SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
martial law
No Kings! Only We Can Save Us!
Saturday's day of action was a good start. Let it not be the end.
Jun 16, 2025
Editor's Note: The following prepared remarks were delivered at the Courthouse at the Square in Bloomington, Indiana on Saturday, June 14, 2025, as part of the “No Kings” demonstration organized by Bloomington Indivisible, Bloomington 50501, and the Monroe County Democrats.
Good afternoon.
My name is Jeff Isaac.
I’ve lived here in Bloomington, and taught political science here at IUB, for almost forty years.
I believe I’ve spoken before a crowd at the Courthouse only one other time: in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 when, as a founding member of Bloomington United, I spoke to a frightened and anxious group of fellow Bloomingtonians about the need to refuse easy answers, and to avoid demonizing or persecuting those among us who might be different but who are not therefore dangerous. I spoke then in the name of a simple democratic truth: as Bloomingtonians, we share a common place and a common fate, as citizens and residents, and are responsible, together, to address the challenges, and dangers, that confront us, and to do so with decency and a respect for the rule of law and the rights of others.
In those days, people were afraid because our country had been attacked by an obscure group of foreigners based somewhere else.
Today we are again afraid, but the attacker is not obscure, and the threat is not in any sense “external.”
Today we are threatened—our freedom and our democracy are threatened—by Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who is based not in the mountains and caves of Afghanistan, but in our nation’s capital, in the White House.
The events taking place all across the country today are taking place under the banner of “No Kings” for a simple reason: because Trump, with the aid of an exceptionally partisan administration, is today acting like a king, by organizing a massive celebration of his birthday and himself, a celebration that features an unprecedented display of military force on the streets of the Capitol, at the very same moment that he has unleashed the National Guard, and the U.S. Marines, on the streets of Los Angeles, and threatened to do the same in cities across the country.
Trump is a megalomaniac who exults in dominating others.
Trump regards the government, and the entire country, as his private property to be controlled and used to bring wealth to him and his family and friends.
In many ways Trump seems truly to believe the classic motto of that iconic absolute monarch, French King Louis XIV: “l,etat c’est moi.” The state is me. I am the state.
“Only I can save us,” he has said.
“I was saved by God to Make America Great,” he has said.
Trump acts like a King.
And we are here to say, loudly and clearly: “No Kings!”
But in my brief remarks here I want to remind us all that Trump is not a king.
And while he inherited much wealth, he did not inherit the political power he now wields, with such cruelty and contempt, to threaten the people and the things we hold dear.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Trump is the elected President of the United States.
Well over 77 million citizens voted for him, after experiencing his Covid response, and his two impeachments, and his civil and criminal convictions, and his failed administration.
After all that, those millions of our fellow citizens elected him to the highest and most powerful office in the country for a second time.
[It’s okay to boo! It is awful that he was elected, and more awful that we are subject to him!]
It is important, I believe, for us to draw two important conclusions from the fact of his election.
The first is that while monarchs can be dangerous, Trump is much more dangerous than any monarch, precisely becausehe was elected after a multi-year campaign that consisted of angry rhetoric and violent incitement and very clear promises to do exactly what he is now doing.
Trump successfully treated the presidential election like an American Idol television show. And the viewing audience voted him the winner.
Trump is an authoritarian populist, a master manipulator of mass media, digital media, and public opinion, someone who claims the legacy of the American Revolution—remember, the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 insisted that this was their “1776 moment” and their “July 4.” Trump claims to act, above and beyond the law itself, as the tribune and the leader and the avenger of those supposedly “real Americans” who believe in his MAGA lies. He is their “retribution.” Against the rest of us and against our constitutional democracy.
Trump is a populist in the same way that Mussolini was a populist and Hitler was a populist.
And, like these mid-20th century fascist leaders, Trump is a fascist because he preys on fear; promotes xenophobia and racism; and incites violence.
He has used his popularity to take over the Republican party, to purge all dissenters from that party and from the federal government—which is not his private property!–and to create a cult of personality.
