The hypocrisy is so glaring that I struggle to take seriously even seemingly earnest expressions of concern about Jones’ language from the right. You can and should worry about American leaders at any level viewing their opponents as the enemy within, whether it’s the president of the United States or a random candidate for state AG. But if you’re more vocal about the latter than the former, forgive me for thinking you’re more interested in contriving a “both sides” equivalency to minimize what the White House is up to than you are about addressing the problem of incitement.
What moral responsibility does the Trump administration have not to behave in ways that might alarm and potentially incite already frightened Americans? Is there any?
Bad faith.
Did you know that, as of last month, there were still 300 members of the National Guard deployed in Los Angeles? The rioting that triggered the initial deployment of thousands happened in early June, but a residual force of a few hundred troops was still hanging around months later.
Did you know that the current National Guard deployment in Washington, D.C., is set to drag on for nearly two more months, despite the fact that the president will tell anyone who listens (falsely) that crime in D.C. has disappeared?
What are these servicemembers still doing in these cities? They aren’t regular Army; they have other careers. Their employers presumably are feeling their absence since they were called up. What’s the nature of the “emergency” that requires them to be there picking up trash in camouflage instead of getting back to their lives?
Last week, Donald Trump called 200 members of the Oregon National Guard into service and ordered them to protect ICE’s headquarters in Portland. On Saturday, a federal judge who was appointed by Trump blocked the deployment, unable to identify an emergency that would legally justify military intervention. Judge Karin Immergut found “substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days—or even weeks—leading up to the President’s directive.”
Even Trump has a sneaking suspicion that there might not be a bona fide emergency. “I spoke to the governor [of Oregon], she was very nice,” Trump noted recently. “But I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place. … It looks like terrible.”
No matter: The pace of deployments is accelerating anyway. After Immergut stopped the Oregon National Guard from being called up, Trump turned around and tried to send members of the California and Texas National Guards to Portland instead. On Sunday night, the judge blocked those, too. Hours earlier, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced that the White House was sending soldiers from the Illinois and Texas National Guards to Chicago over his objections. “Call up your troops, or we will,” he said he was warned.
Describing the deployment as an “invasion,” the governor declared that “there is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, and cooperation.” I wouldn’t go that far, as enforcing the 14th Amendment over segregationist objections is a pretty good reason. But trampling on the 10th Amendment probably should warrant logic more compelling than “the officials whom voters elected to lead their city and state aren’t controlling crime as aggressively as the president would like.”
Two things are remarkable about all this. One, which almost goes without saying, is that it’s another case of the Trump administration aiming to normalize unprecedented authoritarian shows of force. But the other is underappreciated: It’s all being done in bad faith, as a provocation, and quite plainly. There’s barely a pretense anymore of a colorable emergency like a riot that might justify the president deploying troops. He’s doing it unbidden and enthusiastically, looking for excuses to intimidate Democrats by symbolically occupying their cities with troops yanked from duty in other states.
It’s a little tease of martial law, just in case he feels obliged at some point to try that, too. Which feels like a form of incitement, no?
I don’t think left-leaning observers are being hysterical in suspecting a dark strategy here in which the Guardsmen who’ve been deployed are essentially being used as bait. Stephen Miller “clearly wants to provoke the left into widespread violence so the president will have a pretext to crack down on all kinds of political dissent,” Damon Linker wrote, “as well as on the remaining institutional constraints on his power, very much including federal judges.” If you doubt that, go read Miller’s musings this weekend about “domestic terrorism” and the, ahem, “legal insurrection” that Judge Immergut supposedly staged by declining to let the president do any ol’ thing he likes to live out his fantasy of armed men under his command confronting undesirables.
Or go read the reactions of some of Trump’s noisiest online cheerleaders to a court daring to demand that the commander in chief have an actual reason before doing something as draconian as deploying the military internally. The richest man on the planet is now fantasizing about a fascist purge of the judiciary in the style of El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. Others with huge followings have begun demanding that Trump ignore court rulings and heralding a “golden age” of authoritarian strongman rule.
It all feels a bit provocative. Incitement, one might even call it.
The enemy within.
To say that Trump, Miller, and their flying monkeys are engaged in incitement is not to say that their critics should let themselves be incited, of course. So long as the courts in this country are functioning—and, per Judge Immergut’s ruling, they are—there’s no moral justification for resisting the administration’s provocations with extra-legal means. Court challenges and civil disobedience are the only ethical tools in the toolbox.
But this is incitement, on a vastly wider scale than Jay Jones texting his colleagues.
We can all agree that the president has both the authority and a duty to enforce immigration law. When Miller wheezes that the “colossal landslide” Trump supposedly won last fall gives him a mandate to mass-deport illegal immigrants, he has a point. But a mandate to deport illegals isn’t a mandate for ICE to treat American apartment buildings like they’re terrorist safe houses in 2006 Iraq, replete with locals being detained with zip ties for hours. And it sure as shoot isn’t a mandate for the Department of Homeland Security to release sizzle reels of the raid for Trump’s fans to … enjoy?
