Is Trump trying to normalise troops on US streets?

Australia Broadcast Center

12-06-2025

Sam Hawley: Across America, the number of protests against Donald Trump's immigration raids is increasing, a week since the LA rallies began. But it's Donald Trump's decision to deploy armed forces on US soil that's really causing a stir. Today, Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, on why it's an authoritarian move Trump has long wanted to take. I'm Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily.
Karen Bass, LA Mayor: I have declared a local emergency and issued a curfew for downtown Los Angeles.
News report: Thousands of National Guard troops and Marines deployed by President Trump are on the ground in LA in response to the protests. An overnight curfew in the city will remain in place indefinitely.
News report: As Los Angeles enters its sixth day of protests against the policy, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, announced it was deploying tactical agents to Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Northern Virginia.
Protester: I want to say to each and every one of you, you are not alone. The world is watching Los Angeles.
Sam Hawley: Ilya, it's a week since these protests in LA first began, but it's been an extraordinary week, not so much because of the protests, but because of the US President's reaction to them.
Ilya Somin: Yes, that's right. The protests themselves are not that extraordinary, nor is the level of violence that has occurred, which is so far at least pretty modest in scope. Rather, it's the domestic use of the military and the attempt to assert federal control over National Guard, which if not completely unprecedented, certainly is unusual and certainly in modern times has not been done without much more substantial reason than exists here.
Sam Hawley: And I would have thought it's pretty ironic, Ilya, that Donald Trump pardons almost everyone involved in the January 6th riots and then sends in the military for these protests.
Ilya Somin: So I would say it's more than an irony. It's pretty obvious and blatant hypocrisy. What happened in 2021 was a genuine insurrection and a genuine attempt to overthrow the government effectively to keep in power a person who had no legal claim to it. On the other hand, what is going on now is fairly small-scale violence and property destruction. I condemn it. The people who do it should be prosecuted, but it's not anywhere near the level of what happened on January 6th. In many cases, Trump's immigration policies and the activities of ICE themselves, as well as trying to deport people without due process, seizing people when they're going to immigration hearings, sending people to imprisonment in El Salvador, which is lawless on many levels and which several courts have ruled against. So I think it is Trump's law breaking which precipitated this crisis and he and his policies are principally to blame for it. That doesn't justify people reacting with violence that harms innocent people in response. That's wrong and I condemn it, but it is also the case when the government itself acts lawlessly, they can't rightly count on the cooperation of citizens that normally they might come to expect.
Sam Hawley: Some of these protesters have been flying the Mexican flag. That plays into Donald Trump's hands, doesn't it? That's what he wants.
Ilya Somin: Maybe. If I were organising a protest, and I'm no political activist, but if I was, I probably would not wave Mexican flags, but that people have a first amendment right to wave whatever flags they want, whether I approve of them or not.
Sam Hawley: All right, so, Ilya, we're going to unpack with you the significance of Donald Trump's intervention in these protests. To do that, I just wondered if you could first take us to Fort Bragg. That's a military base in North Carolina. Donald Trump addressed troops there during the week, didn't he?
Donald Trump, US President: It's a beautiful sight to be with you in a place called Fort Bragg.
Sam Hawley: What was he actually telling them?
Ilya Somin: As I understand it, you know, he was telling them that the US had been invaded and that he would use force to prevent it in Los Angeles.
Donald Trump, US President: What you're witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace, on public order, and a national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We're not going to let that happen.
Ilya Somin: And he was at least strongly implying he would use force even against peaceful protesters, and he got the troops to cheer.
Donald Trump, US President: Time and again, our enemies have learned that if you dare to threaten the American people, American soldier will chase you down, crush you, and cast you into oblivion. That's what happens, unfortunately. In Los Angeles, the governor of California, the mayor of Los Angeles, they're incompetent.
Ilya Somin: From what I have read, what they did is troops who seemed inclined not to be supportive of Trump, they had the right to just not appear at that speech. And so the people who were there were sort of self-selected to be his supporters. The bottom line, though, is it's unusual and a violation of political norms, at the very least, for the president to openly advocate the use of force domestically and to use troops as a backdrop for what is obviously a blatantly partisan political speech, at the very least. It may not be illegal to do that, but it's certainly a violation of political norms, though in fairness, over the last decade, we've seen a lot of norms be violated, and this will be far from the first.
Sam Hawley: All right. And he told these troops that he'd liberate LA.
Donald Trump, US President: Very simply, we will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again. It's happening very quickly.
Sam Hawley: And he called the protesters animals and the foreign enemy. Quite extraordinary.
Ilya Somin: Yes. I think that language speaks for itself and you don't really need me to say much more, except that it's both wildly inaccurate and to say the least, hugely inappropriate.
Sam Hawley: Yeah. All right. Well, let's just talk a bit more about his decision to send in the US Marines and the National Guard to LA, even though the local authorities, the police insist they were being brought under control. It's hardly surprising he acts in this manner, is it? I mean, he has form.
Ilya Somin: In one sense, it's not surprising because it seems like he wanted to do this even in his first term during the much larger actually protests and riots that occurred after the death of George Floyd. And at that time he was prevented by his secretary of defence and by military officials. This time around, he has sort of more cooperative loyalists or one might say, toadies who are less willing to counter his worst impulses. So while it's not surprising that this individual wanted to do it, it is, I think, at the very least, a major breach of norms and at least arguably a violation of law as well.
