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Trump’s Pieces Falling in Place to Impose Nationwide Martial Law

First, they eliminate the right to habeus corpus, then they invoke the Insurrection Act and then martial law.

Trump is clearly trying to provoke a great national crisis as an excuse to order martial law, ignore the courts and suspend elections. As usual, he is using scapegoating and fearmongering as his principal weapons.

Trump has declared eight national emergencies and invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deny due process rights to undocumented immigrants. He has spoken with his sycophants about claiming that left wing protests are a reason to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to use American troops to deal with a “rebellion” within the United States.

Recently, trump’s anti-immigrant hit man, Stephen Miller, offered misleading comments about suspending habeas corpus for undocumented immigrants.

“The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended at a time of invasion,” said Miller. “So I would say that’s an action we’re actively looking at.”

Scholars say there are enough constitutional safeguards to block any of the three radical pronouncements, but trump has stretched and undermined the constitution so far that it could ultimately just disappear so that he could disband the constitution and declare martial law, allowing him to order the military to police the nation.

In October, trump said “radical left lunatics” in the U.S. “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” In June 2020 during nationwide protests after the murder of George Floyd, trump said if governors didn’t deploy the National Guard to sufficiently “dominate the streets,” he would order the military to “quickly solve the problem for them.”

The U.S. imposed martial law in Hawaii for three years after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. President Abraham Lincoln also declared martial law in certain parts of the U.S. during the Civil War. After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson restored civilian law.

Among the safeguards against martial law is an 1866, Supreme Court ruling that martial law cannot be imposed where civil courts are open and functioning. In any event, the president would have to get congressional approval to use the military. But then again, he has refused to gain required congressional approval to withhold funding for congressionally-approved programs.

Fears of possible imposition of martial law began to grow after trump signed an executive order on Inauguration Day that directed the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to submit a report by April 20 assessing the situation at the southern border and recommending whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 for purposes of border enforcement.

The online world saw an explosion of rumors that trump planned to order martial law, using the Jan. 20 executive order as cover.

Fact checking by Newsweek concluded that unfounded social media claims about martial law were conflated with the April 20 deadline on plans to enforce the southern border.

The Insurrection Act grants the president authority to deploy U.S. military or National Guard forces domestically in response to rebellions, civil unrest, or obstruction of federal law. It was invoked by Lincoln during the Civil War, by President Ulysses S. Grant against the Ku Klux Klan, and more recently by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.

Martial law suspends civil liberties including for citizens and places military authority above civilian rule. Under martial law, constitutional rights such as freedom of assembly, speech, and due process may be suspended, and civilian courts can be replaced by military tribunals.

Revising History

The adage is that history is written by the victors and that historical revisionism is as old as history. But it has reached a new and frightening level with the advent of social networks, adroitly manipulated by trump and his supporters.

Historical revisionism has long been used to stir up support for government activities and opposition to declared enemies. In the U.S., it included the denial of murderous treatment of native Americans by Christopher Columbus and the European colonization of the Americas. After the Civil War, revisionists pushed the so-called “lost cause” narrative that portrays the Confederacy cause as noble and just and that the war was fought over states’ rights while it downplays the role of slavery.

Trump has consistently fueled white grievance and the anger of white Christians toward people of color, immigrants, universities and the LGBTQ community. He has downplayed the threat of white supremacists and ordered an end to “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government. He also has targeted such national institutions as the Smithsonian Institution for supposedly focusing on the negatives of American history and not the positives.

And recently he welcomed white South Africans to the nation who had claimed they were victims of attempted genocide by the government since the end of apartheid.

Trump already has declared several national emergencies. He invoked emergency powers to battle what he claims to be an invasion of undocumented immigrants along the southern border. In another, he used emergency powers to permit him to levy massive tariffs on imported goods.

More recently, trump dispatched thousands of active-duty troops to the U.S. southern border, some with 20-ton Stryker combat vehicles. More recently, the administration also has approved a plan to have the Defense Department take control of a 60-foot wide strip of land that spans much of the southern border, effectively turning it into a satellite military installation and allowing troops to take a more active role in searching for illegal border crossers.

Trump supporters call such forewarnings as alarmist, paranoid examples of the Democrats’ opposition to anything trump, otherwise known as trump derangement syndrome. But trump has exploded so many guardrails and violated so many laws and traditions, that nothing should be excused as trump derangement syndrome.

