Inside Trump's plan to have red attack blue states — using a 200-year-old law

The direction we’re going is either martial law or civil war.

Americans from so-called “red” states, with the backing of their Republican governors and legislatures, are on the brink of using lethal force against Americans in so-called “blue” states, whose Democratic governors and legislatures strongly oppose the moves.

I pray we don’t come close to this, but Trump has now ordered the deployment of 400 members of the Texas National Guard to several states, including Oregon and Illinois — ostensibly to protect ICE agents and facilities from protesters. The first group of Texas Guard troops is expected to arrive in Chicago tomorrow.

The troops are under the control of the Pentagon, with Trump as commander-in-chief. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “the orders will be effective immediately for an initial period of 60 days.”

Less than an hour after Trump’s order, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, responded that he “fully authorize[s]” such a move by Trump. “You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it,” Abbott said in a post on X.

The Democratic governors of Oregon and Illinois have sought emergency injunctions against these and similar deployments.

Late Sunday night, a federal judge in Oregon (appointed by Trump) temporarily blocked the mobilization of any state National Guards to that state. Today, a federal judge in Illinois declined to block the deployment of National Guard units there.

Yesterday Trump said he was considering invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807. That act would allow him to deploy troops despite any court orders stopping him.

“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump said, adding, “I’d do that if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

What is Trump’s plan? What is the troika behind him (Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Russell Vought) seeking to accomplish, and how?

Sad to say, I believe Trump and his enablers have worked this out in advance. At the Pentagon on September 30, Trump pitched the plan to use American soldiers for the purpose of punishing his political enemies.

He told hundreds of United States military leaders that they must prioritize “defending the homeland” against the “invasion from within” in American cities run by “radical-left Democrats.” He stated his intention is to use certain cities “as training grounds for our military.”

The first step has been for the Department of Homeland Security to deploy ICE agents to use aggressive tactics in targeted cities.

ICE has sent masked and armed federal agents into cities with Democratic mayors to do the following:

• Arrest and detain people outside immigration courtrooms.
• Fire tear gas and chemical munitions on city streets without warning.
• Raid homes and apartments in the middle of the night and arrest their occupants willy-nilly, including Americans, people legally in the country, and children.
• Use racial profiling to stop anyone looking Latino and demand proof of citizenship without warrants.
• Detain people they believe are here illegally, and do so without due process.

The second step is for such aggressive tactics to provoke demonstrations, and for Trump to exaggerate the scale and severity of them.

Trump has described Portland as a “war-ravaged” city “burning to the ground” with “insurrectionists all over the place.” In fact, demonstrations there had been muted and rarely expanded beyond a one-block radius of the immigration detention facility in the city.

On September 6, Trump posted on social media an image of the Chicago skyline in flames with the words “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” and a depiction of himself in the image of the fictitious warmonger character Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now,” titling the post “Chipocalypse Now.”

Yesterday, he described Chicago as a crime-ridden “war zone.”

The third step is for Trump and Hegseth to deploy federalized National Guard troops to control the demonstrators, an act that’s already enflaming the public and provoking some actual violence.

Until Trump’s announcement that he was sending troops into Portland, protests rarely numbered more than two dozen people. Since his announcement, clashes have become more violent.

The fourth step will be for Trump and Hegseth to invoke the Insurrection Act.

He said as much today. The Insurrection Act empowers a president to deploy the U.S. military and to federalize the National Guard units of the individual states to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or armed rebellion against the federal government of the United States.

It is a statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits the president’s power to deploy the U.S. military within the United States.

The Insurrection Act requires that after invoking it but before exercising its powers, a president must formally order the dispersion of people committing civil unrest or armed rebellion.

The major clause of the Insurrection Act reads:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws, either of the United States, or of any individual state or territory, where it is lawful for the President of the United States to call forth the militia for the purpose of suppressing such insurrection, or of causing the laws to be duly executed, it shall be lawful for him to employ, for the same purposes, such part of the land or naval force of the United States, as shall be judged necessary, having first observed all the pre-requisites of the law in that respect.

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As I said, I hope we don’t come near to this. I hope the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, stop Trump’s plan. But I believe it is Trump’s plan (the details of which have been worked out by the troika of Vance, Miller, and Vought), and they are implementing it as quickly as they can.

I don’t want to unduly alarm you, but you need to be aware of this imminent danger. It’s unfolding very rapidly.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/