Thinking Ahead to the Full Military Takeover of Cities
A new executive order gives Trump his army.
Donald Trump is assembling a military force under his direct personal supervision that can be used to seize control of American cities at gunpoint. In light of the fact that he has already sent the Marines into Los Angeles and the National Guard into the streets of DC, this may seem like only a minor progression. But it is very important that we all take this seriously.
On Monday, the White House issued an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Address the Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia.” This title is misleading for a couple of reasons. First, there is no crime emergency. This is demonstrated both by crime statistics, and by the personal experience of those of us who actually live and work in these cities, as opposed to Republicans who only experience cities through lurid online news and through the windows of their weird little fascist social clubs in Georgetown.
Second, the EO will have an impact far beyond the borders of Washington. After ordering the hiring of new prosecutors and park police in DC, the order says this. Bolding added:
(ii) The Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law. In coordination with the respective adjutants general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.
The order also calls on every law enforcement agency currently involved in the federal crackdown on DC to “immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”
This executive order is meant to create a standing military force that will go wherever Donald Trump tells them to go and do what he tells them to do. It is meant to smooth over any bureaucratic, legalistic, or technical objections to this sort of dictatorial use of force. It is meant to see to it that Donald Trump can point to any city and say “Send in the troops” and have that happen, notwithstanding the opposition of any governors or mayors or disgruntled military officers or stray courts.
The possibility of Trump using the military to take full political control of an American city is very, very real. The logistical barriers to this happening are getting close to nonexistent. Furthermore, the sheer outrageousness of such a thing happening is, I think, greater now than at any time in the past century. The National Guard and the military have, in the past, been used to crush strikes, popular uprisings, and protests—but at least in those cases those things were happening. Today, there is no crime emergency or riots in the street. There is only a president who wants to be a dictator, and who has purged all traces of opposition from the federal government.
When I read this executive order and realized how bad things may get, I admit that my first thought was (as it often is) “Why aren’t the stupid Democrats doing something about this?” On further reflection, though, I had the sobering thought: “Do what?” While it is a fact that the leadership of the Democratic Party is spineless, asleep at the wheel, and far too compromised to rise to the occasion at this moment, it is also true that we are entering a period in which elected officials will have few if any useful options. We are entering a period when, if there is to be any meaningful opposition to the end of our democracy, it is going to have to come from all of us.
Consider this (extremely plausible!) scenario: Trump decides that he wants to take full control of Baltimore, or DC, or Oakland, or one of the other cities with Democratic mayors that he rails against so often. The attorney general sends a letter to the city’s mayor and police chief citing some pretextual claim about a crime emergency and informing them that the federal government is going to replace them. The secretary of defense calls out the National Guard’s “quick reaction force,” which has been placed under federal control. The soldiers go to City Hall and escort in the mayor’s replacement, who is a Trump loyalist. The soldiers go to police headquarters and escort in the new police chief, who is a Trump loyalist. The city is now controlled by Donald Trump. The entire chain of command between the president and the city streets is made up of Trump loyalists and troops who are under their orders.
The military itself is just a tool here. The substance of the problem is that Trump can take political control of municipal governments at gunpoint. This is, effectively, the end of the rule of law, or at least the full exposure of the underlying reality that guns are the only real laws.
Ask yourself, as soberly as possible: What would stop this scenario from playing out? Will the mayor fight the troops? No. Will the police chief fight the troops? No. Will the city’s police force get in a shooting war with the National Guard? No. Will the troops refuse to carry out their (technically lawful!) orders? No. Will the courts put a stop to all of this? Well, there would certainly be a lawsuit after it was already done. Quite possibly the courts would eventually sign off on the actions, even if it went to the Supreme Court. Even if they didn’t, their ruling would only come after everything described above had already happened. And how positive are you that Trump would acquiesce? How positive are you that the man with all of the guns would voluntarily cede the new power he had taken, when so many more pretexts not to do so are there to be used?
Now think about what could be done to oppose such a scenario. The aforementioned lawsuit is a very thin reed to rest our entire political system upon in the year 2025. What else? The mayor could do a sit in, and get arrested. The city council could make outraged statements, and vow to grind city business to a halt. So what? Trump does not care about city business. Trump cares about pictures of himself on television, as a great strongman. Even if the elected officials in the targeted city were brave and righteous, there are few levers for them to push that would hold back the National Guard.
