What a militaristic president means for democracy

0:00The new episode of The Next Five is all about the freedom to invent with AI. Steve Tarza at Amazon joins me. I think there's such a huge opportunity for innovation. As does Jim Rowan at Deloitte. We see that when the C-suite is using AI, they get their teams on board as well. And Seth Fox at S &P Global. Our data is our crown jewels. We have to draw a bit of a line around the data, but not around the idea. Listen to The Next Five wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy. so you may have heard there is a massive military parade going on in Washington today I live in DC so I've been preparing for it to come to my door for a few weeks now but I wasn't expecting it to literally come to my front door

0:50so let me tell you what happened it was late on Monday night and my roommate and I are sitting in our living room and we start hearing this loud rumbling noise, which sounded really different from the traffic we normally hear. So obviously we go look out the window to see what it is and start recording a video. We see a U.S. Army tank on the back of a massive truck rolling right down Rhode Island Avenue, which is one of the city's main thoroughfares. And then there is another and another and another tank. And it happens the next night too. It's a little bit earlier this time. So people all over the street come out of their houses and start pointing, filming.

1:32One guy flips the trucks off. And I have to be honest, seeing all these vehicles come into the U.S. Capitol at the same time that Donald Trump is sending federal troops to California to crack down on protests, it was a pretty incredible moment. Why are there tanks in D.C. and Marines in L.A. So that's what we're going to figure out today, how we got to this point and what comes next.

2:05I'm Sonia Hudson. This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all of the things happening in U.S. politics, finance and the economy. And this week we're asking, what does a militaristic Trump mean for America. Here with me to discuss is James Politi. He's the FT's Washington Bureau Chief. Hi, James. Hi, Sonia. And we're also joined by Chris Mirasola. He's a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in military deployments in the United States. He's also a former attorney for the Department of Defense. Hi, Chris. Hi. Thanks for having me.

2:40Thanks for being on the show. So, James, tell me about this parade. Why is it happening now? Well, it's happening now because President Trump decided that on his birthday, he wanted to showcase U.S. military strength. It's a celebration of the Army, U.S. Army's 250th anniversary. But to have something so overt in conjunction with a presidential birthday and in a week in which the U.S. president decided to deploy the military on U.S. soil in California in order to sort of quash dissent and protests over immigration policies is a pretty dramatic turn of events. And James, this is all happening against the backdrop of the protests in Los Angeles.

3:28How did those start and how did federal troops get involved? So the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been really ramping up its efforts to implement President Trump's crackdown across a wide range of cities. But in L.A. in particular, this triggered protests, which included some violent episodes. Trump decided initially to send in the National Guard against the will of Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California. And then subsequently, he also ordered the deployment of U.S. Marines to the city. Yeah, and Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration over this deployment. On Thursday night, we actually had a ruling in that lawsuit.

4:14A federal judge said that Trump needed to return control of the National Guard to Newsom. There's now been a stay on that by a higher court, so we'll have to see how that plays out. And Chris, while we're talking about lawsuits, can you walk me through the legal justifications for sending National Guardsmen and Marines to crack down on these protests? So there are basically two parts to the legal argument here. So first, we got to keep in mind that the National Guard and the Marines, they're being authorized to do protective activities, protecting federal buildings, personnel and functions. And the White House is using a theory of implied constitutional powers to justify that mission set.

5:05This is a theory that's never been before the courts before. It's based on a reading of the Constitution. A second kind of source of the law here is the statute that the president used to bring members of the National Guard into federal duty. Right. And there was a particular provisions that the president used to federalize. It's Section 12406 of Title 10, for those who care. That really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. But what do you make of the legal argument, though, that the Trump administration is making here? Yeah, so there are a lot of different issues with what the administration has done so far.

5:52The implied constitutional theory that underpins the protective mission, I find to be not particularly sound. It's never been tested in a court of law. And I think it's pretty unmoored from the text of the Constitution. I think it's a much closer matter about whether the president properly brought the military into a federal duty status, right, for these members of the National Guard. This is generally an area of a lot of discretion. Obviously, on Thursday, Judge Breyer found in favor of California. That decision was stayed by the Ninth Circuit. And so I have less certainty about how that's going to play out in litigation.

6:38Well, let's pivot now and talk about the big picture here. James, what do you think that Trump gets from sending in troops and holding this parade now? Is he trying to kind of lean into a persona of a military strongman? I think that's what he's trying to position himself as, is the president of law and order against the chaos and the open borders of the Biden administration. He campaigned very strongly on this, and now he's trying to put it into action. Americans, I think, traditionally have been very comfortable with the deployment of U.S. military power and strength overseas, even in wars that eventually have caused a backlash domestically.

