President Trump’s vaunted dispatching of troops into Washington, D.C., has managed to be both buffoonish and authoritarian. Thus far it has involved little more than handfuls of National Guard members standing around and taking selfies. And yet Trump has accompanied it with genuinely alarming threats: This week he openly described the deployment as a dry run for more cities, and on Wednesday, he made things even worse, suggesting that he has the authority to take control of the D.C. police indefinitely without Congress’s assent. (He doesn’t.)
But in this blending of autocracy and absurdity lies an opening for Democrats—and a new letter sent by top Democrats to the Pentagon hints at what this might look like.
The letter—signed by Representative Adam Smith and Senator Jack Reed, the ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees—calls on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to release internal communications involving discussions between the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security about the militarization of domestic law enforcement.
The letter is a response to The New Republic’s recent report on an internal DHS memo outlining top Homeland Security officials’ desire for the military to get much more involved in domestic enforcement operations. That memo, authored by Philip Hegseth—a senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem who also happens to be Defense Secretary Hegseth’s younger brother—was seen by national security experts as an alarming sign of Trump’s intent to further escalate this hyper-militarization.
“Public reports indicate that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is pushing senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials to increase operational coordination in law enforcement activities,” reads the letter, which TNR obtained. It warns that this “continues to erode the line between defense activities and law enforcement.”
The Defense Secretary surely will throw this letter in the garbage. But, as hopeless as the prospects for real congressional oversight look right now, Democrats should make it absolutely clear that if they capture the House (and the Senate) in next year’s midterm elections, it will mean relentless scrutiny of every aspect of Trump’s corrupt abuses of the military toward domestic political ends.
“It’s particularly alarming the way Trump is merging Homeland Security and DoD into his personal domestic police force,” Smith told me. “If Democrats take back the House, we will exercise aggressive oversight to stop him from taking over the military and using it for domestic enforcement.”
The letter from Smith and Reed also asks Defense Secretary Hegseth about a July 21 meeting that apparently took place between top DHS and Pentagon officials. As TNR reported, the DHS memo in question laid out the view of top DHS officials that the senior military leadership must be persuaded to get much more serious about their involvement in operations within the country, particularly on immigration.
For instance, the memo stated that operations like Trump’s dispatching of troops in cities like Los Angeles might be necessary “for years to come.” The memo also declared that “the U.S. military leadership” must be made to “feel” for “the first time” the “urgency” of defending the homeland, and that they “need to understand the threat.” Experts told TNR that this hints at pressure by DHS on the Pentagon to get much more involved in domestic enforcement, potentially coordinated by the Hegseth brothers.
All of which is exactly what Smith and Reed want to learn about.
“In the interest of transparency, please provide any DoD memos, guidance, or policy directives produced in connection with the DHS request for increased DoD participation in, and support for, DHS activities,” the two Democrats wrote to Defense Secretary Hegseth.
This comes as Trump’s threats just got worse. He has dispatched the D.C. National Guard (which he already controls as president) throughout the city, and has taken control of the D.C. police force. Trump has the authority to commandeer the Metropolitan Police Department for 30 days, but only for a declared federal purpose, and any longer requires congressional authorization.
Yet Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he doesn’t see this as binding. “If it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress,” he said.
As it happens, he can’t. “Trump has no authority to utilize the D.C. police for longer than 30 days without an intervening Act of Congress, no matter what real or contrived emergency he purports to invoke,” Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck told me.
Though Trump did say he will seek authorization from Congress, that remains to be seen—and regardless, it merely confirms that he envisions an indefinite presence. His stated rationale for this is pure propaganda—he keeps lying about data on crime in the District, which is substantially down—suggesting he sees this as a test run not just for takeovers in more cities, but also for his manufactured pretext for them. That context makes Trump’s declaration that he has near-unlimited power for extended operations in “emergencies” even more menacing.
Trump has now made his true intent unmistakable. “This will go further,” he told reporters this week, drawing a direct link between the D.C. operation and his intention to use the military in blue-state cities like New York, Baltimore, and Oakland.
All of which makes it more urgent that Democrats try to get to the bottom of what Homeland Security officials are envisioning in terms of future collaboration with the military.
As Smith and Reed wrote:
Americans do not need or want military personnel policing their streets. Using DoD resources for such activities diminishes the United States’ capacity to conduct defense activities and undermines public confidence in the Armed Forces as apolitical institutions.
All this can coexist with the thought that Trump’s military moves have a touch of absurdity to them. In the spirit of a recent suggestion from Brian Beutler, Democrats can ridicule Trump’s transparent desire to see us quake in fear of his watch-me-play-fascist-dictator-on-TV routine while also vowing to shine a light into every last nook and cranny of his manufactured pretexts and illegal abuses of power while doing so.
Congressional letters from the minority are often mocked for their inherent toothlessness. But there is a place for this kind of display. It can alert the public to ongoing transgressions, and it can let the executive branch know that members of Congress have become aware of—and are on the lookout for more of—a particular abuse.
These apparent talks between top DHS and Pentagon officials about future militarization of domestic enforcement badly need more scrutiny. Democrats should make it clear that if they are returned to power, they will deliver it, and no amount of Trumpian stonewalling will stand in their way.
