trump's Cabinet Preparing to Invoke Insurrection Act

The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act

An authoritarian’s dream, the Insurrection Act is ripe for abuse — and Trump’s Cabinet is already setting up his justification to use it.

teased a dangerous escalation on Monday afternoon, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces to U.S. cities, should pesky judges and state leaders continue to thwart his ambitions to assault and occupy blue states.

“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

His comments, though, make clear the shape of his authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to liberal American cities after a federal judge blocked him from sending troops to Portland, Oregon.

In his second term, Trump’s aides and advisers have been clearly setting up a justification for invoking the law — softening up MAGA adherents to accept yet another shockingly dictatorial move from the president.

It’s no accident, after all, that members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”

Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.

“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”