Those are gratuitous provocations, designed to frighten and enrage Trump’s opponents. ICE agents covering their faces is another: Lots of government workers across various branches now live in fear of violent reprisal from lunatics, but only Stephen Miller’s secret police force gets to avoid the basic public accountability of identifying itself, with predictable effects on its behavior. Masked police are a provocation. The practice is supposed to put you on edge and make you feel desperate.
The president’s demagoguery of his opponents before members of the military is also a provocation. Last week, he used a rare in-person address before America’s generals and admirals to encourage them to worry less about enemies abroad and more about “the enemy within.” This weekend, he told an audience of Navy sailors that “we have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulders called the Democrats.” Relatedly, since the shutdown began a few days ago, some federal employees have found that their personal government email accounts are generating out-of-office replies that explicitly blame Democrats for shuttering the government.
In the same way that a Republican who lives in Virginia would understandably worry about equal treatment under the law if Jay Jones becomes attorney general, a Democrat living anywhere in the United States should worry that Donald Trump is trying to make the federal government systemically hostile not just to their policies but to them personally.
Practically every word out of Stephen Miller’s mouth anymore is a provocation. “I see the guns and badges in this room. You are unleashed,” he recently told a group of law enforcement officers in Memphis, another target for a Trump military intervention. “The handcuffs that you’re carrying, they’re not on you anymore. They’re on the criminals.” That’s straight out of the Pete Hegseth school of public safety, in which the only thing standing between us and utopia are legal restraints on agents of the state who carry large guns. If you worry about the Memphis police treating Miller’s incitement as a license to brutalize people, that’s great. He wants you to.
I had to laugh this weekend when he took to Twitter to complain that the ascent of a character like Jay Jones in Virginia’s Democratic Party “tells you a lot about the *system* and the beliefs it nurtures, rewards & reinforces.” Stephen Miller himself is the most powerful adviser to the most powerful person in the world, and nowadays routinely screeches about domestic terrorism and crushing the “wicked ideology” of leftism in ways that would make old-school fascists blush. What does it tell us about the Republican “system” and what it rewards and reinforces?
It occurred to me this morning, in fact, that I can’t recall him ever actually denying that he’s a fascist. He’s complained about being called the F-word, but not in a spirit of indignation. He just thinks it’s inflammatory to use the term against him as he goes about saying and doing stereotypically fascist things. If I’m wrong about him, ask yourself: What conceivable exercise of power by Donald Trump would ever cause Miller to say, “Sorry, sir, but I’m afraid you’ve gone too far this time”?
The point of all of these provocations is simple. It’s to convince Americans that their political opponents aren’t opponents but enemies and should be dealt with accordingly. The more terrified Democrats get, the more likely it is that the degenerate apples in their bunch will act out. And the more they act out, the stronger the pretext Trump will have to deal with them as true enemies. That may sound cynical, as you and I aren’t used to seeing our government try to incite domestic discord, but we’re also not used to seeing the executive branch repeatedly seize the powers of a second branch while moving toward defying the powers of the third.
The latter is happening, though. And so the former is too, to create an appropriate excuse.
Deference.
Needless to say, this is why the Trump White House didn’t get the benefit of the doubt from Judge Immergut on the Portland deployment, or from Judge Waverly Crenshaw on whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia was vindictively prosecuted. It’s also why the case against James Comey will end up in the toilet sooner rather than later. Courts have traditionally given the president and the Justice Department wide discretion in commanding the military and choosing whom to prosecute, but that’s because presidents traditionally haven’t given courts good reason to think they’re acting in bad faith.
Trump has. Abrego Garcia was deported to a foreign gulag without due process, in violation of a court order. Comey was charged over the objection of practically the entire U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia and is now a target for further gratuitous humiliation by the White House. The Portland deployment, as noted earlier, lacks any emergency to justify it. And the president himself frequently confesses to his own bad faith in print, like when he urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Comey before the statute of limitations ran out.
Why would courts continue to give the White House the same deference that it’s traditionally enjoyed when the president is openly abusing his powers to punish his political enemies and being egged on by his most fascist supporters? Do you think judges don’t know “what time it is”? This guy wants to put his face on the currency, for cripes’ sake.
Domestic discord is essential to Trumpist postliberalism, dedicated as it is to the permanent hegemony of one national tribe over another. (If you don’t believe me, believe Miller.) Both parties have done a terrible job this century of encouraging comity between left and right, but only one has glorified ruthlessness toward one’s opponents to the point of talking itself into attempting a coup—which it will do again, I promise, if circumstances in 2028 necessitate it. “American versus American” is the logical end state of Trumpism, and so provocations to incite that dynamic will recur continuously for the rest of his term. Maybe the courts can prevent it. Maybe the public, which is properlyskeptical of his military deployments, can. Or maybe not.
