Trump’s Turn to the Enemy from within
251 years ago, the First Continental Congress decided against establishing a standing army because its members feared that a bad government could turn such an army against its people. Last week these fears were confirmed by President Donald Trump when he decided to deploy the National Guard and US-Marines against an imagined insurrection in Los Angeles. On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress finally established a US-army since there seemed to be no other way to get rid of the British colonial power - the very army which Donald Trump is now turning against “the enemy within”.
The signs for Donald Trump’s planned usurpation of the American military for political reasons had been there. In 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests were shaking the country his attempt to invoke the “Insurrection Law” of 1807 was sabotaged by members of his own administration and the top brass of the Pentagon who still had some constitutional qualms in their minds and professionalism in their bones and boots. And in October 2024 he said explicitly in an interview on Fox-TV: “The enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries”.
Re-elected in November 2024 Donald Trump banned transgender people from serving in the military. In February he had the top lawyers for the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force fired because he saw them as endangering or slowing down his political agenda. And he ordered all material containing matters of race, gender and diversity to be banned from libraries and teaching at military institutions and had all Pentagon programs concerning these issues cut.
Starting his second term in office the President has appointed presenters from right-wing media and followers of the MAGA movement to his cabinet and important positions on his national security staff: sycophants, performers, and clowns of the right-wing circus whose loyalty and incompetence would not allow them to threaten his political orders on military matters this time.
He pushed the appointment of the FOX-TV-presenter, hyper religious philanderer and obvious drunkard Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense through a hesitant Congress after his first choice was even too outrageous to make it through the committee. And in South Dakota Governor, Kristi Noem, he found his type of political woman, anti-masks, pro-gun and full of adoration for her President.
The worrying thing is not only that Trump could appoint such questionable characters to high office, but that they are still being sheltered from any serious critique by Republican lawmakers despite having embarrassed themselves in front of Congressional Committees week after week. They might present a daily security risk to the United States, but that does not seem to bother the elected Representatives of “America First”.
Some observers have been trivialising the situation by arguing that many of Trump’s Executive Orders, policies or appointments have been mainly performative or will not last. This has long been naïve. Yet, since last week such arguments have become reckless and dangerous.
So, what has happened between Los Angeles, North Carolina and Washington, DC over the last few days that should worry friends and foes of the Trump-regime alike - and its allies abroad?
On May 21, Trump’s main personal aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem had pressed the heads of Immigration Agency ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to arrest 3.000 “illegal immigrants” a day to implement Trump’s election promise of sending back one million of them. This would quadruple the annual deportation rate under Presidents Obama and Biden. What had been practiced in a haphazard manner by local ICE units all over the country should now be coordinated, stepped up and moved to large cities for more effect.
When ICE units started picking up non-white labourers in front of the Home Depot Store in Central Los Angeles on the first weekend of June there were protests by the local Latino population. Others joined the demonstrations which were restricted to a few inner-city blocks. If there was some violence, it was at most a local skirmish which could have been easily dealt with by the riot-trained Los Angeles Police Force.
But because it was the Democrat stronghold of California and - in conservative eyes – the “sin city” of Los Angeles, Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth sent in the National Guard and US-Marines, hoping to embarrass Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and to get dramatic TV-footage for increasing popular support of Trump’s deportation agenda.
Courts ruled the use of the National Guard without a real emergency illegal, Governor Gavin Newsom gave a fighting speech defending democratic rules against the choreographed demonstration of federal power, but to no avail. The pictures provided what the Administration was looking for to sway the majority of the population towards its deportation agenda. Not without success. The conservative media celebrated this action. The national polling is still inconclusive, but roughly half of the population seems to be in support of a stronger immigration policy although Trump is losing some voters on the question of calling in the military.
The manufactured mayhem also showed the failure of legacy media in an environment that has totally changed since the LA-riots of 1992 or even the nation-wide Black Rights Matter protests in 2020. Even the coverage of the usually more balanced cable channel CNN did give its viewers the Trumpian impression that all hell had broken loose in Los Angeles. Some balaclava clad youth throwing a water bottle at the police is visually much more attractive than thousands doing their normal weekend shopping undisturbed just half a mile away.
These changes in the media matter a lot, not the least for the Democratic Party. Nostalgic Democrats who are just wishing for another Obama, writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in “The Atlantic”, forget “that we no longer have that country” (of 2008, R.P.); a country of IPhone 3G, when a web-based discourse was just coming up with twitter and “a president benefited a lot from a media world in which we shared the same reality”.
Around 2012 came the shift from an open web to one in which algorithms of Big Tech were shaping your media consumption. That was already the case when Black Lives Matter happened, but since then extremist influencers have made the right-wing propaganda even more dominant in a deeply polarized media ecosystem. And after Elon Musk bought twitter in 2022 it turned from a platform for discourse into a machine shaping and justifying what people believe. Whatever those right-wing influencers say and do, argues McMillan Cottom: “The real power is the platform that can amplify that popularity and insulate it from detractors”.
So, Congress has failed to safeguard the neutrality and professionalism of the armed forces, and a fractured media can no longer produce an shared reality, neither in LA nor elsewhere. And the military itself?
Whilst the spectacle in LA unfolded President Trump gave a very partisan speech at Fort Bragg, wearing his MAGA hat, attacking the Governor of California and enticing the young recruits to follow his political agenda; that is, defying all military traditions and the rules of civil behavior. And nobody from his appointed military leadership ventured to speak up to their commander-in-chief as it would have been their duty in a threatened democratic order. “The Silence of Generals”, the headline in “The Atlantic” ran. It was just the Philosophy Professor Graham Parsons at West Point who put his resistance into words after resigning from the revered military school, writing in the same magazine.
The military parade that followed on Saturday June 14 in Washington D.C. was just another act in a week of militarized spectacle. The costs of driving large tanks through Washington D.C. were enormous, the actual marching of the soldiers atrocious, the crowds disappointing; and watching it Donald Trump was falling asleep. But he made “his military” march to his political tune.
Much of what happened during this week was designed as revenge for failures during his first presidency: not getting his parade in 2020, not being able to deploy troops during the protests of “Black lives matter”, not be able to follow through on his promises to deport immigrants of all sorts.
But in retrospect, it might be also remembered as the week when Donald Trump’s performance as a strongman turned into the real thing, as Susan Glasser ventures in the New Yorker; when, by turning the military towards the enemy within “he redefined national security”.
Saturday’s military parade in Washington has been a flop with less than 200.000 people attending whereas the simultaneous “No Kings” protests of millions all over the country have been encouraging. But the American military remains in the hands of an unhinged leadership with its Generals sleepwalking into the threat of a civil war which is already being fought online.