Trump Threatens to Invoke the Insurrection Act and Impose Military Rule on Lawful Protests Against Lawless ICE in Minneapolis

Since his first term, Donald Trump has been itching to deploy troops onto the streets of America’s cities to crush protests. After an ICE agent shot one such protester in Minneapolis, Trump again threatened to send in the military against all protesters there.

The Washington Post reports:

President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota on Thursday, raising the prospect of sending U.S. troops into Minneapolis to quell protests over a recent federal immigration enforcement surge.

Trump, in a Truth Social post, put the onus on Minnesota politicians to stop protesters from “attacking” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Trump wrote that if the state couldn’t calm the protesters, whom he referred to as “insurrectionists,” he would “institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State.”

By invoking the Insurrection Act, a president empowers the military to make arrests and perform searches domestically, functions that the military is generally otherwise prohibited from performing in the United States.

Federal agents have flooded the streets of Minneapolis in recent days, detaining people, pulling them from their vehicles, stopping U.S. citizens and—as of Wednesday evening—shooting two people.

Remember that Trump incited his own insurrection against the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021. So for him to wail about “insurrection” now is hypocritical—and only serves the goal of a further insurrection against law and order by imposing military rule to suppress lawful dissent.

The full scope of Trump’s intentions can be gauged by the increasingly bloodthirsty public statements of his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has promised ICE agents “federal immunity” for abuses and is also threatening to use them to investigate alleged “networks” of domestic political opposition.

Trump may not actually impose the Insurrection Act and try to rule through military force, but it is an abuse of power merely to threaten it, repeatedly, in response to political opposition from the public.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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