If you’d somehow forgotten what Donald Trump said to top military aides in June 2020 about the people gathered in Washington’s Lafayette Park protesting the shooting of George Floyd, now seems like a good time to remember.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in many interviews while promoting his book in 2022 that, during a White House meeting to discuss the protests, Trump turned to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and asked: “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Naturally, Esper and Milley were both aghast. But now fast forward to this past January, and the confirmation hearing of current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As fate would have it, Hegseth was among the National Guard troops deployed by Trump to quell those George Floyd protests. Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii asked Hegseth about that day, and how he might handle a similar situation were he the Pentagon chief. Per The Washington Post at the time:
“In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former secretary of defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with,” Hirono said. “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?”
“Senator, I was in the Washington, D.C., National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events,” Hegseth replied, “carrying a riot shield on behalf of my country.” …
As Hegseth was describing his experience, Hirono pressed the point: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs as directed to Secretary Esper?”
“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth continued, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.”
“That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order,” Hirono concluded. “You will shoot protesters in the leg.”
The Post’s droll next sentence? “Hegseth didn’t reject her conclusion.” Watch this video, starting at about 3:30; at exactly 4:02, Hegseth had a clear opportunity to say, “No, Senator, I can’t imagine ordering that.” He didn’t take it.
This, remember, is the same Hegseth who tweeted over the weekend about possibly calling in the Marines.
Oh, while we’re recalling stuff, it behooves us to recall this: During a 2023 campaign rally, Trump was talking about those Lafayette Square protests when he said this: “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in—the next time, I’m not waiting.”
I’m no math whiz, but I’m pretty sure I can add all that up. It equals the very real possibility that somewhere down the dark road ahead of us, under orders of the president of the United States, U.S. soldiers might open fire on U.S. citizens, along with possibly other civilians who don’t happen to be U.S. citizens. The idea of the military firing on civilians on American soil seems impossible to imagine, something more akin to a totalitarian dictatorship or a rogue state. But the idea of U.S. soldiers firing on U.S. citizens exercising a constitutional right they’ve secured simply by being born is beyond incomprehensible. But today, under this president and this Defense secretary, there seems a better than remote chance that this is where we’re headed.
I hope people allow what’s happening in Los Angeles to de-escalate. No one should give up the right to peaceful protest, of course. But everyone should be mindful that Trump and Hegseth, and Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and JD Vance, are just waiting for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. Homan, the border czar, said over the weekend: “You’re going to see more work site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation. We’re going to flood the zone.” That means more protests, which means more confrontations, which means many more opportunities even for something to happen either by intention or even perhaps by accident.
Once we’re down the Insurrection Act road, there’s no telling where this leads. It’s not an accident, by the way, that JD Vance called what happened in L.A. an “insurrection”; labeling it as such makes it easier to invoke the Insurrection Act, whose Section 253, passed into law in 1871 when the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing people, allows the president to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” Vance undoubtedly used the word to troll us about January 6. But there’s also a legal rationale for using it.
Presidents have invoked the act in the past and our democracy survived just fine. That said, the reasons for those invocations have always been specific, the durations, short. Now, our concern is that if Trump decides that Blue State X isn’t enforcing the law in the way he wants it enforced, he will call the lawlessness an insurrection, and then do who knows what, for who knows how long.
And finally, get a load of this, which Insurrection Act expert Joseph Nunn wrote about last year in Democracy journal (which I also edit): “Because the Insurrection Act refers simply to ‘the militia,’ and not specifically to the National Guard or the organized militia, a president could, in theory, use it to call private individuals into federal service—including members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other private militias.” Nunn notes Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes used this interpretation of the act in his defense at his trial. No wonder that Nunn calls the Insurrection Act “a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code.”
Donald Trump won the election. A narrow majority backs his immigration policies (although support drops when people learn more specific facts about how they’re being carried out). Those of us who opposed his election and oppose his immigration policies have to live with this democratic verdict. Our recourse is to do everything we can to make sure the next democratic verdict (assuming there is one) repudiates the man and his policies.
But this is not about immigration policies. This is about the use of state power against the people of the United States, or at least the ones he doesn’t like. And now, potentially, it’s about the state doing violence against those people. Again: We have a president who said “Next time, I’m not waiting,” and a Defense Secretary who refused to deny that he’d allow soldiers to shoot protestors.
To some, it all sounded theoretical a year ago and was often waved away as an especially fevered manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Well, it’s not so theoretical anymore. All we have to do is pay attention to what they said—or didn’t say.
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