The danger of letting a delusional president send troops to American cities
The president is operating on outdated information, fantasies, and a lust for power.
Portland, Ore., is not on fire. It is not in the throes of an out-of-control, anarchist mob. And it does not need federal troops patrolling its streets to keep citizens safe.
But you would never know it from listening to President Donald Trump or reading what he has posted about Portland. “Portland,” he said on October 5, “is burning to the ground. You have agitators, insurrectionists. Turn on your television, look at your television. The governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives.”
Neither the governor nor the mayor nor anyone else in Portland has said any such thing. Quite the contrary.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek told the president as much when she called him last month. She told Trump that he was being misled by outdated media coverage—such as television footage from 2020 when violent protests erupted in the city and that no federal facilities were in danger.
Regardless, we are at a point at which the American military is being held hostage to the commander in chief’s delusions. That is incredibly dangerous, especially when the president is so eager to use it against American citizens he labels the “enemy from within.”
It becomes even more worrisome if the president ignores the facts on the ground and sends the military on a wild-goose chase, charged to carry out a mission for which it is ill-prepared. On Oct. 4, Federal District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, said that is exactly what the president is doing with his plan to send the Oregon National Guard to Portland.
She issued a temporary restraining order and doubled down on it the following day when the president tried to circumvent her order by planning to send troops from California instead of from Oregon. The judge then issued what the Washington Post called “a new, broader order … to prohibit the administration from deploying any state’s National Guard troops under federal control to Oregon.”
On Oct. 9, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily lifted Immergut’s order blocking the deployment of Oregon National Guard troops to the city—but not the order prohibiting the National Guard from any other state from being sent into Portland.
Nonetheless, it is still very important that Immergut called out the unreal world in which the president often seems to live and the groundless claims he makes. She would not let him get away with pretending that cities run by Democratic mayors can’t keep the peace.
Indeed, that seems like a sustaining pretense for him and his administration.
It is fed by people like Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Miller insists that Portland is under siege, beset by “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”
Miller wants the president and his supporters to believe that local and state officials “have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life” and that “the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.”
Defending the republic?
Seems odd to think that the fate of the republic depends on whether 200 or 300 National Guard troops are deployed in Portland. But Miller and Trump will say almost anything to justify their desire to use the American military to flex their power.
Recall Trump’s Sept. 30 speech to America’s top military brass. As the BBC reported:
The president repeated his criticism of Democratic-led cities including San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles and indicated he would continue his policy of using military for law enforcement.
“They’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one,” he said, adding that it would be a “a major part for some of the people in this room”.
“It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our borders is essential for national security….”
The president also claimed that since he sent the military to Washington, D.C., “We haven’t had a crime … (there) in so long because we got the careers—we call them the careers. We got these lunatics out, and they’ll never be any good. You know, I hate to tell this to the liberal media…. You could send them to the finest schools, which they couldn’t get into anyway, mentally they couldn’t get in. But no matter what you do, they’ll never be good.”
What Trump’s assertions about lunatics never being any good has to do with the role of the military is almost impossible to say. But, of course, that doesn’t stop the president from saying it.
Judge Immergut was not taken in by any such flights of fancy. There is, in her view, too much at stake when it comes to the use of the military.
She said that whether or not the president can send the military to Portland implicates three constitutional fundamentals. First, there is the relationship between the federal government and the states. Next is whether the armed forces can perform domestic law enforcement functions. Last is the role of the judiciary in policing the executive branch.
As she saw it, the president’s desire to send troops to Portland would violate state sovereignty, would be a misuse of the military, and should not be countenanced by the judiciary.
Immergut laid out the facts in cold detail.
None suggested that Portland was, as the president insisted, “war-ravaged.”
She explained that the president may federalize National Guard service members only if the United States is invaded, if there is a rebellion, or if the “President is unable with regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Immergut wrote that it has been months since there was any “sustained level of violence or disruptive protest activity in Portland.” In her view, Trump’s plan to send in the military “was not ‘conceived in good faith.”
And, in a decisive rebuke, she said that the president was acting on bad information, a pre-conceived political agenda, and that “nothing in the record” supported his contention that any “anarchists” or “crazy people” were burning down federal buildings.
The judge warned that “military intrusion into civilian affairs” was too serious a matter to be sustained by decisions that are “ simply untethered to the facts” on the ground.
Former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson captured that danger more than 80 years ago, when he wrote, “(T)he existence of a military power resting on force, so vagrant, so centralized, so necessarily heedless of the individual, is an inherent threat to liberty.” Jackson warned the American people of the deadly danger of letting “command of the war power fall into irresponsible and unscrupulous hands.”
Sadly, that seems to be where we are. A president operating on outdated information, fantasies, and a lust for power is in command.
Whatever the ultimate fate of her decision, Judge Immergut has put on the record her doubts about the basis of Trump’s effort to wreak havoc in another American city.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
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Oregonian here. WE'LL LET TRUMP KNOW we need his help the next time we have to evacuate due to wildfires. You know, he can come to our rescue with the tax money we fronted him.
Gone are the early days when our spirits would be buoyed by a righteous judicial decision such as the decision from Judge Immergut. Famous for "simply untethered to the facts". Now it is almost with sadness that we give a nod to Judge Immergut as courageous and principled because we have seen how little judicial decisions and rule of law matter to this President.
Certainly, I am deeply grateful to Judge Immergut and to her numerous colleagues who have risen to the moment with equally righteous judicial opinions. They have done all that we could ask of them and yet it is not enough. Yup, you and me, ordinary Americans, have to do our part as well. See you October 18th.