In Defense of Confrontational Protesters
Nichols suggested that the greatest victory for Trump’s opponents would be for government forces to arrive with rifles in tow and find the streets empty, so that they would wonder why the president had sent them there. “This kind of restraint will deny Trump the political oxygen he’s trying to generate,” Nichols argued. The logic is confounding, to say the least: If only the protesters completely capitulate, then Trump will be humbled. It will appear as though there was civil unrest and violence before he sent in the military, and then peace in the immediate aftermath of him doing so, but somehow this will make Trump weaker?
Nichols’s Atlantic colleague David Frum seemed largely in concurrence, arguing that Trump’s actions in L.A. constitute, per the essay’s headline, a “dress rehearsal” for future deployments, when the president might use the military to challenge elections. Any perception of widespread disorder, Frum argued, could serve Trump’s purposes. “If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections,” Frum contended, “he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control.” The problem, though, is that Trump is already doing this: He issued an executive order in March outlining such a plan and providing justification for the trimming of voter rolls. If we don’t show that we’re willing to fight back, peacefully but forcefully, there may be no midterm—at least not a wholly legitimate one.
The pleas for protesters to be law-abiding—which have come not just from pundits, of course, but many elected Democrats too—may seem noncontroversial, but it’s the kind of preaching that inadvertently advances Trump’s narrative about chaos in the cities of Democratic-run states. It implicitly accepts the prevailing media narrative of violence and destruction, even though only a tiny fraction of protests, largely in one small pocket of Los Angeles, are responsible for the images being shown 24/7 on cable news.
It’s also a bit ironic given Trump’s very own lawlessness. He’s constantly pardoning MAGA members who’ve committed serious offenses, including the January 6 attackers; has suffered no true legal consequences for his own lawlessness; is, by any reasonable measure, the most corrupt president in history; and recently called on border czar Tom Homan to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom for allegedly obstructing federal immigration enforcement. Trump’s very sending in of the National Guard and Marines—now totaling 4,700 soldiers—likely violates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits using the military for general policing purposes. Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act, as he’s threatened to do in the past, but he’s forgotten about that one so far. (It would be outlandish to argue that the protests constitute an insurrection, but the letter of the law has never concerned him.)