Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

This past June 11, President Donald Trump gave one of his stock speeches full of the usual boasts about his GREAT FIRST 100 days back in office and complaining that it should have been his THIRD term had CROOKED Biden not STOLEN THE 2020 ELECTION. The packed stadium filled with camo-clad Army soldiers at the Ft Bragg Army base in North Carolina, cheered at his boasts and booed as he denounced his enemies. A closer look at the troops shows why they were so enthusiastic in their response, almost as if they were being prompted by staffers holding up cue cards: Although the US Army is 21% black and 16% female, the soldiers listening to Trump were overwhelmingly white and male.

There was a reason for the unrepresentative demographics of the the president’s audience that day. It turns out Trump and his White House staff had insisted only volunteers show up at the event. They had also made it clear Trump only wanted MAGA troops. The instructions from the Commander-in-Chief to the soldiers on the base were: Don’t attend if you “disagree with the president!” (He also added, “No fat soldiers,” which explains why all those present looked so trim and fit.)

That got me to thinking. Suppose Trump is that careful about the soldiers he picks to attend a speech he gives just to avoid embarrassment. What might he do to ensure obedience from troops he sends on the unconstitutional domestic missions he has in mind for them?

I went to my trusty old computer and googled images of National Guard occupations of Los Angeles and Washington, DC this summer, and guess what? Although the total force of the 15,010 National Guard troops in the US is even more diverse than the two million regular military enlistees: 30% black and Latino, and 21.3%women. Yet despite three-in-ten National Guard troops who are Black or Brown, and over one-in-five who are women, the news photos and videos of occupying Guard forces are practically devoid of troops of color, and women are even scarcer. (Check out the screen grab of a CBS video.)

Why does this matter? Because the National Guard is not an expeditionary force tasked with the grim business of maintaining American Empire. National Guard troops are meant to provide a reserve force whose primary role is to defend the American people at home from national or regional emergencies like hurricanes, floods, heavy blizzards, epidemics and other crises (like for example, an insurrection and takeover of the US Capitol Building)— situations, in other words, that overwhelm local or state resources.

To be sure, Guard units have been federalized and sent off to war abroad in prior years, as in Iraq during the.two US invasions of the country. But those are exceptions and were resented by many in the Guard, who tend to be older and to have families.

What Trump is doing now, though, is setting the Guard up as his personal army. It’s apparently a trial run to see how the public, the state governments, the Congress and the courts react to his efforts to toy around with martial law, which is what a president “taking over the law enforcement of a city“ really is. It’s what would be happening nationwide if, as has been proposed, he were to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Actby an executive order ludicrously claiming the country is facing an existential threat to its existence because of a mass insurrection among the people. (If there is an existential threat to US democracy, it is Trump’s unprecedented power grab!)

It would be harder for this to happen successfully if a significant number of troops in the National Guard decided they were being asked to violate their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and simply stood down and said “No!” Such a mass rejection of his seditious plans could spread rapidly.

There are some grounds for hope that such a thing could happen.

Military.com is an independent publisher of newspapers for every branch of the US military. Distributed on bases, on ships at sea and at remote posts around the globe, it is widely trusted by the people in uniform. On August 13, it published a stunning opinion piece in those papers provocatively headlined, “4 Out of 5 US Troops Surveyed Understand the Duty to Disobey Illegal Orders,” by Charli Carpenter and Geraldine Santoso, respectively a professor and PhD student, in the UMass Amherst Department of Political Science.

They note that Trump, since taking office for a second term as president, has engaged in actions that have:

…alarmed international human rights observers. His administration has deported immigrants without due process, held detainees in inhumane conditions, threatened the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and deployed both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests.

The two authors write that they conducted a detailed June survey of 818 military service members. Four out of five of those taking it said they understood the obligation to disobey an illegal order. Importantly, most also said that among the things they would consider illegal would be orders that were unconstitutional, or that involved killing civilians, or torturing anyone. A significant number of respondents said they “didn’t trust” US law on the issue of what constitutes a war crime and would base their decision on whether an order was illegal under international law,

American troops and especially officers in America’s endless wars have often objectively violated international law, for example invading countries that pose no threat to the US, bombing hospitals or clinics because of suspicion that enemy fighters might be receiving treatment in them, killing civilians, torturing captives in US custody (remember Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base and Guantanamo’s detention camp?), and collective punishment, as in the destruction of the city of Fallujah after an angry group of Iraqis killed four US military contractors and five us soldiers, or the Kent State Massacre by the Ohio National Guard in 1970.

Typically nobody is punished for these crimes, the perpetrators either never.get charged or are charged only to have their cases tossed out by military tribunals. The US does not belong to or accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, often called the World Court, and typically uses its power to demand that in countries where US soldiers are stationed or may be engaging in operations, they areexempt from local laws and prosecution, even in cases of murder or rape. While the US, on occasion, refers foreign leaders or military commanders to the international courts for prosecution, if US leaders or troops are charged, the US places sanctions on prosecutors and international court jurists and any countries making the charges, and refuses to respect the courts’ jurisdiction.

