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In the United States, the People Rule, Not Wannabe King Trump
The “No Kings” protests, led by Indivisible, represent no disrespect to the Army. They are all about telling President Trump, who wants to be a king, that he isn’t one and never will be.
Jun 14, 2025
This week President Donald Trump sent the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to control what he preposterously called a “violent occupation.”
Sending U.S. troops to act against citizens exercising their right to free speech is a chilling betrayal of American democracy. The rebellion Trump claims to be fighting is simply nonexistent.
In fact, reporters and on-site observers have documented that the protests in Los Angeles—and those spreading now to other cities—are, for the most part, nonviolent. The violence that has occurred was likely intensified by the arrival of the military.
This spectacle is looking less like a tribute to our military and more like a pageant to honor “Dear Leader.”
Late Thursday, a federal court ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in California was illegal and unconstitutional and ordered Trump to relinquish control of the California National Guard back to Governor Gavin Newsom. That ruling has been temporarily blocked by an Appeals Court and the deployment will be allowed to continue at least into next week.
Also on Thursday, In another show of authoritarian force, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) was forcibly removed and handcuffed after identifying himself and attempting to ask a question of Secretary Kristi Noem at her Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles.
Trump’s disgraceful, authoritarian move in Los Angeles over the past few days is the first, but likely not the last, effort by Trump to use the country’s military against its own citizens.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress on Tuesday that Trump is already prepared to send the National Guard and Reserves into other cities as part of Trump’s effort to, in Hegseth’s words, “secure [the] homeland.”
Using a fig-leaf justification, Trump is steamrolling over the spirit, if not the letter, of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. This act restricts the military from being used in domestic law enforcement within the United States.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman got it right when she said that Trump “wants to demonstrate absolute power.”
As historian Timothy Snyder puts it: “Tyranny is terror management.”
That is what we are seeing in myriad actions by Trump and his cronies over the past four months and especially now as he works to stoke fear without regard for constitutional rights or the rule of law.
In an address given at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, Trump absurdly (and falsely) claimed that the Los Angeles protesters were part of a “foreign invasion” and that Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass “paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists [in a] willful attempt to nullify federal law and aid the occupation of the city by criminal invaders.”
(Trump’s words must always be considered in the context of the more than 30,000 false and misleading statements he reportedly made in his first term. His serial falsehoods continue to grow in his second term.)
Trump doesn’t even try to hide his desire to have the absolute powers of a king and seems to revel in being the Commander in Chief.
Trump is staging a military parade on Saturday that’s expected to cost taxpayers $45 million. The parade is ostensibly to celebrate the Army’s birthday, but Saturday also just happens to be Trump’s 79th birthday as well. This spectacle is looking less like a tribute to our military and more like a pageant to honor “Dear Leader.”
And, in true “Dear Leader” fashion, Trump has warned that protesters at his birthday party “will be met with very big force.”
Peaceful protest is a fundamental First Amendment right, a constitutional right apparently alien to the president. This threat is yet one more attempt by Trump to intimidate and spread fear.
Protesters, however, won’t be in Washington, D.C. Instead, more than 2,000 protests around the country on Saturday will bring hundreds of thousands of Americans together to stand up against Trump and his authoritarian regime.
The “No Kings” protests, led by Indivisible, represent no disrespect to the Army. They are all about telling President Trump, who wants to be a king, that he isn’t one and never will be.
Those protesters are not alone. Some 70% of U.S. veterans oppose Trump’s vainglorious use of the military to celebrate his birthday. Last week in Washington, D.C., thousands of veterans protested the drastic cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the programs that support those who served.
They have good reason to wonder why Trump can afford a $45 million birthday parade and $134 million to send the military into Los Angeles for a political stunt, when funding for the VA and other core programs that benefit veterans are on the chopping block.
The VA has indicated that department staff will be cut by 15%, comprising some 72,000 employees, many of them veterans.
Veterans will also be seriously affected by proposed cuts to Medicaid and food programs in the pending reconciliation bill. One out of four veterans, according to 2023 data, lived in a household receiving food assistance or health coverage from Medicaid.
In the United States, the people rule.
As President Lincoln reminded us in his Gettysburg Address, we are a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Trump isn’t going to change that no matter how hard he tries.
This was adapted from a piece that appeared in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a weekly Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here to receive your copy each week via email.
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Trump in Los Angeles Is Exactly What We Have Been Warning About
This is a critical moment in U.S. history, and it demands that we stand strong in our opposition to the administration’s reckless and unlawful use of military force.
Jun 11, 2025
For years, we have warned against the danger of an unchecked president turning the military against American civilians.
In an extraordinary show of force, President Trump has federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and deployed 300 of them, in addition to deploying 700 Marines, to quell protests in the Los Angeles area. All over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Why this abrupt, camera-ready escalation? White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted a video of a peaceful protest parade. “If we don’t fix this, we don’t have a country,” he shuddered. “Pass the BBB” — the budget bill now facing turbulence in Congress.
Trump’s administration is spoiling for a fight. It pops out emergency declarations like a Pez dispenser. It is also relying on flimsy legal justifications, as my colleagues have pointed out.
Presidents have deployed troops to control civil unrest only 30 times before in U.S. history. The Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits federal troops from engaging in civilian law enforcement. Soldiers are trained to defeat an enemy, not to de-escalate protests.
