After Friday and Monday’s Backchannels, full of the ominous progress of the Trump White House, we can see again today the dual nature of Trumpism, both predatory and absurd, methodical and feckless. The key to grappling with Trumpism is recognizing that both are simultaneously true and neither reality invalidates the other. Trump’s federalization of the DC Metro police is a case in point. The President can take control of the DC police for up to 48 hours. With notification of relevant committees of Congress, the president can maintain that control for an additional 30 days. After that he requires Congress’s authorization to continue to control the DC police.
Can Trump clean up the DC crime hellscape in 32 days? It seems unlikely. Will Congress allow him to continue past 32 days? Possibly. But by no means certainly. Trump’s margins remain razor thin and it’s the kind of issue where at least a few Republicans might refuse. Will the President remained focused on becoming the DC police chief and mayor or will the whole effort go by the wayside? Was any of it more than an excuse for a news-cycle-driving press conference?
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that the Pentagon is in the planning stages for a “rapid reaction force” of state National Guard troops in a constant state of readiness to be available to deploy in as little as one hour to whatever American city happens to be hellscaping at the given moment. The Post doesn’t publish the report on the plan, which it characterizes as “pre-decisional” (a very Pentagon diction). But they relay elements of it. From those tidbits it appears to be written by someone whose subtext might best to summarized as “this is probably not a good idea.” It notes that it’s probably bad for retention and morale of the state National Guards since most Guardsmen don’t relish being deployed against American civilians. They also don’t like the constant pace of deployments that goes with having hundreds locked down on military bases in Arizona and Alabama for 90 days at a time, which is required in order to be able to deploy to hellscaping cities in as little as one hour.
Then there’s the expense. Such a rapid mandated turnaround time for deployment requires vehicles, planes and all the hardware required for such deployments to be in a constant state of inspection and readiness. That costs a lot of money. (The report then notes that it might be cheaper and wiser, if admittedly much less cool, to book flights on American and Southwest airlines. Low energy, yes. But that’s what the report appears to recommend.)
Then there’s what the report refers to obliquely as the political “friction” created by the whole effort as well as potential legal difficulties involved in deploying Guard from one state to another absent permission, what we might call the backdrop “what the fuck” factor that haunts the whole endeavor.
Of course the whole reason you’re using the National Guard, a part-time force, to do this deeply full-time mission (basically a domestic 82nd Airborne) is because there is a mountain of law and regulation against deploying the regular military against U.S. civilians or on American soil. You can do it, to a degree, under certain conditions and restrictions. But it’s much more complicated and frequently runs into cases and uses that are plainly illegal.
This half-cocked workaround captures most of what is happening in round two of Trumpism. They are actively trying to subvert the Constitution and the federal state. They routinely try to do things they are not allowed to do. To get as close as possible to doing so usually involves both breaking laws as well as doing things in highly inefficient ways, even ways that might amount to not doing them at all save for a high octane roll out. Both realities are true simultaneously. Neither invalidates the other.
These things are feckless, incomplete, much less than they seem in many cases. And yet they come at a sufficient pace that even incomplete they leave small assertions of degenerate illegal power, along with pathways and mechanisms to assert it. And these new pathways, new organizations and mechanics build on each other over time.