On August 25, Trump ordered the Pentagon to create National Guard units across the country to put a check on civil protests and “ensure public safety.” The units have been described as a “rapid reaction force.”
Trump specifically ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to prepare some Army and Air National Guard members to deploy on short notice to aid federal, state, and local law enforcement “in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under the law.”
In a dramatic expansion of the National Guard’s role in enforcing domestic laws, and a potential illegal violation of America’s civil-military separation, especially as it pertains to law enforcement, Hegseth was also ordered to establish a “specialized unit” within Washington DC’s National Guard “that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s Capitol.” The members of this unit will be “deputized” to enforce federal law.
While there are exceptions to Posse Comitatus, which prohibits the military from serving as a domestic law enforcement body, such as civil crises, Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to Washington DC and Los Angeles did not meet the emergency requirements.
According to Major General Randy Manner, Trump’s exceptional utilization of the National Guard serves to desensitize Americans to militarized policing. Trump may have developed a focus on this to further cover up the Epstein files crisis, which has been crowded out of the media, partly due to stories relating to the National Guard’s deployment to Washington DC.
