people’s efforts to protect their neighbors from terrifying abductions as “rebellion” and “insurrection” to justify Trump declaring emergency powers and deploying the National Guard and Marines. Trump has done the same, referring to the localized and mostly peaceful protesters as “an insurrectionist mob.”
It’s not that Trump needed much convincing. Trump has long admired and envied the power wielded by dictatorial leaders. As The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone has noted, “Trump has fantasized about using the military against citizens for much of his political career.”
Trump reportedly regrets not deploying the military against racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Before the 2024 election he talked about using the military against “the enemy from within.” Before he was vice president, J.D. Vance declared that “we need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of our power.”
In his first term, Trump encouraged violent policing – he “gave police permission to be brutal,” in the words of journalist Adam Serwer. Since his return to power, the Justice Department has abandoned efforts to curtail abusive police violence—while Trump freed the violent Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked and injured Capitol Police on Trump’s behalf.
After Trump lost the 2020 election, MAGA activists like Michael Flynn and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes urged him to declare martial law to stay in power rather than acknowledge defeat. Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who reportedly argued that Trump could use the military to put down protests that would erupt if he refused to leave office, has remained on Trump’s teamand is now working at the OMB for Russ Vought, a key architect of Project 2025 and its plans for Trump to push the far-right’s agenda without regard for the law.
Since returning to power in January, the president and his henchmen have proven that predictions that a second Trump term would be for more dangerous to democracy were correct. Trump’s recent threat that anyone who dares protest his military parade—a multi-million-dollar birthday present to himself—would be met with “very heavy force” is a reflection of his tyrannical and antidemocratic contempt for checks and balances and disdain for dissent.
Far-right MAGA activists are urging Trump to go even further. Former White House aide Steven Bannon has declared that the Los Angeles protests are a sign that “we’re in the Third World War.” He wants Trump to order the arrest of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass if they resist the administration’s hostile takeover of Los Angeles. (The state of California is suing Trump over his deployment of the National Guard over the governor’s objections.)
While most Americans do not approve of Trump deploying the marines against protesters in Los Angeles, Republican members of Congress are cheering him on, a sign of how thoroughly the GOP has been corrupted and cowed by Trump’s demands for cultish loyalty. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to corrupt and politicize the military, firing the military’s top lawyers and telling soldiers that protesters in Los Angeles are “animals” and a “foreign enemy.”
People For the American Way is calling on Americans to resist the Trump administration’s dangerous escalation of violence and authoritarian disregard for the Constitution and law by participating in one of this weekend’s No Kings protests that are taking place around the country.