Trump Has Long Been Itching To Use The Military On American Streets

Yahoo

09-06-2025

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
We come into the new week with more weekend news to process than we've had since February or March, so I'm going to jump right into it. I tried to condense it as much as possible, grouping like things together, in roughly descending order of importance. One note: I wrote extensively about the return of Abrego Garcia on Friday so I didn't include it here given the volume of other news, but we'll come back to this, especially the news that the criminal division chief in Nashville resigned over the Abrego Garcia indictment. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a flaming retort last night to the Trump DOJ's attempt to end the original case and sidestep the contempt of court proceeding entirely.
We can't talk about the protests in Los Angeles against mass deportation and President Trump itching to send in the military without a quick reminder that we all knew there was an extremely high risk that if Trump were re-elected he would provoke civil unrest in order to use it as a pretext for lawless actions he was already determined to take.
It's too early to say whether this particular incident ends up being the defining episode of the erosion of the line between the military and domestic law enforcement. But it's understandable why everyone has a hair trigger about Trump sending in the National Guard over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Two things in particular:
The President's memo was concerningly open-ended. It didn't specify Los Angeles or California; it applies anywhere. It empowered the defense secretary 'to employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.' It broadly defined protests as rebellion: 'To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.'
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a big deal over the weekend about a detachment of 500 Marines at Twentynine Palms being ready to provide backup to the National Guard.
A former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau told Fox News: 'This is an inappropriate use of the National Guard and is not warranted.'
The most astute analysis:
Law professor Chris Mirasola, who used to work in the DoD Office of General Counsel, unpacks the presidential memo.
The NYT's Charlie Savage on the various legal issues implicated.
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck on what the presidential proclamation did and did not do and why it remains alarming.
A helpful thread from Carrie A. Lee, a former associate professor at the US Army War College:
'I'll say it over and over again; you can't build the mass deportation machine without first building the police state machine.'–Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council
ABC News suspended veteran newsman Terry Moran for a blistering tweet about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Here's the tweet:
A great visualization from Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell on the people Trump doesn't want to exist:
This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump's conception of the new American 'golden age.' Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America's past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America's 'missing persons.'
The Trump administration has forced out two senior FBI officials and punished a third for his friendship with former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the longtime Trump target.
Damian Williams, the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, is leaving Paul Weiss, which cut a deal with President Trump, and joining Jenner & Block, which in contrast sued over Trump's executive order against it and won.
Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – all convicted in the Jan. 6 attack then given clemency by President Trump – have sued prosecutors and FBI agents in federal court in Florida over their prosecutions, demanding $100 million in punitive damages.
An alleged series of thefts of combat equipment from an Army Ranger regiment in Washington state led to the arrest earlier this month of two veterans at a home full of Nazi and white supremacy paraphernalia and a stockpile of stolen weapons, the NYT reports.
The Forward: ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt compared pro-Palestinian student protesters to ISIS and al-Qaeda in an address to Republican attorneys general.
A 6-3 Supreme Court granted DOGE access to confidential Social Security records, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasting the decision in a written dissent joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor Jackson.
Over the objections of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court cut back the scope of discovery the watchdog group CREW can seek from DOGE.
Frank Bisignano, the new head of the Social Security Administration, declared himself to be 'fundamentally a DOGE person.'
In a widely panned decision, two Trump appointees on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reinstated the Trump White House's ban on the Associated Press in retaliation for not using 'Gulf of America' in its stories.
Adam Bonica used computational text analysis to examine judicial decisions in nearly 300 cases involving the Trump administration and found what he called an 'institutional chorus of constitutional alarm':
The sharp language from the bench isn't judicial activism; it's the sound of democracy's defense mechanisms under unprecedented stress. These interventions span the political spectrum. Judges were responding not to partisan disagreement but to actions that crossed fundamental legal and constitutional lines.
The alarm is being sounded by conservative and liberal judges in a range of cases, many of which you'll be familiar with from Morning Memo.