All of us, myself included, need to think seriously about what all the rest of us would do in situations like this. I love to harangue piece of shit Democratic politicians as much as anyone, but at a certain point that becomes an indulgent activity. Events in the real world may supersede our feelings of moral superiority. The relevant question, at least in the moment, is not “Whose fault is this?” but instead “What will actually stop this?”
A garbage strike. That would be legitimately useful. If municipal workers refused to work in such a scenario, public outrage would grow very quickly, and it is at least possible that that outrage would reach such a high volume that the White House would conclude that their point had been made, and move on to whatever Trump’s next obsession is. A municipal worker strike is something that requires planning and assistance from all of us. Existing municipal worker unions should begin talking about it now, introducing these ideas to their members. And everyone else in the city should think about what they could do to help such a strike take place, and support the workers if it did. No one should expect low wage municipal workers to sacrifice themselves in order to save the rest of the city. Will you pay their salaries? Will you pay their rent? Will you pay their bail money? Etcetera.
This is not one of the essays where I am going to pretend to have all of the answers. All I can say is that we are entering a time in which we need to think about these things not as abstract theoretical issues but rather as things that could plausibly occur in coming weeks or months. America is a big country. It is big enough to ignore awful things that happen, if they are happening somewhere other than where you live. But this is the key thing about solidarity, isn’t it? It’s easy for an aspiring dictator with a few thousand troops to take over a city of hundreds of thousands of people as long as millions of other people do not consider such a thing to be their problem. We need to understand all of this as a problem for all of us. Serious shit is coming.
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Related reading: Gangster Party; Leave the Military; How Pretexts Work.
Labor Day is coming. This Sunday, August 31 at 11 a.m., I’m giving a speech about Labor vs. Fascism at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, at 2 West 64th Street in Manhattan. Free for everyone. On Thursday, the day after tomorrow, there is a solidarity rally in DC beginning at 4 pm in Dupont Circle. I’ll be there. Great time to practice getting out the streets for each other.
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100%.
The no-compliance attitude is spot on regardless of what anyone thinks of any proposed actions. Which should be thought through.
We will almost certainly never reach the numbers (ie, solidarity) required to win. Just look around you. People barely talk about this.
But in a sense (ethically) it doesn’t matter if we win: don’t collaborate in the destruction of everything, including your children’s future. And that’s literally true, given the flooring of carbon by these omnicidal nihilists.
(A word on the distraction of “optimism” vs “pessimism.” Fact: 99% of “optimists” think everything will work out, so they don’t have to do anything. Fact: 99% of “pessimists” think everything is doomed, so they don’t have to do anything. Note the functional similarity.)
Stick your neck out. Make good trouble. Join organizations. Spend time, money, and effort. Try to get the apathetic and/or frightened to grow a spine. Make these murderers of your posterity *work* at their omni-destruction.
Trust me: if you literally do and risk nothing, you will hate yourself. You will try to rationalize it but you will fail. There are fates worse than audits and harassment—or whatever lengths this scum will go to, and I think we should prepare for the worst.
So? Fuck ‘em all. Dissipate the comforting fog of diffused responsibility. They are literally coming for your children. Literally.
What are you going to do about it? What are we all, the minimally sane and supposedly non-sociopathic, going to DO about it?
I ask myself this question every day as I don’t do nearly enough, so I’m hardly holding myself above anyone. I’m just “mean” enough to state it baldly.
If failure is all that’s left, fail properly.
The full irony here, if only in a secondary sense, lies in the fact that the 2nd Amendment, every docuher conservative ball bag’s favorite amendment, was drafted to prevent this very thing:
For over 200 years, it was viewed as a single, inseparable anti-Federalist clause that granted the states the right to raise and arm their own militias to prevent federal overreach.
The current interpretation recasting the 2nd Amendment as an individual civil Liberty entitling an individual to possess a gun is the product of conservative dickbags fevered imagination hoping to pump their stock values in fire arms companies, AstroTurfed in the ‘70s and enacted by regressive activist judge Scalia in DC v. Heller in quite possibly the worst-written judicial decision in the history of the Supreme Court.
A state national guard of course fulfills this constitutional requirement for an armed militia. Too bad it’s been pressed into the service of tyranny due to a legal loophole.
Interesting to see how the military, including the Guard, chooses to view their oath to protect and serve the Constitution from enemies domestic and domestic.