IMMEDIATE RELEASE 15 August 2025WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUNDToday’s Events in Historical PerspectiveAmerica’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932The militarization of AmericaBy Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift WASHINGTON – We write as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and President Trump are meeting in Alaska in an effort to end the war in Ukraine. Against that backdrop and the bonhomie between the two men, we can almost hear Putin with tongue firmly in cheek, congratulating Trump on his deployment of troops to the streets of Los Angeles and the nation’s capital and masked ICE agents throughout the country – the irony being lost on Trump.True, America’s streets need to be made safer, but with police known in the community and carrying holstered pistols, not fatigue-clad soldiers carrying automatic weapons, fingers on triggers, ready to fire a spray of bullets.Our slogan should be more police on the beat on the street, especially in high-crime areas. President Bill Clinton ran on a platform promising 100,000 more cops – cops in uniform acting as a deterrent to criminals.What Trump is doing is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bans the military from acting within our borders except in emergencies. Long before the act, for example, President George Washington dispatched troops under Alexander Hamilton to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. They marched, and the rebels scattered.Today, like the boy who called wolf, Trump claims national emergencies as cover to do whatever he wants. He falsely claimed the United States is being invaded by terrorist elements who entered the country illegally.But who has the right to call an emergency? Trump says that as president, he alone has the right. The Constitution is not clear on this, and the courts have not ruled definitively one way or the other. Knowing Trump's outsized influence over the courts – from the record number of judges he appointed to a super majority of conservatives on the Supreme Court – there is no guarantee the courts will restrain his executive power.In fact, there is a good chance the Supreme Court could rule in his favor. If that happens, Katy Bar the Door. It would be a giant step toward autocracy.Crime is at a 30-year low in the District of Columbia. Granted, that is down from a significant spike in the nineties, when Clinton won the presidency, but Trump does not pay attention to the facts; he is acting on a feeling he is working hard to generate that crime is out of control, and only a strong man like him can fix itHe threatened in remarks to reporters that he is thinking of sending troops into Detroit and Chicago, cities in states governed by Democrats. He made no mention of deploying troops to, say, high-crime Memphis in Republican-controlled Tennessee.He also threatened to bypass Congress and extend the 30-day stay for the National Guard in D.C., which is pushing the edge of constitutionality.He wants to see how much he can get away with. Los Angeles was a test case, where he sent in the National Guard and Marines without the governor's consent, then soon began removing them, perhaps having considered the test a success.Likewise, if he is in and out of D.C. with his soldiers in 30 days, it will have been a ploy. If it is more than that, we are in dangerous territory.Trump has additional motivation. Alarm over militarizing American cities takes attention away from the Epstein papers, and the likelihood that Trump knows more than he has told us about those partying years. And anything that moves him closer to increasing presidential power is what he is all about.Had he amassed such power in 2020, the events of January 6 of that year would have turned out very differently, and Trump would not have relinquished the presidency. See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).Twitter: @douglas_cohn© 2024 U.S. News Syndicate, IncDistributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
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