Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
President Donald Trump teased a dangerous escalation on Monday afternoon, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces to U.S. cities, should pesky judges and state leaders continue to thwart his ambitions to assault and occupy blue states.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
His comments make clear the shape of Trump’s authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to American cities.
Trump noted that he did not see an immediate need to invoke the federal law. His comments, though, make clear the shape of his authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to liberal American cities after a federal judge blocked him from sending troops to Portland, Oregon.
Like so many of the Trump regime’s power grabs, the threat is both shocking and predictable.
He Badly Wants to Use It
Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is hardly new. He toyed with invoking the law in his first term.
He was itching to use it to send in the military to crush the 2020 George Floyd uprisings but faced opposition at the time from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. No such problem for the president with loyalist goon Pete Hegseth in the so-called secretary of war position.
And Trump allies called on the president to invoke the law to illegally hold onto power after the 2020 election. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to use the Insurrection Act to suppress unrest and dissent.
In his second term, Trump’s aides and advisers have been clearly setting up a justification for invoking the law — softening up MAGA adherents to accept yet another shockingly dictatorial move from the president.
It’s no accident, after all, that members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”
Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
Ripe for Abuse
Then there is the law itself,