Sam Hawley: But just explain for me how that relates to now and what Donald Trump is doing now.
Ilya Somin: So I think in two ways. One is he clearly did want to use the military back then, and he clearly has sort of these authoritarian instincts going way back. At one point, even years before he was president, he praised the Chinese government for their crackdown in Tiananmen Square, which a massacre that killed hundreds or even thousands of protesters.
Donald Trump, US President: I was not endorsing it. I said that is a strong, powerful government that put it down... they kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing. It doesn't mean at all I was endorsing it.
Ilya Somin: And so he has these instincts going way back, but also his frustration over what happened in 2020 may make it even more likely that he would want to do things differently now.
Sam Hawley: So you seem to be suggesting that sending in the National Guard and the Marines could be somewhat sinister in a way.
Ilya Somin: I think at the very least, it's quite possible, given that the actual legal and policy argument for doing so is extremely weak. So either at best is just a very poorly thought out initiative by the administration, but at worst, it is indeed sinister, as you suggest.
Sam Hawley: But to what end? What's the aim?
Ilya Somin: So one possible aim could simply just be to look strong or to satisfy his instincts to be strong and tough. Another possibility is that they want to normalise the idea that you can use troops domestically so that they have this in their toolkit going forward. And that obviously would be extremely sinister, as you suggested.
Sam Hawley: What, so it's a practice run for the future?
Ilya Somin: Yeah. If you normalise something and you succeed in getting people to accept it, and obviously those are two big ifs, then it's easier to do it the second or third or fourth time around.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Ilya, Trump's deployed the Marines to LA and the National Guard, but there are limits, aren't there, on what those forces can do? Just explain that.
Ilya Somin: So under the current set of statutes that he's invoked, it seems like the limits are that they can only sort of protect federal facilities and perhaps federal personnel. And from what I've read and heard they actually haven't been doing very much other than sort of being in the streets and guarding certain federal facilities. But if he were to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law he hasn't invoked yet, then at least it's possible that they would have much broader law enforcement authority to just enforce ordinary laws and could then act much more aggressively. And there's also the issue of even if he doesn't invoke the Insurrection Act, whether he could simply just order them to do things which are illegal, but on the hopes that nobody would stop him from doing it, even if it is illegal under the letter of the law.
Sam Hawley: Right. And just to point out that Insurrection Act, it's not used very often. We haven't seen it used much in American history, right?
Ilya Somin: Not much. The last time, if I recall correctly, was with respect to the LA riots of 1992, which really was much larger scale violence than anything going on right now. But certainly it was the case that there was large scale riots. The LA police at that time were just not able to control them. They were taken by surprise. Whereas right now, from what I've heard, things are sort of calming down. There has been some destruction of property and some relatively low level violence, but nothing like what happened in LA in 1992 or at some other notorious riots in American history.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, in a televised address said that Donald Trump is destroying democracy, that California may be the first, but it won't be the last.
Gavin Newsom, California Governor: When Donald Trump sought blanket authority to commandeer the National Guard, he made that order apply to every state in this nation. This is about all of us. This is about you. California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next.
Sam Hawley: Now, we should point out, of course, that he is a Democrat and could potentially be a presidential nominee in the future. But what do you make of his comments?
Ilya Somin: I think his concerns are at least plausible and well taken. We don't know whether the administration has a plan to make use of this precedent in the future, but I think the risk is great enough that this is the kind of thing that, if at all possible, you want to cut off before we go down that road and take more risk.
Sam Hawley: All right. Well, Ilya, Donald Trump's next big scheduled event is this military parade in Washington over the weekend. The president says any protests there would be met with a very big force.
Donald Trump, US President: For those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force. You know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.
Ilya Somin: I don't know what force he has in mind or whether he even plans to carry out that threat in any way or not. But obviously, if he does use force, even against peaceful protesters, that would both be a violation of the First Amendment and I would argue a crime as well.
Sam Hawley: But Ilya, if the LA riots are the start of something bigger for Trump, what legally can be done to stop him? I note the California governor is taking action in the court to halt the troop deployment, but does that achieve anything?
Ilya Somin: So it depends to some extent on whether he wins the action, if so, whether Trump would obey the decision. So we'll have to see what happens in court on that. And if there is a decision by the court against Trump, whether they would obey the injunction or not. You know, if troops commit crimes or shoot people illegally or whatnot, criminal liability can result there. There would also be civil liability as well. But it all depends on exactly what is done and under what circumstances. And if the Insurrection Act is invoked, then there could be litigation about that. And, you know, there would be questions that I think in modern times, there's little, if any, judicial precedent on.
Sam Hawley: We see headlines suggesting it could be the start of a civil war. That's going a bit far, I would think at this point. But there is a concern about that.
Ilya Somin: So I think a civil war, to my mind, is still unlikely. But obviously, the very fact that we're talking about that is itself not a great sign.
Sam Hawley: Ilya Somin is a law professor at the George Mason University in Virginia, and the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank. This episode was produced by Sydney Pead. Audio production by Adair Sheppard. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I'm Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday. Thanks for listening.