And Republicans who ignore Trump’s shorthand illiberalism are abdicating basic civic duty.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of intra-Republican political affairs when merely pledging to uphold the law is described as breaking with Donald Trump.
“Obviously we don’t want to have the United States military, we’re not going to have that, be deployed in the United States,” said Representative Byron Donalds, a staunch Trump ally, on Tuesday. “That’s been long-standing law in our country since the founding of the republic.”
The rebuke was occasioned by the former president’s cynical musing about the many subversive agents operating in the United States and the need to deploy the armed forces to subdue them.
“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo over the weekend. “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” The comments, which veered wildly away from Bartiromo’s premise, reveal the extent to which Trump remains fixated on what he called “the enemy from within.”
If he is restored to the White House, it’s not likely that Trump would be able to violate the Posse Comitatus Act at will. But nor would Trump be entirely bereft of the tools that would allow him to do just that, and his former defense secretary, Mark Esper, thinks he would certainly try.
In a recent CNN interview, Esper recalled how Trump “wanted to use the National Guard” and “active duty military as well” to subdue the often violent demonstrations that erupted across the country in the summer of 2020. There are safeguards against that level of presidential interference in state-level affairs, and those guardrails held in Trump’s first term. “But my sense is his inclination is to use the military in these situations, whereas my view is that’s a bad role for the military,” Esper added.
Trump’s remarks are a godsend to the Harris campaign at a time when it needs all the help it can get. The vice president’s campaign and its allies are doing all they can to publicize Trump’s remarks, but it is unlikely that Republicans have been privy to that rhetoric. The Right long ago learned to compartmentalize the former president’s imperious pronouncements. He, unlike his predecessors or would-be successors in the Oval Office, cannot be taken at his word, some argue. Rather, his comments should be subjected to exegesis by a priestly caste who can divine from them their most banal interpretation. This, we’re so often told, is the only intellectually serious way to interpret Trump’s guttural utterances.
That is irrational nonsense. More importantly, it’s nonsense to which the voters that matter in a general election do not subscribe. Republicans often let events fomented by Trump’s shorthand illiberalism get away from them by simply ignoring their significance. The result is a runaway news cycle in which Republicans play no part in shaping public perception. That’s not just bad practice, it’s an abdication of elementary civic duty.