Donald Trump’s threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to crack down on those protesting his immigration agenda may bring more than the drama and conflict he desires, his biographer says.
Author Michael Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that when the president repeatedly mentions the 1807 law, which allows him to deploy the military to suppress civil disorder and rebellion, he’s not concerned with what it would entail.
Wolff said that if Trump were to invoke the act, he would do so to bring about an even bigger conflict than the discontent on display in Minneapolis, where an ICE officer’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month sparked outrage. The White House and Department of Homeland Security further enflamed tensions by smearing Good as a “domestic terrorist.”
“This whole idea of the Insurrection Act—this is preposterous. There is no insurrection going on here,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. Instead, Wolff pointed to the videos coming out of Minneapolis, which include Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being filmed slipping on ice that some protesters are allegedly helping make. “There is, you know, some relatively minor resistance, not major resistance…to what’s happening.”
“Let’s amp this up,” Wolff imagined Trump thinking. “We’re going to do the Insurrection Act. We’re essentially going to take over Minneapolis. We’ve already sort of taken it over, but now we’re really going to take it over. It is going to become an occupied city in the United States, and then that would give us all power. There is, speaking of absolute immunity, this would be absolute, absolute immunity.”
It’s doubtful that Trump, 79, has been talking about the Insurrection Act because the Supreme Court has ruled against him sending National Guard troops to Chicago, Portland, and other blue cities, Wolff said.
“Everybody wants to see this through a prism of political and policy and strategic logic,” the author explained. “Trump wants to see this through the prism of conflict and drama and distraction and statement.”
Yet while he’s doing that, “someone inside the White House is actually probably thinking through what the Insurrection Act actually means, and the troops on the ground, and the cost, and the possible fallout from them,” Wolff elaborated. “I hope someone is thinking about this. Trump, from his point of view, is just thinking about the conflict and the drama and what that gets him.”
Part of Trump’s motivation is to distract from the controversial killing of Good and turn the headlines back to himself, even if they make him look bad, Wolff went on to say.
“In most administrations, you would try…to get away from this, and you would walk this back, and you would hold an investigation, and you would try to identify wrongdoing—although you would probably not identify yourself as the wrongdoer—but you would identify someone as the wrongdoer,” Wolff said.
“Trump, again, just the opposite: let’s not walk this back at all. Let’s double down. Let’s increase the drama. Let’s have the headlines about the Insurrection Act rather than about this poor woman.”
When reached for comment, the White House disputed Wolff’s credibility.
“Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud,” Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast. “He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
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