POLITICO is reporting: According to nearly a dozen retired officers and active military lawyers, as well as academics who teach at West Point and Annapolis, there is an intense internal debate within the U.S. military community about what orders it would have to follow if President-elect Donald Trump deployed the military domestically.
The last time an American president deployed the U.S. military under the Insurrection Act, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, federal troops were kept away from the front lines.
Fata Morgana
During the election campaign, Trump made some authoritarian remarks to mobilize the small segment of radical voters needed to tilt the scale. But this rhetoric does not reveal anything about how the GOP would use the military against domestic threats. Trump and many Republicans are extremely reluctant to reveal their cards because it is much safer to appear unpredictable.
During the election campaign, Democrats tried desperately to use “Trump the dictator” as their core message. Voters were told to put up with illegal migration, a miserable economy and crazy woke culture as the lesser of evils. This sales pitch simply didn’t work because the negative effects of Democratic policies are guaranteed while the doomsday scenario of a Trump presidency is a Fata Morgana. The GOP and the military will not let a real estate casino man make the big choices.
Voters simply knew what to expect from Republican administrations. They knew what they were getting. The Democrats, on the other hand, were no longer the same party they were during the JFK, Clinton or Carter years. They have turned Soviet.
Rules? What rules?
A military operation inside the country requires clear “rules of engagement.” But these would change in all sorts of ways, depending on the situation. The debate has so far been taking place behind closed doors. As a result, some retired military personnel, as well as academics and lawyers, are trying to bring the issue to the public.
“It is legally and ethically tricky to have open conversations about this,” says Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point, who in a New York Times editorial in September urged military officers and soldiers to resist “politicized” orders.
Some lawyers and military law experts say there is widespread confusion even among active-duty officers about how the military should behave, especially when Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and calls in troops. In most cases, officers and troops have no choice but to follow such presidential orders, even if they have ethical issues with doing so. If they refuse, they face court-martial. The average soldier has an IQ of 100 and no deep understanding of complex legal and constitutional law that even experts can’t really reconcile with reality. In the end, the one with more firepower and other resources is “right”.
Under long-standing military law, soldiers are required to disobey only obviously illegal orders — for example, an order to mass-kill civilians, as happened in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War. But under the more than 200-year-old Insurrection Act, Trump would have extraordinarily wide discretion in deciding what is “legal,” lawyers say.
If quarantine measures are enforced in a smallpox pandemic and people refuse, or think it’s just a giant hoax from the windmills of Zion, or if there’s a risk of insurrection spilling over, then pretty much anything is legal. In many wars, the tactic of intimidation is also used. Massive violence is intended to deter others. Would this also be legal if you weigh up victims and potentially saved people?
“The basic reality is that the Insurrection Act gives the president dangerously wide discretion to use the military as a domestic police force,”
says Joseph Nunn, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s an extraordinarily broad law that doesn’t provide any meaningful criteria for when it’s appropriate for the president to use the military domestically.”
Nowhere in the text of the Insurrection Act does it say that the president must cite insurrection, rebellion, or anything similar as a justification for a deployment; the wording is so vague that Trump could potentially only claim he sees a “conspiracy.”
Ineteresting to note that this topic usually comes up when it’s a Republican in the White House. Not with a Democrat.
The Insurrection Act, a mishmash of various laws enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871, is the main exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits federal forces from participating in civilian law enforcement.
The Insurrection Act was also used by President Dwight Eisenhower after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, when he deployed the 101st Airborne Division to help desegregate the South. George Washington and John Adams used the Insurrection Act in response to early rebellions against federal authority, Abraham Lincoln invoked it at the start of the Civil War, and President Ulysses Grant used it to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s.
The standard manual for military courts states that “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal beliefs cannot justify or excuse disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”
Fighting for the narrative
Even regular police officers increasingly have AR15 rifles on hand for serious confrontations, and departments can quickly call in SWAT units and armored vehicles. There are now a wide selection of YouTube channels that document many police operations with bodycam footage of the officers, where it is easy to see how necessary a semi-automatic rifle sometimes is.
For civilians, the pejorative and ominous term “assault rifle” has been coined by left-wing politics. The word assault actually describes a criminal physical attack. What exactly makes a rifle an assault rifle was, during a period of prohibition in the USA, absurdly defined by attachments. But in policing, it is admittedly only a tool to defend the public and uphold the law.
When police resources are exhausted due to unrest, a new pandemic/biological attack or uprisings, only the military remains to maintain state order. Civilian gun laws are based on the militia concept (instead of a huge, permanent and expensive army), but practically no civilian is trained to practice a complex, structured and organized approach with other citizens in an emergency.
During the Reagan and Bush years, security experts expected that a US intervention in Latin America, for example the deployment of 20,000 Marines against a new Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, could trigger left-wing uprisings in the USA. It is perfectly clear that Moscow would have deliberately tried to stir up sentiment for just such uprisings. The ringleaders and the naive activists would have spread panic about “fascism.” The White House and the Pentagon drew up lists of domestic enemies like “MainCore” and conducted exercises such as Rex84.
Under Clinton and the Democrats, traditional conspiracy activists believed they were the main target of such domestic operations. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and a large number of others firmly believed that there would be a full-scale attack on US patriots under the flag of the United Nations to usher in a “New World Order.” Even back then, conspiracy activists were infiltrated by Russian networks; although not as obviously as is the case today. The really dangerous networks in the US are very difficult to understand. For the Russians, it was enough to combine fairy tales about the Elders of Zion with a complete rejection of NATO and rejection of any serious US security policy at home and abroad.
The victory of Bush Jr. and the Republicans in the presidential election did not calm the worries, and then 9/11 happened with consequences such as the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, torture and the new definition of “enemy combatants” not protected by the Geneva Convention.
Conspiracy influencers were given more impetus than ever before, as the Internet was now mature enough to deliver video content to audiences. Immediately after 9/11, Russian networks strengthened the conspiracy movement and new influencers. None of the influencers exposed how Russian moles in American security agencies sabotaged the hunt for Islamic terrorists and how SPD people in Hamburg, for some inexplicable reason, failed to notice how enough Islamists for two football teams were registered in the same apartment and then traveled on to the USA.
The Republicans, among whom there are of course highly suspicious people, used the opportunity of 9/11 to obtain broad new security powers and to start two wars. The Russians used the left-wing movement and conspiracy activists to create as much tension as possible. Just like Timothy McVeigh in the 1990s, “patriots” now believed that the great final battle was imminent.
During Trump’s first term, conspiracy influencers changed their tone; even Alex Jones apologized for his own reporting and his cult documentaries from the “Police State” series. The Q fanatics and even Jones supporters believed that Trump and a secret team behind him would launch a major arrest operation against the Democrats, most likely accompanied by a military operation at home.
In 2025, the topic is now more relevant than ever and the world situation is different. The incoming Trump administration may have to deal with artificially fomented unrest, whether from illegal immigrants, left or right fanatics. New pandemics of unknown origin or even clear biological attacks. Massive cyber attacks. As usual, influencers of all kinds will immediately and without clear evidence declare with absolute certainty that the US government or “the globalists” are behind it all.
Every action of the government will be interpreted as evidence of a conspiracy. And perhaps the “patriots” do not notice how they have been drawn into a major sting operation that has been prepared well in advance. Not only through willingness to use violence, but above all through connections to Russians. Nothing gives the US government more “legality” against insurgents than if they have participated in the treacherous conspiracy of a foreign power.