Rising This Week: Trump's "national police force"?
There's nothing national about it. Blue cities are the targets, and courts are starting to rein in Trump's schemes.
Immediately after last week’s Posse Comitatus trial, California Attorney General Rob Bonta gave us a debrief about how its lessons applied to the rest of the country.
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During last week’s Posse Comitatus Act trial, a federal judge repeatedly conjured an image that he said “troubled” him: the emergence of Donald Trump’s “national police force” without legal constraints.
As California noted in a post-trial interview with me, there’s nothing national about it. Democratic cities are the targets, and Trump keeps doubling down on his power grabs, even when his comments weaken his legal position in court.
Just days before trial began last week, the Department of Defense extended the Los Angeles troop deployment through Election Day. Trump chose the first day of trial to announce plans to call in the D.C. National Guard, while threatening to follow suit in other U.S. cities like New York, Baltimore and Chicago.
Ratcheting up the partisan spectacle, the Republican governors of South Carolina and Ohio signed up on Saturday to send their National Guard to Washington, D.C., even though cities in their own states fare worse in certain rankings. According to Newsweek’s compilation of FBI data, three of the cities with the highest crime rates are in Ohio: Cleveland, Toledo, and Akron and North Charleston, S.C. occupies the 19th spot for city crime rates.
“[Trump] will never put any military in any red city because this is completely political,” Bonta told me during the interview.
Trump’s Justice Department and three government witnesses, including a decorated U.S. general, conceded in court last week that using the military for civilian law enforcement would be illegal. Using a so-called “constitutional exception,” the Trump administration simply tried to define the law out of existence, the judge suggested.
In a 20-minute interview with me on the All Rise News channel of the
’s Legal AF, Bonta unpacked Trump’s political calculus. Click on the image below to watch the full interview.
“Theater”
For all of Trump’s rhetoric of creating a crime-fighting force to clean up blue cities, the Justice Department’s lawyers and witnesses repeatedly disavowed this use of the military at last week’s trial. That’s why Bonta described Trump’s martial chest-thumping as “theater.”
More than once last week, the Trump administration either retreated from their rhetoric or announced plans once challenged in court.
In Washington, D.C., Attorney General Pam Bondi retreated from the federal government’s attempted takeover of local police on Friday. Under pressure from a federal judge, Bondi rescinded her memo purporting to replace D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith with Drug Enforcement Agency chief Terrence Cole. The Justice Department dropped that plan to avoid a temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, who retains jurisdiction over a case challenging the takeover pursuant to D.C.’s Home Rule Act.
The ongoing legal battles expose the limits of Trump’s power grabs and the tactics his administration uses to magnify them in the public eye. One of California’s lawyers pointed out at trial that the nearly 5,000 troops deployed on the streets of Los Angeles dwarfs the number deployed to Afghanistan in the three months after Sept. 11, 2001, and the Trump administration argues that the government does not need to show any threat at all to deploy such a massive force.
As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell memorably put it this week, there are currently more hotel doormen than National Guard members on the streets of Washington, D.C., and Trump wants the “photo op” of the troops as a diversion from the Jeffrey Epstein news cycle.
The lawsuits, and live reporting on their revelations, shows Trump’s sleight of hand and keeps the focus where it belongs.
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