The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.
The last time that a president sent in the Guard without a clear request from a state’s governor was 1965, when troops were used to protect the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. (And even in that case, George Wallace waffled.)
To be clear, violent protests are not acceptable or productive. The federal government should be unobstructed in carrying out its lawful duties. Of course, the specter of masked ICE agents lurking in the lobbies of immigration courts, as has happened here in New York City, is itself willfully provocative.
In fact, in Los Angeles, protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful. The LAPD — hardly a department of pushovers — has been adamant that it has the situation under control. Not surprisingly, the troops have only fanned the protests. Newsom formally requested that the administration rescind the deployment, saying that it is “inflaming tensions while pulling resources from where they’re actually needed.”
The situation in Los Angeles is bad. What might come next could be worse.
Trump’s executive order authorizes deployment of the Guard “at locations where protests against [ICE] functions are occurring or are likely to occur.” Where might that be? “We’re gonna have troops everywhere,” Trump declared.
As my colleague Elizabeth Goitein notes, “No president has ever federalized the National Guard for purposes of responding to potential future civil unrest anywhere in the country. Preemptive deployment is literally the opposite of deployment as a last resort. It would be a shocking abuse of power and the law.”
The most powerful repressive tool would be the Insurrection Act — a law that lets presidents deploy troops to suppress a rebellion or insurrection or curb domestic violence in extreme scenarios. Trump threatened to invoke it against Democratic-run cities during his 2024 campaign.
The Insurrection Act is, unfortunately, a mess of a law. Key words such as “rebellion” and “insurrection” are left undefined. Courts have given presidents a wide berth. Trump winked at this law by calling the protesters “insurrectionists.”
He has so far chosen to rely on a different law — one that has never been used to quell civil unrest without an accompanying Insurrection Act invocation. The administration claims that it is invoking this law only to protect federal personnel and property. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has requested that soldiers be authorized to detain and search protesters, functions normally prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act.
It’s clear that Trump wants to use this showdown to expand enforcement powers.
The week before he stages a strongman-style military parade along the National Mall — complete with tanks, missiles, and military aircraft — Trump has claimed the right to preemptively authorize deployment of the military all across America.
That should be chilling to most Americans, who have enjoyed a firm line between police and the military as an essential component of our democracy. The deployment of the military against civilians should only be used in the most extreme cases as a last resort. Otherwise, as Elizabeth Goitein notes, “an army turned inward can quickly become an instrument of tyranny.”
Experts have already identified worst-case scenarios. George W. Bush administration official David Frum has sounded the alarm on the possibility of Trump using the military to influence the 2026 election.
If you want to learn more about all of this, here are reports we’ve published in the last few years on emergency powers, the Insurrection Act, the Posse Comitatus Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and martial law.
Once again, in the face of a lawless executive, the courts must now step up. The Supreme Court may want to avoid a conflict, but here, it may have no choice. It is imperative that it uphold checks against the use of military force against civilians.
And now that we know that the existing laws can be used, however tendentiously, to justify provocative military action, we must fix those laws so they cannot be abused again.
The Brennan Center has proposed reforms to the Insurrection Act, including defining the law’s critical terms and enforcing more checks on its use. We have also proposed reforms to strengthen the Posse Comitatus Act. Americans must be adamant, too, that even under existing statutes, presidents lack the power to declare martial law.
This is a critical moment in U.S. history, and it demands that we stand strong in our opposition to the administration’s reckless and unlawful use of military force, in Los Angeles and across the country.
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'That's a Dictator': Trump Threatens Force Against Military Parade Protesters
"Worth stressing that he's not threatening rioters or people who are violent or lawless but literally just 'protesters.'"
Jun 11, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday threatened to respond with force to protesters who gather this coming weekend in opposition to his costly and authoritarian military parade in Washington, D.C., remarks that came amid growing fears that the administration is planning to mobilize troops across the country.
In his comments, Trump made no effort to distinguish between peaceful demonstrators and those who commit violence or property damage, telling reporters, "For those people that want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force."
"I haven't even heard about a protest, but you know, this is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force," the president continued.
Trump says anybody who protests the military parade on Sunday will be met with “very heavy force” pic.twitter.com/iDm4qVzKg3
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 10, 2025
Under the banner of "No Kings," roughly 2,000 rallies have been planned across the United States on June 14 to protest Trump's birthday military parade and grave abuses of power, including his deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to crush demonstrations in Los Angeles.
Organizers opted against holding a "No Kings" rally in the U.S. Capitol, saying that "real power isn't staged in Washington."
"Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity," they said, "we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together in communities across the country to reject strongman politics and corruption."
Leaders of the rallies have stressed their commitment to nonviolence, saying in a statement this past weekend that "organizers are trained in de-escalation and are working closely with local partners to ensure peaceful and powerful actions nationwide."
Public Citizen, a "No Kings" partner organization, was among those responding with alarm to Trump's remarks on Tuesday.
"That's a dictator," the group wrote on social media.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote that it's "worth stressing that he's not threatening rioters or people who are violent or lawless but literally just 'protesters' with 'very big force.'"
"My strong instinct is that Trump's threats against Americans' First Amendment right to peaceably assemble are going to massively juice attendance at Saturday's protests," Hayes added.
A map of rallies planned across the U.S. can be found here.
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