A lot moving as usual. I’m out at Public Notice today with a rundown of Trump’s explicit threats to use the military against Americans — again. I imagine a trip to Portland or Memphis or Chicago or any of the places Trump is threatening military incursion will be in my future. If you want to help support the costs of my reporting, please consider a paid subscription or dropping a few dollars in the Doom Coffee Fund.
There was a fair bit of reporting centered around whether President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would demand some sort of loyalty pledge from the hundreds of the military’s highest ranking officials who flew from around the world to attend an event held Tuesday in Virginia.
In the end, we didn’t have to wonder what this pledge looked like, because both Hegseth and Trump laid out what they expect the military to look like — and do — under their leadership.
Trump and Hegseth would like American soldiers to do “whatever the hell they want” in American cities that the two men at the top of the chain of command have identified as enemy territory. Of course, those hostile lands all happen to be major cities that are largely Democratic — and Black.
Here’s the key quotes from Trump, who explicitly said he expects military leaders to follow orders and head into whatever American city he feels like targeting.
“Our history is filled with military heroes who took on all enemies foreign and domestic.,” Trump told the generals and admirals in attendance. “That’s what the oath says — foreign and domestic. Well, we also have domestic.”
“They’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one,” Trump said of U.S. cities, singling out San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. “This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s war from within.”
Domestic deployment of the military will “be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control once you get involved at all.”
Not sure what else there is to say at this moment. As I’ve said many times before, this is the type of tyrannical behavior that prompted us to declare our independence from England and, you know, start America.
The courts are still holding, and even beginning to push back a bit. A federal judge on Monday (appointed by Reagan) actually suggested holding some Trump administration officials in contempt for ignoring court orders. Meanwhile, another Reagan-appointed federal judge issued a 161-page opinion on Tuesday that chastised the president for an “invidious” interpretation of free speech and other constitutional rights for citizens and noncitizens alike.
U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young, appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1985, absolutely went off on the president, his administration, and all the down-chain officials who have engaged in in sweeping suppression of speech through actions like the deportations and visa-revoking of pro-Palestine protesters on college campuses.
“What remains after issuing this opinion is to consider what, if anything, may be done to remedy these constitutional violations,” Young wrote.
At Public Notice today, I detail the ways in which the Trump administration is set to — again — violate the constitution in its deployment of federalized Oregon National Guard troops to Portland. Judges like Young have been raising the alarm about the government’s unwillingness to comply with court orders — in addition to outright refusals to obey them — just as federal judges in California and the Ninth Circuit have deemed the Trump administration has violated laws governing use of the military.
Simply put, they are not stopping. Trump and his authoritarian acolytes will continue to push the boundaries of domestic military deployment until the Supreme Court weighs in or Trump is impeached — again. If the Supreme Court tells Trump to stop using the troops to police Americans — and he ignores the order — only Congress can stop him from achieving absolute power. Then, it’s the ballgame.
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