CNN
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In September 2020, President Donald Trump suggested he was hamstrung to crack down on at-times-violent racial justice demonstrations in cities like Portland, Oregon.
“Look, we have laws. We have to go by the laws,” Trump said at an ABC News town hall, adding: “We can’t call in the National Guard unless we’re requested by a governor.”
Trump noted there was one way he could do that – by invoking the Insurrection Act – but added that “there’s no reason to ever do that, even in a Portland case.”
Something has clearly changed since then.
Trump this weekend became the first president in about 60 years to call in the National Guard without a request from a governor – to help quell protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
He did so without invoking the Insurrection Act – the 1807 law that allows the president to deploy American soldiers to police US streets in extreme circumstances. That means the guard has limited authorities that don’t include law enforcement, as CNN legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted. Even that more limited decision, though, has been criticized as overzealous and heavy-handed by some experts, given fears it could inflame the situation.
In pictures: Burning cars and tear gas in LA protests
But Trump has clearly left open the possibility of ratcheting things up and possibly even doing what he said five years ago there was “no reason to ever do”: invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with demonstrators. Northern Command said Sunday that 500 US Marines were on “prepared to deploy” status.
Trump was asked Sunday whether the situation was an insurrection, and he said no. But just after 10 p.m. ET, he posted on Truth Social: “Paid insurrectionists!”
The president again used the term on Monday, telling reporters upon his return to the White House that the “people that are causing the problem are professional agitators” before going on to call them “insurrectionists.”
Top White House adviser Stephen Miller has been calling the situation in Los Angeles an insurrection for days.
And indeed, for Trump, Miller and their allies, the bar for “insurrection” appears quite different than it was five years ago. After many labeled the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol an insurrection, Trump and MAGA have spent years applying that label extremely broadly to other things.
The idea seems to have been to “whatabout” the term and water it down by suggesting other events are the “real” insurrections – like the protests after George Floyd’s murder.
But Trump’s broad definition of that term looms large as the administration considers something he’s long entertained: dispatching the military on US soil. It has almost seemed like Trump and Co. see themselves surrounded by insurrections.
Among the situations Trump has previously attached the “insurrection” label to:
Miller – a key figure in the White House on such matters – has appended that label to many of these things and more.
He’s most often used it in relation to the border under Biden. But he’s also repeatedly accused judges who ruled against Trump of a “legal insurrection.” He’s called pro-Palestinian demonstrators a “pro-Hamas insurrection.” And he accused those who protested the Supreme Court in 2022 – including in some cases apparently illegally at justices’ homes – of waging an “open insurrection.”
It’s worth emphasizing that many of these things don’t qualify as insurrections.
While Trump and his allies balked at people labeling January 6 an insurrection, there’s little doubt that it met the definition. That word is generally defined as a violent revolt or rebellion against the government. The attack on the US Capitol was a violent attempt to effectively change the makeup of that government by overturning the election result – and by attacking an actual seat of power.
In other words, an insurrection isn’t about the level of violence; it’s about the target and purpose of it.
Merely protesting or even engaging in violence while doing so doesn’t automatically make something an insurrection. Nor do adverse court rulings and an influx of undocumented immigrants constitute a rebellion.
Of course, Trump has shown he’s more than happy to stretch the bounds of words and the law in his quest to expand his power and go after perceived enemies.
The question from here is why Trump hasn’t gone there on invoking the Insurrection Act. He and Miller have now invoked that specific word multiple times in reference to the situation in Los Angeles, and preparing the Marines to possibly come in suggests this is very much on the table.
Perhaps the White House has some qualms about the politics of what could come from the more in-your-face federal presence Trump has spent years entertaining. Or perhaps, as Vladeck wagers, the initial deployment of the National Guard could be a precursor.
“In other words, it’s possible that this step is meant to both be and look modest,” Vladeck wrote in his newsletter Saturday, “so that, if and when it ‘fails,’ the government can invoke its failure as a basis for a more aggressive domestic deployment of troops.”
Only time will tell. But we’re clearly operating in a very different political world than we were five years ago. Trump seems to have developed a very broad sense of what constitutes an insurrection and plenty of reasons to potentially do what he said “there’s no reason to ever do.”
Indeed, he’s already gone further than he did before.