He has begun to bring media institutions to heel, and universities to heel. He has begun using the Justice Department to threaten and investigate political critics. He has unleashed ICE, and in the past week subjected the country to something frighteningly close to martial law.
And he has done all of this with very substantial popular support.
We are here together. We ought to be proud to be here, together, determined to walk the talk of democracy. But we must recognize that most Americans are not out on the street today chanting “No Kings!”
Contending with Trump means contending with him and his coterie, but also with the MAGA Republican Party everywhere across the country, and also with his base voters everywhere—we know this here in Bloomington, Indiana, a relatively liberal island in a blood red sea of reaction. It also means contending with a mass public that is tired, cynical, and angry, and with many millions of voters who are in denial or who simply do not care.
The danger is thus enormous, and our challenge especially great, because winning real popular support for an alternative to Trumpism is today an uphill battle.
But this brings me to my second point: Trump is a despotic demagogue who has not—yet!—vanquished constitutional democracy.
Our “democracy” is no doubt plagued by numerous injustices; it is corrupt, in tatters, and besieged.
But it is not dead. Yet.
Trump has attacked the courts. But they persist in their independence, at least in some places.
Trump and his allies have attacked the universities and the media. And they have cowed a great many prominent media and university institutions—including our own Indiana University—a once great institution that the Whitten administration is transforming into a MAGA demonstration project. But independent media and educational institutions persist. Academic freedom and press freedom are not dead—yet.
Trump and his allies would love to utterly destroy the Democratic party–in many ways a sad shell of what was once a serious mainstream party, but still the only substantial source of political opposition. But they have not succeeded.
Trump and his allies still face opposition, in Congress, in civil society, and in the streets. And their party, much to their chagrin, is required by law to face elections in 2026, and again in 2028.
(To be clear, I am not saying that because the law requires free and fair elections, the law will be respected by the MAGA movement. But I am saying that the law has force, and it will be hard even for Trump to simply suspend it. In short, Trumpism can and must be electorally contested in 2026 and 2028—and we must make sure that it is so contested.)
The recent demonstrations against ICE, today’s “No Kings” demonstrations—such things are taking place, all across the country, because we still have certain freedoms and rights, and there are still spaces of dissent and opposition, and forms of solidarity and resistance, that are available to us.
There are democratic means–fragile, limited, and vulnerable to further Trump attacks—that are still available to us.
It is up to us to seize hold of these democratic means, and to use them to say NO to kings and despotic demagogues, and YES to democracy.
Think. Write. Speak. Listen.
Organize. Assemble. Reassemble.
Petition. Demand. Vote.
Act.
Only we can save us.
This is a good start. Let it not be the end.
Thank you.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Why Trump's Troop Surge on US Streets Is a Blueprint for Authoritarian Power
This is not just about Los Angeles. It is about whether a president can override a state to deploy troops in support of domestic policy. It is about whether dissent is still protected in practice, not just in principle.
Jun 16, 2025
The images coming from Los Angeles in June 2025 are not without precedent. But the precedents are not American. They are global, and they are troubling. Military convoys rolling into a city over the objections of its elected leaders. Peaceful protest recast as a public threat. Immigrant communities targeted with sweeping enforcement actions and then blamed for resisting. What unfolded in Los Angeles this summer looked less like the United States of 1992 and more like Beijing in 1989 or Paris under curfew in 1961. These were moments when governments exploited protest as pretext and used the language of order to justify repression. What makes Los Angeles so alarming is not just the imagery of troops on domestic streets, but the quiet dismantling of legal guardrails that once kept that imagery exceptional.
This is not just a story about immigration raids. It is about the redefinition of dissent as rebellion and the deployment of military force to enforce that fiction. For the first time in modern U.S. history, active-duty federal troops were sent into a state not to uphold civil rights or restore public safety, but to enforce domestic policy over the objection of state leaders. There was no invocation of the Insurrection Act. Instead, the Trump administration relied on a lesser-known statute, 10 U.S.C. §12406, and vague assertions of inherent executive power to federalize California’s National Guard and deploy 700 Marines across Los Angeles. Governor Gavin Newsom objected. The Pentagon bypassed him.