One optimistic finding the UMass researchers cite is that there has been a seven-fold spike in calls to the GI Bill of Rights Hotline since Trump’s controversial takeover of policing in Los Angeles and the nation’s capital. Those calls from soldiers or members of their families, the Hotline reports, jumped from about 50 calls a month before the California Guard activation to 50 calls per week afterward.

The researchers write, “The initial results of our survey – coupled with the recent spike in calls to the GI Rights Hotline – suggest American men and women in uniform don’t want to obey unlawful orders.”

Stephan Woolford, a resource officer at the Hotline, in another article in military.com offers some examples of comments and questions the hotline receives:

“This person never envisioned what they were signing up to do as being a situation where they might point a gun at a fellow US citizen who they might think is just exercising free speech rights or something like that. So this was someone who is very troubled about what’s happening,” said Woolford, describing one of the calls.

“Some of these people are thinking of, this is my home, this is my neighborhood, or this is my town where they’re sending me,” he adds. “And I know people who might be targets of immigration raid or whatever you want to call it, you know, of ICE activity, and I’m not going to go deport my family members. So there’s people who feel like they’re in a real bind there between what I’d say, duty to country and family, and they openly talk about that.”

As one caller asked, “I don’t feel right about this, but what kind of consequences go with this?”

(Counselors at the Hotline don’t offer advice to callers, but just provide information about options and about potential consequences. Other places help callers think their response through and can also offer legal help. Here are two: Center for Conscience & War and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.)

Trump’s move to involve the National Guard in his gambit to become a dictator (or as most mainstream media more gently put it, “an autocrat”), answerable to nobody and no other branch of government, is unprecedented. It is incredibly threatening to the freedoms that still exist in the US. The Constitution is supposed to guarantee all our rights and the rights of those very National Guard soldiers he is ordering to enforce his profoundly unconstitutional power grab.

The National Guard holds a unique place in American society. An outgrowth of the militias of pre-Revolutionary colonial days, which were a mainstay of the revolutionary army, its units exist in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the colony of Puerto Rico, and its troops are recruited from those jurisdictions in which they live. This means that uniquely in the vast US military with its two-million people in uniform, the 15,010 men and women of the National Guard are neighbors and co-workers of the people they serve when they are called up for duty in rescue operations, to restore order in the cases of riots, to help fire fighters in the increasingly common forest fires, or even to help find a lost toddler. Even when a Guard unit from one state goes to another state in a major crisis, they always go because they were invited there by the state with the crisis, not because they were sent there over the objections of their governor.

Of course, the National Guard has engaged in violent repression, as when in decades past it was called out to break industrial strikes, or on May 4, 1970 during the Vietnam War when an Ohio National Guard unit opened fire sending 64 bullets into a group of unarmed peaceful student anti-war protesters on the Kent State campus, killing four and seriously injuring nine.

More often, the arrival of troops from the Guard, often unarmed, during civil disturbances, can come as a relief to the demonstrators, as they are seen as fellow citizens, not as enforcers like the police, who are usually the first responders in such cases and are always armed.

I recall witnessing a tense moment during a June 2020 protest by Black Lives Matter in Philadelphia, when mostly black protesters were facing off against a phalanx of mostly white Philadelphia Police just west of City Hall. When the Guard troops, dispatched by PA Governor Tom Wolf, showed up they — especially the Black members of the Guard—were greeted with applause, and even hugs by the protesters because their very presence, without weapons, cooled down the confrontation between protesters and the of course always armed police.

But federalization of the Guard units in the present case by Trump in Los Angeles and Washington DC is different in two ways. First, they were activated not by California Governor Gavin Newsom or by District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, both of whom said there was no need for them, but by the president, who cited a bogus “emergency” in both jurisdictions.

In Los Angeles, the “emergency” was clearly an artificial one created by the White House itself. It was Trump who had ordered officers of ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) service, as well as many law enforcement personnel borrowed from other federal agencies like the FBI, Alcoho,l Tobacco and Firearms Bureau (ATF), and Federal Protective Service, to “ramp up” arrests, detention and eventual deportation of immigrants. Wearing masks and lacking personal identification, these forces were making raids and mass arrests—actions that led to mass protests and a resistance movement in the nation’s second-largest municipality, which is also home to a huge number of immigrants and descendants of immigrants.

Second. Trump did not just federalize California National Guard units, but also asked specifically Republican governors from Red states, often ones remote from California like Wyoming, to send troops from their Guard units to assist in the ICE raids.

