Former President Donald Trump and his allies have hinted that they will deploy the military in American cities in a second term to quell domestic unrest, and experts who spoke with the Associated Press expressed alarm about what that could mean for American democracy.
At the heart of these plans is the Insurrection Act, which gives the president broad powers to deploy the military to put down violent domestic uprisings.
While all presidents have had this power for literal centuries, there has been a taboo against using it that only Trump appears intent on breaking.
“The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,” Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the AP. “There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.”
Former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark reportedly floated invoking the Insurrection Act back in late 2020 when Trump was working to illegally cling to power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
However, these plans never got a chance to go into effect because then-Vice President Mike Pence refused the president's demands to block the certification of the election.
Should Trump win a second term, however, there would be little to stop him from going through with such an action, particularly if he and his allies are successful at dislodging career Pentagon officials who would be resistant to following his orders.