7:24But the deployment of U.S. troops and the image of a sort of ultra strong man military leader in Washington, I think, is something that would make people much more uncomfortable. And it's much sort of more removed from the American tradition. And so whether it helps or hurts him politically, I think, really remains to be seen. Chris, is there anything that you wanted to add on to that? So since like basically the start of the Cold War in the United States, we have had very few, right, military parades of this kind. And in part, right, this is because we were trying to make a distinction between the liberal democracy that we had in the United States and the authoritarian regimes against which we were posturing ourselves in places like the Soviet Union.

8:12Right. And so I think part of the current public perception of these kinds of military parades is a product of that history. Right. This Cold War history. And then second, even if we take a longer view over a history where there were many military parades, World War Two and before, kind of think of ticker tape parades down New York City and that kind of thing. These were military parades that occurred after the end of some kind of conflict. I really can't think off the top of my head of very many, if any, instances where we had a military parade for the president's birthday. Right. And so even if you take that, like, really long view of history, this is still a pretty extraordinary use of the military.

8:56Well, let's talk a little bit about the opposition that Trump is facing here. You know, we were talking earlier about the lawsuit that's being brought by California Governor Gavin Newsom over the federalizing of the National Guard. We also saw on Thursday, California Senator Alex Padilla was briefly put in handcuffs and detained at a press conference in Los Angeles. Tell me about the political position that Trump's opposition holds in this debate and just how significant that is. Well, I mean, at the moment, so on the ground, you're seeing some protests. I think those are kind of growing organically because of his response and possibly spreading to other cities.

9:39Yeah, I've seen lots of stuff on social media about these, quote unquote, no kings protests across the country. Yeah, there was just a sign driving in said, you know, no ice in D.C. when I was driving in this morning. And I think we'll see what happens today, you know, on the day of the parade across the U.S. if those protests expand. But this is all happening in the context of a sort of depressed, divided Democratic Party, which has struggled to really galvanize an opposition against Trump and coalesce around a certain message. In a way, this provides the Democrats with an opportunity to target Trump and the Republicans for overreach and for jeopardizing really certain core values of American democracy.

10:29I think that that's why you're seeing some lawmakers stick their heads out and start to really emerge as sort of the figureheads of the opposition. And Gavin Newsom is the most kind of glaring example of that. But I still see some reluctance among some Democrats to really go full on and attack Trump over this. Why do you think that is? Well, I think some are still worried that the immigration crackdown still remains broadly popular. And so to be attacking Trump for trying to enforce his own deportation program could be seen as sort of an endorsement of undocumented immigration and an endorsement of the Biden policies.

11:17So I think there's still, especially among sort of swing district, more moderate Democrats, I think that's still a very big factor. What are we hearing from the Trump administration outside the courtroom? Well, we're hearing that for them, this is a winning issue politically, that what they see in California is sort of a permissive liberal government running amok and defying essentially the will of the American voters who had endorsed Trump's immigration crackdown and want to see the deportations proceed without any kind of impediment. They're trying to focus on the fact that some of the protesters were, you know, carrying Mexican flags, for instance, and that he is doing this to enact sort of the will of the people.

12:15So, Chris, you have studied domestic militarism a lot. But do you think that these dramatic gestures, you know, troops in L.A., tanks in D.C., even going back to 2020, Trump's attempts to use federal troops during the Black Lives Matter protests, are they going to change how our democracy interacts with the military? Yeah, I think that's a real possibility here. So historically, and particularly since the end of World War II, we've had a broad-based normative view in the United States that the military should have a, like, de minimis role, like a minimal role in civilian functions, right? And this tradition, in many ways, dates back all the way to the founding of the Republic, right?

13:09One of the core reasons cited in the Declaration of Independence for our revolution was concern about the British military's role in the colonies. So this has a really, really long and in many ways foundational normative role in the republic. And in the past 10 years, we've seen an incredible shift in the circumstances where the military is used. And a lot of that is due to the first and now second Trump administrations. We're seeing uses of the military in ways that if they're not unprecedented, then they haven't been done in at least 50 years, incredibly long periods of time. And so that has the real risk of just shifting our window of normative perception to becoming more used to having these uses of the military kind of as like a steady baseline.

14:05And that's, in my view, like incredibly corrosive. of the civilian democratic government that we've, you know, in fits and starts, been able to build over the course of more than 200 years. All right, I want to thank our guest. James Politi is the FT's Washington Bureau Chief. Thanks, James. Thanks, Sonia. And Chris Mirasola, he's a law professor at the University of Houston. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Sonia. This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, we've got a link to that in the show notes. Our show is mixed by Kelly Gary and produced by Henry Larson.

14:44We had help this week from Katya Kumkova and Lauren Fedor. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. Original music by Hannes Brown. I'm Sonia Hudson. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

15:05Thank you.

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