Far from being “neighbors” of the locals in California, these troops from other politically and socially conservative states coming into much more politically and socially liberal Southern California felt to locals more like a foreign invasion and occupation than a calming force of locals in uniform trying to cool things down. It didn’t help that in DC, Trump’s people in the Pentagon and Homeland Security had the troops of the D C Guard unit standing around in tourist spots like the Lincoln Monument, White House, and Washington Monument. In contrast they sent the virtually all-white Red State Guard units called in from other Red States to accompany hugely unpopular ICE teams that were conducting raids on work sites, setting up random traffic stops to help check identification papers, etc. and spiriting away immigrants with no criminal records or charges pending against them beyond minor traffic violations— actions most likely of course to stoke local opposition. (It’s significant that the California Guard units called up by Trump made sure to clearly indicate in large letters on their riot gear, including the plastic shields that they were carrying, that they were part of the “California National Guard,” something I’m confident was a a local officer’s decision.)

It’s also significant that the virtually all-white Guard unit dispatched hastily from Wyoming did not do the same, and advertised themselves as an out-of-state Guard unit. At least my search of photos of their deployment showed no obvious identification broadcasting their home state, which could well have led to their being targeted with stones, bottles, garbage, and a lot of verbal abuse.

Trump and his enforcers, in other words, were deliberately creating the very “emergency” he was citing as the justification for his executive order taking control of the National Guard in the two cities. In Los Angeles, it was said to be unrest over immigration enforcement, while in DC, the justification was a claim that the city was facing an “out-of-control” crime wave, a claim easily debunked by FBI crime statistics that show Washington’s crime rate to be down significantly from prior years both in murders and property crimes.

This explanation of what happened in Los Angeles was borne out ina fact-finding inquiry conducted by Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern California federal court district. Brother of retired liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the judge found that the protests against immigration actions by ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers in Los Angeles were not violent in LA until after the California Guard was federalized, and that at no time was what happened an “insurrection,” much less a “rebellion,” as claimed by Trump.

Breyer ruled the federalization of the California Guard to be unconstitutional and procedurally flawed for not having been arranged “through the state’s governor.” The Circuit Court of Appeals quickly blocked his temporary injunction.

The crisis, if not the issue of the two federalizations of two state Guard units, has eased, with Los Angeles “lawlessness” subsiding, though the more likely reason for things improving has not been actions by the federalized Guard troops, but rather a cutback by Washington on raids on immigrants in the city by ICE and the CBP.

Undeterred, though, Trump is now warning that he’s planning more such federal takeovers of Democratic state Guard units to take over policing in cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and perhaps Baltimore— even though many Red State cities and even some entire Red States have higher crime rates. than New York City.

There’s no telling how all this will end. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat in an otherwise very conservative Republican state, as Chair of the Democratic Governors Association, a few weeks ago sent letter to governors of Red states urging them not to comply with Trump requests for them to send some of their National Guard Troops to Democrat-led cities whose policing he wants to take over, to assist with achieving his mass deportation goal. She warns that such unwarranted and unwanted “assistance” could contribute to the political divisiveness and violence already plaguing the nation.

She’s not alone.

The publication Stateline, which reports on “challenges and policy trends cross state lines” ran a story on Feb. 5 shortly after Trump’s inauguration, reporting that:

There’s an emerging blue-state nightmare: Inspired by President Donald Trump’s call to round up immigrants who are in the country illegally, Republican governors would send their National Guard troops into Democratic-led states without those leaders’ permission.

That fear may not be too misplaced, as a number of Red State Governors have obligingly approved sending hundreds of their own federalized Troops to support ICE raids on immigrants in Democratic cities like Los Angeles and Washington, DC., in spite of those jurisdictions’ requests not to do so. If as he promises, Trump continues his use of federalized National Guard troops to back ICE raids in support his increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign, one can imagine Democratic governors at some point asking their state Guard units to protect their state’s residents from outsider Guard units.

There has long been talk about a “new civil war” in the US. Could this be how it starts?

On the other hand, one Washington lawyer, a military veteran himself, suggests something darker might be afoot. “Maybe,” he says, “Trump is really thinking of turning the now hugely funded ICE into a national police force answerable to him.” (Don’t laugh! I’m not the only one suggesting this.) He thinks the president may worry that the National Guard, with its local roots in the troops’ home communities, could become a focal point of resistance to dictatorship, so he may be deliberately placing them in roles that will hurt that popular image.”

Sounds like far-fetched conspiracy thinking? Did any of you reading this article think you’d ever see Trump commandeering control of state National Guard units against the wishes of their respective Governors, or of threatening to take over the running of national elections, opposing mail-in and absentee ballots, turning the Justice Department into his personal vengeance vehicle, or ignoring court orders, even those of the US Supreme Court aand the three justices he nominated to sit on it?

Don’t forget: If President Trump could fill a whole stadium with mostly white male MAGA cult Army troops at Ft. Bragg, he could use he same tactic of asking for only volunteers who support his policies to be included in his federalized Red State National Guard deployments.

These are darkening days, and anything could happen in these Not-So-United States.

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