Trump’s relentless efforts to rewrite history, particularly African American history, is part of an overall effort to incite the populace to demand martial law. The latest proof comes in the backlash and right-wing campaign to rewrite the facts around the murder of African American George Floyd as any of a number of disproved beliefs, including that Floyd died of natural causes and was not murdered on May 25, 2020, by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Some accounts claim that Floyd did not die because he was pinned down but from a drug overdose, heart disease or a rare type of tumor.

Soon after Floyd’s death, a YouTube video backed by the conspiracy group QAnon claimed the entire incident had been faked by the deep state, and that Floyd was still alive. Social media posts alleged that George Soros, the billionaire supporter of Democratic causes and target of anti-Semitic hatred, was secretly funding the protests.

As signs of the backlash, trump ordered removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over.

The right-wing response has led to trump’s prohibition of the diversity, equity and inclusion programs and to end many restrictions on police activities. Most recently, trump abandoned federal consent decrees reached with the Minneapolis Police Department toward creating real change in training and hiring practices. Attorney General Pam Bondi also called a halt to federal investigations or oversight of nearly two dozen police departments with records of egregious misconduct.

Meanwhile, people of color continue to be victims of violence and prosecution across the country. In 2024, police killed Black people at three times the rate they killed white people. And in 2015, just 18 police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter after shooting someone while on duty. In 2024, in the wake of Floyd’s killing, just 16 officers were charged.

On May 25, 2020, Floyd was arrested after a store clerk alleged that he made a purchase using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the course of the arrest, Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the street and calling out “I can’t breathe.” Chauvin killed Floyd by suffocating him to death. The murder set off a series of protests in Minneapolis, across the United States, and around the world, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Chauvin was charged and convicted on state charges of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter and of a federal charge of violating Floyd’s constitutional rights.

Chauvin was sentenced to 22+1⁄2 years in prison. The Minnesota Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court both denied requests for a review of the case. But a rising number of conservative, right wing voices have called for trump to pardon Chauvin of the federal charges. If the federal charges were pardoned, Chauvin would still be confined on the state charges and the earliest he could be eligible for release on parole would be in 2035 or 2036, when he will be nearly 60 years old.

Trump has said through a spokeswoman that he has no plans “at this time” to pardon Chauvin, in the same way that he granted clemency on the first day of his second term to more than 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the Jan. 6, 2021, violent insurrection at the Capitol by trump supporters. Trump and supporters have fueled a continuing drumbeat of misinformation that the Jan. 6 riot was merely tourism and that the violence was instigated by the FBI and the deep state in an effort to deny trump the 2020 election victory that was won by President Joe Biden.

Emergency Powers

Emergency powers broadly refer to the authority given to the executive branch to act outside the traditional bounds of their authority in order to react to a danger that normal channels for approval could not address. The most important emergency powers are those given to the President through the National Emergencies Act which enables the President to unilaterally declare a national emergency which allows the use of a series of measures such as deploying troops or cutting off telecommunication in the country. There are more than 120 statutory provisions that may be used by the President during a national emergency.

The Act requires the President to publicly state the reasoning for the emergency and inform Congress periodically on any costs resulting from the national emergency.

Trump and other Presidents have claimed emergency powers during crisis throughout U.S. history. President Abraham Lincoln used emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus without Congressional approval in 1861. Lincoln claimed that the Confederate rebellion created an emergency that permitted him the extraordinary power of unilaterally suspending the writ which requires the government to file public charges before arresting anyone. The District Court of Maryland struck down the suspension, but Lincoln ignored the order.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked emergency powers when he issued Executive Order 9066 directing that all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast be placed into internment camps during World War II. Because Congress had already declared war, the Supreme Court found Congress to have recognized an ongoing emergency.

President Harry Truman used emergency powers to enforce Executive Order 10340 when he seized private steel mills that failed to produce steel because of a labor strike in 1952. With the Korean War ongoing, Truman claimed that he could not wage war successfully if the economy failed to provide him with the material resources necessary to keep the troops well-equipped. The Supreme Court rejected the argument, voting 6–3 that neither presidential powers nor any claimed emergency powers gave the President the authority to unilaterally seize private property without Congressional authority.

Trump also is not the first president to cite the National Emergencies Act. Ronald Reagan did it six times, including to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Bill Clinton used it 18 times to stop Iran from enriching uranium and thwart Middle Eastern terrorism. George W. Bush declared 14 emergencies against specific foreign entities related to terrorism as did Barack Obama.

In his first administration, trump used the act to bypass Congress in the construction of a Southern border wall. Biden used emergency powers to apply them to his plan for student loan debt relief in the wake of Covid.