You Trust Trump on Troops, Right?
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 9, 2025
So, Donald Trump is ready to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy armed troops to U.S. city streets if “people were being killed, and courts were holding us up,.
Of course, if everyone just gets out of the way, he won’t need to invoke the rarely used law, he says.
You trust him to make that call, right? You trust him to distinguish that people truly are being killed or harmed and not just recalling images from five-year-old footage from Portland or Minneapolis after the George Floyd killings? Surprised to hear that Trump wants to jail the Democratic Illinois governor and the Mayor of Chicago for “not protecting immigration agents” to protests about their tactics, not a crime?
For that matter, you trust that the President of the United States, with intelligence services galore, will not just be basing this decision on some random Fox News commentary broadcast and instead of having reached out to, say, the Portland police or the Oregon governor to find out whether we have insurrection or mostly peaceful protests are happening on a single block, right?
Do you trust that this same Donald Trump who could not distinguish an actual insurrection underway at the Capitol on Jan. 6 from a peaceful day of love can now make a reliable call about sending armed active military units to blue cities based on something other than a need to show Chicago who’s in charge?
You’re not even momentarily stunned by Trump blurting out yesterday that his administration “took the freedom of speech away” as it relates to flag burnings, an activity that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected under the First Amendment.
Bravado and Control
Do you trust that Trump isn’t sending Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago even before a court hearing scheduled for today expecting to provoke a rebellious response to justify invoking the Insurrection Act? Should we expect that Trump knows that the law has been invoked sparingly in 200 years, the last being 1992 when Los Angeles had widespread rioting after the Rodney King beating and to enforce a major Civil Rights decision in Alabama?
Do you trust that Trump is not a petulant, obstinate, overgrown child who can’t stand being told “No” by a judge or two and is invoking a legal end-run around adverse court rulings? You trust Trump to have had White House lawyers confer with legal authorities about the Constitutional values involved, right?
Did we miss Trump’s acknowledgment that ordering masked, camo-clad Homeland Security agents to rappel into a Chicago apartment building at 3 a.m. to roust residents resulted in arrests of U.S. citizens, including zip-tied children? Did we miss Trump’s acknowledgment that protesters have been injured by Homeland Security “defensive” gunfire?
For that matter, do you trust that Trump and his Big Beautiful Bill that gave more money to Homeland Security than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined lacks sufficient personnel to put a few on guard outside ICE facilities?
You trust Trump to make this call based on evidence and not just to promote his mass deportation campaign through intimidation and fear? Do we know whether we need armed troops on U.S. streets to stop out-of-control crime or to protect Homeland Security’s roaming immigration squads or to guard federal buildings or to halt widespread violence that local authorities say is not occurring?
Indeed, should we be concluding, as Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has, that Trump wants us to become accustomed to seeing troops on our blue city streets well before the 2026 elections to douse peaceful dissent and make people uncomfortable to vote?
Do we accept Trump’s declaration of emergencies facing our economy, our border security, crime and homelessness as justification for skirting Congress and challenging state and local officials and the courts? Do we believe that Trump still believes in a democracy?
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