Trump's National Guard Deployment

I was part of an exercise for this exact eventuality

In February of 2024, I flew out to Palo Alto to participate in a one-day tabletop exercise in the event that Donald Trump won the 24’ election. The exercise brought together Never-Trumpers, National Security experts, and administrators from the first Trump term to discuss a fictional crisis scenario provided by a UCLA professor with extensive experience designing decision scenarios for government and business leaders. The point of the exercise was to consider anti-authoritarian options for a hypothetical Trumpian use of military power, domestically.

Note the ever-present, deliberate, and cowardly masks for these agents of State power.

This was the scenario: Trump is in office. A migrant family is killed along New Mexico southern border. The killing is caught on tape and goes viral. Domestic extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front join with anonymous local militias to “defend the border.” The Democratic Governor of New Mexico is at odds with Trump’s desire to send federal troops into his state for this crisis.

Sound eerily familiar?

The drill was covered by Elliot Ackerman of The Atlantic. He was not impressed (full disclosure, I fought alongside Elliot in the Second Battle of Fallujah and consider him a friend). Ackerman thought the drill ill-conceived, and the subtext of his article was that it was bed-wetting and hand-wringing over an unlikely event which, if the shoe were on the other foot and MAGA was game planning Constitutional overreach, would be viewed, perhaps rightly, as disloyal to the nation.

But it was pretty obvious to me that something close to the drill would come to pass, at some point. We are now here. With Donald Trump ordering the National Guard and putting US Marines on alert to march into Los Angeles to suppress protests surrounding immigration round ups, we have come to the moment we easily foresaw and, as Miles Taylor (a participant in the exercise) told us that day, Donald Trump had tried to manufacture in his first term three separate times!

Trump and his administration hard-liners have wanted this confrontation for years, and the events in Los Angeles are going to appear quaint if this crisis escalates. Trump, who lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the Constitutional parameters surrounding domestic protest, is now no longer hindered as he was in the first term. His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, in addition to his crippling bad judgement (Signalgate), is eager to deploy federal troops against the American populace.

The first thing he did as SECDEF was to fire all the JAGs. There’s no one left at DOD to say “no.”

So here we are. American troops are being sent to crush a protest in an American city by American citizens. I don’t know where we go from here, but the potential for escalation and the potential for serious injury and death is not hypothetical any longer. It has come.

We saw it coming over a year ago, and it sent shivers down our spines. They saw it coming, too, and have been waiting for this moment. So here were three of my key takeaways from the drill:

1. Chaos is their friend, not ours. The federal government, in a crisis like this, can move fast. Faster than the domestic opposition. The spin machine will work overtime to hype up any reports of chaos as a justification for the use of force. That doesn’t mean protest will not work, but a peaceful general strike presents great optics for the small-d democrats, mask-wearing looters do not.

2. It’s the economy, stupid. Trump’s Achilles will always be the economy, and the quickest way for him to back down is when there exists a real threat to shareholders and especially CEO’s of large companies. This is an exploitable weakness we’ve already seen cause real MAGA course corrections (Elon Musk).

3. Public opinion will determine who “wins” in this confrontation, and whether our democracy continues. The audience is not MAGA. The audience is the constituents of members of Congress who will call their Senator when they see American blood spilled in the streets. The audience is on college campuses. The audience is industries that employ immigrants.

This is a challenging time, and the power of the federal government is awesome. But it is not hopeless. For example, if 5% of airline pilots walk off the job, the economy stops. There are cards to play. The time is fast approaching when they will need to be played.