For the first time in modern U.S. history, active-duty federal troops were sent into a state not to uphold civil rights or restore public safety, but to enforce domestic policy over the objection of state leaders.
The White House framed the move as necessary to restore order. But there was no large-scale disorder. There were protests, including vigils outside detention centers, marches through working-class neighborhoods, and union leaders acting as legal observers. There were curfew violations and some scattered vandalism. But there was no insurrection. The destabilizing force was not public protest. It was the decision to respond to it with troops.
Defenders of the administration reached quickly for precedent, citing the Rodney King riots in 1992 and the civil rights showdowns of Little Rock and Selma. But these comparisons obscure more than they clarify. In 1992, California’s governor requested help after riots erupted. In 1957 and 1965, Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson used the military to enforce federal court orders and protect constitutional rights that states had refused to uphold. In all of those cases, the goal was the expansion of rights. In Los Angeles in 2025, troops were sent not to defend civil liberties but to suppress protest against their erosion.
If the domestic record fails to explain this moment, the international one does. In Beijing in 1989, peaceful student demonstrators were labeled counterrevolutionaries. Martial law was declared. Troops rolled in. Thousands were killed or disappeared. In the years since, the Chinese state has denied, distorted, and buried the events of Tiananmen Square. The repression was not only physical. It was historical. Dissent itself was erased.
In Paris in 1961, Algerian immigrants marched peacefully against a discriminatory curfew. Police responded with overwhelming violence. More than a hundred were killed, many beaten and dumped into the Seine. The government minimized the incident for decades, calling it a minor clash. Only in recent years has the truth surfaced, slowly and incompletely, with no accountability.
In Myanmar in 2017, a stateless Muslim minority, the Rohingya, was framed as a terrorist threat after a small-scale insurgent attack. The state launched what it called a clearance campaign. Entire villages were destroyed. More than 700,000 people were forced into exile. The military denied responsibility and described the operation as a legitimate anti-terror response. The world called it ethnic cleansing. The government called it counterinsurgency.
What these cases share is a structure. A marginalized population asserts its presence, through protest, through migration, through visibility. The state reframes that assertion as rebellion. Force follows. Then comes denial or strategic ambiguity, and often historical erasure. Violence becomes policy. Policy becomes precedent.
What happened in Los Angeles has not reached that level of brutality. But the logic is already in place. Peaceful resistance was framed as a rebellion. The deployment of troops was not a last resort. It was a political maneuver. The administration used the machinery of national defense to discipline domestic opposition, and to do so under legal theories that dissolve long-held constraints on federal power.
Critics may call this comparison alarmist. They argue that America is not China, not Myanmar, not an authoritarian regime. We have elections, courts, and a free press. But the danger is not that the United States has already crossed the threshold into authoritarianism. It is that we are normalizing the tools that allow such a shift to happen incrementally and under cover of law.
Authoritarianism does not begin with the mass suspension of rights. It begins with the narrowing of who those rights apply to. It begins with the quiet reclassification of dissent as danger. It begins with language: radicals, illegals, rebels. It begins with the claim that protest is disorder, and that order must be restored by force if necessary. And it gains ground not only through coercion, but through public fatigue. If the streets are quiet, if the media coverage fades, if the courts stall, the logic settles into the baseline of governance.
That is why this moment matters. The deployment in Los Angeles is not just provocative. It is precedent-setting. It redefines the legal thresholds for domestic military use. It challenges the role of states in checking federal authority. And it reframes protest against government action not as a civic right, but as a federal security risk.
We have seen, around the world, how easily protest can be recast as provocation. How immigrants, minorities, and political dissidents can be treated not as citizens, but as threats. How democratic states can adopt authoritarian tools, first in exceptional cases, then in ordinary ones.
We are not there yet. But we are closer than we think.
This is not just about Los Angeles. It is about whether a president can override a state to deploy troops in support of domestic policy. It is about whether dissent is still protected in practice, not just in principle. It is about whether the line between order and oppression has already begun to blur, and whether we will recognize it in time.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular