Stop Kidding Yourself. The Insurrection Act Is Coming

When Donald Trump threatens to use the Insurrection Act as a justification to subjugate blue states, his critics are quick to point out that the law hasn’t been used in more than three decades and never for anything as trivial as the current anti-ICE protests.

While that may be true, there also has never been a fascist in the Oval Office, so all of that hand-wringing and pearl-clutching isn’t going to help.

Here is the reality: Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act this year. Maybe it won’t be today or next week, and maybe it won’t be in Minnesota. But there is nothing that suggests that the president will show restraint when it comes to using a tool that moves him closer than ever to become the absolute ruler he craves to be.

That is especially true because he has clearly developed an appetite for deploying or threatening to deploy the military.

For a malignant narcissist and wannabe dictator, the only thing that may be more alluring than playing God; deciding who lives and who dies; and taking over cities, states, or entire countries as though they were territories in the board game “Risk” may be the ability to get away with any crime.

And, to ensure that he can do the latter, he may have to do the former to ensure that Democrats don’t win the midterm elections.

The Insurrection Act will be one of the tools Trump can use to achieve that goal while also allowing him to punish his enemies, i.e., people who oppose him and states that didn’t vote for him.

Therefore — and this bears repeating — it’s going to happen.

And here is how: There is either going to be a flimsy pretext to send the military to some state a Democrat controls — most likely Minnesota, Illinois, or California because he hates their governors for mocking him and resisting — or his federal goons will terrorize a community to the point that it actually does fight back.

So, the question isn’t whether the Insurrection Act will be invoked but rather what the opposition will do about it.

Right now, Democratic governors should examine every tool at their disposal and coordinate a response among themselves… and that means more than having statements and lawsuits ready.

Granted, they don’t have a lot of leverage, but one of them is money. The three aforementioned states, for example, contribute a lot more money to the federal government than they get back, something that is also true for several other blue states.

So, one strategy could be for Democratic governors to stop sending tax revenue to a federal government that terrorizes and occupies them.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress should also have a good idea already of what they will do once Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, and it better be more than holding press conferences.

One thing they should do is to talk to the few (somewhat) reasonable Republicans left in Washington, DC. There are plenty of them who don’t want to see a situation like in Minneapolis escalate, especially not when the GOP will end up getting blamed for it.

And that brings us to perhaps the most potent weapon Democrats can deploy: Public opinion and the power of the people.

Trump’s dictatorial ambition is anti-American, and the people don’t like it.

By a wide margin, they think that ICE is making US cities less safe, and they believe the killing of a Minnesota mom was unjustified.

There has to be a strategy to harness their discontent, especially if and when adding the military to the mix results in more violence directed at Americans, and all options have to be on the table in that case, from mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience to general strikes.

Finally, Americans from all walks of life will have to start thinking about what they are prepared to do to defend their country from a dictator, and we don’t mean by taking up arms.

Of course, members of the military also have to figure out how they will respond if they are asked to attack fellow Americans, and officers have to determine whether they are willing to pass along illegal orders.

Right now, somebody in the White House is plotting how to take the next step toward American fascism, and Trump is more likely to succeed if the country’s pro-democracy forces aren’t already drawing up plans on how to respond.