The
Trump administration has sidelined Congress,
violated the U.S. Constitution, and taken an
axe to both the U.S. and the global economies.
Trump has issued executive orders that give
him unprecedented presidential powers. The
courts have blocked many of his policies, but
in the budget bill pending in the Senate,
there is a
clause buried in the thousand-page
document that
would make it far more difficult for courts to
enforce their judgements against the
administration. In front of the Supreme Court,
Trump’s lawyers have successfully argued that
he has immunity from prosecution for pretty
much anything he does when he’s in office.
In
this way, Trump has dismantled the structures
of U.S. democracy. You might think that all of
these actions taken together amount to a
declaration of martial law. But they don’t.
The United States remains, at least formally,
a civil democracy, and the president must
still answer to other institutions (Congress,
the courts).
However,
Trump continues to test the limits of his
power, and now he is doing so with respect to
the military. He is doing so either to govern
just short of a martial law declaration—or in
preparation to make that declaration at some
future date.
Although
formally the commander-in-chief of the armed
forces, the president is constrained by
tradition and by law from deploying the
military however he pleases. In his first
term, Trump nevertheless attempted to use the
military as a tool of presidential power. He
tried to arrange a military parade in
Washington, DC. He proposed to use the
military against Black Lives Matter
demonstrators around the country in the wake
of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The military
said no. His defense secretaries—Jim Mattis
and then Mark Esper—opposed these proposals.
In
his second term, Trump has replaced career
military with loyalists. For the head of the
Pentagon, he appointed Pete Hegseth, an
incompetent ideologue and former Fox News
host. And now it seems that the military is
willing to do Trump’s bidding. On June 14, the
president will get the military parade he has
so desperately wanted—to celebrate the
two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the
Army and his own seventy-ninth birthday. Kim
Jong Un would be envious.
More
consequentially, using the Insurrection Act of
1792, Trump dispatched National Guard troops
and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles to suppress
demonstrations against the actions of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
What Trump is doing is technically
unconstitutional for the president can’t send
the army to participate in policing.
But
the constitutionality of Trump’s actions is
secondary to the scale of his ambition. On the
face of it, Trump wants to ramp up
deportations. He knows that he will have to
confront the political leadership of
Democrat-controlled cities and states. He will
have to overcome public resistance to ICE
raids on workplaces, churches, and schools. He
will also have to confront some of his own
allies in business—in construction,
agriculture, and the service sector—who will
be deprived of their workforce.
But
in many ways, Trump’s use of the military is
far more ambitious. He is using the
immigration issue as a pretext to expand his
control over public institutions and
legitimate the unconstitutional suppression of
the freedoms of speech and assembly. He has
promised to send the National Guard to cities
across the United States to suppress protest,
and he hasn’t made much of a distinction
between violent and non-violent
demonstrations.
In
other words, this is a form of slow-motion
martial law. It is less a declaration than an
evolving action.
Trump’s
expanding control of the military extends to
the foreign policy realm. Despite his promises
to learn the lessons of the Iraq War, Trump is
now thinking about joining Israel’s war
against Iran. He has called on Iran to
surrender unconditionally and is considering
the use of U.S. bunker-busters to destroy the
country’s underground nuclear facilities. Iran
has threatened to retaliate against U.S. bases
in the Middle East.
Americans
are not meekly accepting Trump’s autocratic
moves. His military parade coincided with
thousands of “No Kings” demonstrations across
the country that turned out millions of
protesters.
These are not partisan events. Many
independents and even a few Republicans are
appalled at Trump’s flirtation with martial
law. And Trump’s threats against Iran
have split
his own MAGA camp.
Congressional
Democrats by and large oppose
Trump,
but they don’t control enough votes to make
much difference. If Trump’s budget bill fails
to pass the Senate—it already passed the House
by a single vote—it will be because it doesn’t
cut enough government
services for deficit hawks in the Republican
Party.
In
California, however, Governor Gavin Newsom has
emerged as perhaps the most prominent critic
of the president. He has correctly diagnosed
the presidential dispatch of the National
Guard—without his approval—not just as a
powerful violation of the constitution but as
the moment when Trump is attempting to seize
absolute power. “The rule of law has
increasingly been given way to the rule of
Don,” the governor said in
a recent speech.
In
South Korea, when Yoon Suk-yeol infamously
declared martial law in December 2024,
parliamentarians and ordinary people
immediately fought back. They managed to
reverse martial law in a matter of hours, and
Yoon was subsequently impeached. The
Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment,
and new elections were called. One of the
parliamentarians who courageously pushed back
against martial law, Lee Jae Myung, was
elected president this month by a comfortable
margin.
Trump
knows that a declaration of martial law in the
United States would trigger similar—through
perhaps not similarly effective—protests. He
doesn’t feel the need to make a formal
declaration if he can achieve what he wants
under the current system. He has already
invoked a number of emergencies to assume
extraordinary powers.
In
South Korea, martial law was undone by public
protest. In the United States, Trump will
reverse the equation and use martial law to
overcome public protest. He anticipates that
his current actions—to deport a million
people, to cut government services—will
unleash massive protests. If he can’t suppress
those protests through “ordinary” means, he
will use martial law as his trump card.
It
might seem an impossible dilemma for the
resistance movement in the United States.
Don’t protest now for fear that the president
will declare martial law or protest now and
increase the chances of such a declaration.
Trump
projects strength. But an autocrat secure in
his power doesn’t organize a military parade
on his own birthday. Deep down, Trump knows
that a majority of Americans don’t support
him, that the courts consistently rule against
him, that major institutions in society like
universities, the press, and Hollywood hold
him contempt. Trump is, in fact, a weak man
who doesn’t even have the courage of his (few)
convictions. His latest nickname is TACO:
Trump Always Chickens Out.
So,
protest is the only answer to Trump’s actions
even if it risks a declaration of martial law.
It is important to force Trump’s hand and make
him say in public what everyone already knows:
that he is an autocrat who wants to destroy
American democracy.
Originally
published in Hankyoreh.
