Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
‘Dangerous Cities,’ the Military, Trump and the Founding Fathers
The U.S. armed services have long sought to preserve the tradition of a nonpartisan military.
In the middle of Tuesday’s rambling speech at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, President Trump told hundreds of the country’s military commanders his latest thinking on where they should next set their sights.
Not Poland, or Romania, or Estonia or Denmark, all NATO allies where Russian drones have in the past month violated airspace in a challenge to the alliance’s borders.
The president chose San Francisco. Chicago. New York. Los Angeles.
“We’re going to straighten that out one by one, and this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Mr. Trump told the generals, admirals and enlisted leaders, referring to what he has described as crime-filled urban hellscapes.
“It’s a war from within,” he said.
In that moment, the president again pitted himself against the wishes of the country’s founding fathers, historians and former military leaders say.
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” is in tension with a core principle that the country’s armed services have long sought to preserve — that the military should be nonpartisan.
This principle, with its deep roots in American democratic traditions, is meant to ensure that the standing army initially feared by the country’s founding fathers serves the nation as a whole, and not one political party or leader.
That military was meant to be directed at foreign enemies, not the “enemy from within,” as Mr. Trump said on Tuesday.
‘A Fraught Moment’
Mr. Trump has tried this before.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper and the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. Joseph Dunford, tried to prevent the president from using the military domestically to further his political agenda.
When Mr. Trump demanded a deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 military troops to fend off what he called a migrant “invasion” at the southwest border, Mr. Mattis responded by sending 6,000 National Guardsmen, and told them to make sure to stick to support roles and to steer clear of migrants.
When Mr. Trump wanted to send the 82nd Airborne onto the country’s streets during social justice protests, Mr. Esper called a news conference to announce his opposition, for which he was eventually fired.
Those men are now gone, and the men Mr. Trump has installed in their place in his second term have either amplified his wishes or bowed to them.
Gone too is the congressional opposition that blocked Mr. Trump during his first term. Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and have acquiesced to all of Mr. Trump’s directives and appointments that relate to the American military.
The result: National Guard troops deployed in Washington against the wishes of the city’s elected leaders. Active-duty Marines sent to Los Angeles over the protests of the mayor and governor. Books by writers of color, including Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” banned from the library at the U.S. Naval Academy. A Pentagon leadership that refuses to promote decorated combat soldiers who served under men Mr. Trump dislikes. A plan to use military lawyers, known as JAGs, as immigration judges. And Mr. Trump’s promises to send National Guard troops to more American cities.
“We genuinely are at a fraught moment,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
In her upcoming book, “The State and the Soldier,” Ms. Schake argues that after navigating more than two centuries of changing political winds, the American military is being challenged in ways that could redefine it.
Deploying troops inside the country as an arm of law enforcement is not what the founding fathers wanted, military historians say. They feared that the government could use a standing army to suppress dissent and establish tyranny.
Over 250 years, American political and military leaders built what is widely viewed as the world’s most competent fighting force. Its 1.3 million active-duty troops and 765,000 reserve and National Guard troops have answered to civilian leaders, whether Democrat of Republican, saluting whomever the American people elected as president.
But now the military, which has long prized its nonpartisan role in society, has a commander in chief who is not only breaking that tradition, but also targeting domestic, instead of foreign, threats.
“If I was the leader of the Polish military, and we’re getting Russian incursions into NATO territory, and I saw 800 American generals and admirals sitting in an auditorium listening to that speech, well, that would grate,” said Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, an Iraq war veteran who is retired. “Is the American military serious?”
A Tradition Rises
The Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law, generally bars active-duty forces from providing domestic law enforcement.
Essentially, it holds that the military should be pointed outward and not inward.
But its origins were less laudable. Congress passed the act to placate white supremacists in the South who didn’t want the military blocking state and local Jim Crow-era segregation laws.
The period after the Civil War was hugely tumultuous. The American government won the Civil War, but in many ways it lost the years that followed to white supremacists, who stripped Black Americans in the Southern states of their newfound rights.
The Southern states didn’t want federal troops coming in to protect Black people. Weary of the battle, and in an effort to appease the those states, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act.
Cleareyed Realists
The framers of the American Constitution were students of history, heavily shaped by the English Civil War, in which King Charles I asserted the divine right of kings, tried to rule without Parliament, and used his army against his own people.
The framers also were heavily influenced by the British military’s occupation of the colonies.
They were cleareyed about what they considered the biggest potential danger: that a standing army could be turned against the people it was supposed to protect.
But they were also realists and acknowledged the need for a military to defend the country.
“The continual necessity for his services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers. “The military state becomes elevated above the civil.”
America got its army, but the constitutional framers gave Congress, not the president, the power to raise and fund it. And they gave the Senate, through the “advice and consent” clause, the power to approve or reject the people appointed by the president to lead the military.
The founding fathers “took great pains to try and divide power, and to give so much of it to Congress,” said Carrie A. Lee, the former chair of the department of national security and strategy at the Army War College.
The framers, she and other historians said, sought to balance power between the two branches for a less partisan approach.
They may not have anticipated a Congress that would not use the power given to it.
To be sure, American history is full of examples of presidents using the military for domestic purposes.
President Dwight Eisenhower did in 1957, when he sent the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., where state National Guard troops were keeping nine Black students from entering school under the orders of the segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus.
President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized National Guard troops in Alabama in 1965 to protect civil rights activists marching for voting rights after state and local police attacked previous marchers with billy clubs and tear gas.
In both cases, the presidents used the deployments to enforce the law. For Mr. Eisenhower, it was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education. For Mr. Johnson, it was the Civil Rights Act, which legally ended segregation in public accommodations, employment and federally funded programs, and was the forerunner to the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress a few months later.
Mr. Trump argues that the National Guard is needed to help federal forces crack down on crime.
But those earlier instances were during periods of intense civil difficulty and danger — specific crises that precipitated the deployment of troops.
By contrast, Mr. Trump is ordering National Guard troops to cities that are not experiencing widespread civil disturbance, said Peter Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University who has studied the military for decades.
“Since there is not the generalized breakdown in civil order, or a global crisis, that makes a nonpartisan case harder to make, and we’re left with the partisan interpretation,” he said. “And that is toxic for military professionalism because they do not want to be deployed in narrow partisan missions.”
A Defining Crisis
A crisis came just after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was a moment that led to what became a fundamental military norm: While you are in service you do not serve a political party, you serve the law of the land.
In Congress, Lincoln’s Republican Party sought to expand basic rights to the former slaves.
Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, requiring each state to pass the 14th Amendment. This was a direct message to still-rebellious Southern states that they would be considered only “military districts” unless they gave former slaves citizenship status.
But President Andrew Johnson, who was hostile toward former slaves and in favor of more lenient policies toward the Southern states, vetoed the act.
Congress overrode his veto.
Johnson worried that Ulysses S. Grant — the country’s most senior general, a man who was credited with winning the Civil War — would side with Congress. Grant was wildly more popular than Johnson.
Johnson tried to send him on a diplomatic mission to Mexico. In a testy cabinet meeting, Grant refused to go, arguing that as a military officer, he carried out only military orders from the president.
Johnson asked the attorney general for a ruling on the constitutionality of Grant’s refusing a direct order. The attorney general supported Grant’s position.
With Johnson and Congress on a collision course, Grant was called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, which was considering impeaching Johnson.
At its heart, this was a crisis over constitutional power, and Grant sided with Congress.
“When forced, he made the most democratic choice on the most fundamental issue, which is that, in peacetime, it is the Congress’s authority that is supreme in matters of military policy,” Ms. Schake said in an interview.
For his part, Grant also worried that Johnson was becoming authoritarian, writing that “we are fast approaching the point where he will want to declare the body (Congress) illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary.”
The significance of Grant’s break with Johnson lies in his interpretation of the limits on presidential authority over the military: While you are in service you do not serve a political party, you serve the law of the land.
Military policy and norms evolved from Grant’s example. The military discourages political rallies in front of troops, and those on active duty are urged to avoid partisan politics. Political affiliation is not supposed to be a factor in the vetting of senior officers.
Many military leaders say one big reason the American public regards its military so highly is that troops are usually not seen as advancing political agendas.
Using the military in partisan domestic matters “detracts from much-needed focus on 21st century warfighting challenges,” said Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., a retired deputy judge advocate general in the military. “China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and others aren’t going to be deterred by battalions of immigration judges or troops who are occupied by immigration duties on city streets instead of the harsh environs of the National Training Center preparing to fight a peer competitor in high-intensity combat.”
At the gathering on Tuesday, Mr. Trump looked into the crowd of military commanders and spoke about his vision for the future.
“You’ll never see four years like we had with Biden and that group of incompetent people that ran this country that should have never been there,” Mr. Trump said.
“With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom.”
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
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