The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 18 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump’s threats to militarize law enforcement in U.S. cities are getting uglier and more unnerving. In a bizarre rant, Trump mocked the idea that anyone might see this as dictatorial behavior, then turned right around and lied about crime, showing critics are absolutely right to see it this way. Meanwhile, Republicans are all in with what Trump is doing. MAGA dimwit James Comer came right out and said the military emphatically should be used in cities going forward and again floated a series of silly lies about crime. All this comes as a new poll shows that none of this is working for Trump and might even be backfiring. We think one aspect of this isn’t getting enough attention: the degree to which Trump is using manufactured pretexts as his excuse for his hypermilitarization efforts. Legal commentator Joyce Vance has a good piece on her Substack Civil Discourse arguing that we should be alarmed by the pretextual nature of this in particular, so we’re talking to Joyce about all this today. Great to finally have you on, Joyce.
Joyce Vance: Thank you for being patient with me. My schedule has been messy for the last couple of months while I took on a big project, but I’ve been dying to get on with you. And I’m glad it’s today.
Sargent: Awesome. Well, we’re here now. So as everybody has seen, Trump has federalized the D.C. police and dispatched the National Guard into D.C. Trump is now saying he’s going to seek “long-term control” over the D.C. police. It’s a little unclear what’s going on with the deployment of the National Guard. In some cases, they’re just standing around taking selfies. In other accounts, they’re actually getting pretty active. Joyce, can you give listeners a very quick overview of what’s happening with Trump and D.C. and what it means?
Vance: Yeah. I think it’s important to have a sketch of the law in the District of Columbia. It’s very different from if Trump was trying to do this in a state—because D.C., not a state, is governed by home rule statutes that give Donald Trump more power in the district than he has elsewhere. And that happens in two ways. First, the National Guard. The president is always in charge of the D.C. National Guard. The guard is not one nationwide entity. Every state has its own. In D.C., the commander is Donald Trump. He can deploy them at will. And a very important difference is that in the states, he cannot use a fighting force for domestic law enforcement because of something called the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits it. In D.C., the Justice Department has for decades taken the position that Trump can use the guard for domestic law enforcement. So that’s number one.
Then there’s the police department in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago. Donald Trump can’t take over the police department because the Constitution and our laws very clearly and for a long time have reserved police powers to the state. In D.C., that’s different. Under the home rule statute, Trump can ask the mayor for the services of the police department if there’s an emergency, and she’s obligated to give those services to him for federal purposes for 30 days. After 30 days, he has to relinquish control unless Congress affirmatively acts to permit him to continue. The reality is we have a president who doesn’t respect the law, who’s always looking to punch holes in the authority and stretch it further than it goes. Here, he’s got the benefit in the district of a statute that’s written in a vague way, designed quite frankly for a president who is a good-faith actor to give him nimbleness to act in a true emergency. Because where you started, Greg, I think is the correct framing, right? This is all a lie built on a myth.
Donald Trump invoked claiming that there was a crime problem in the District of Columbia. And Justice Department statistics included.… At least the last time I looked at DOJ’s website—I wouldn’t be surprised if they purged this—those statistics say that crime in the District of Columbia is down. And that undercuts everything Trump is doing.
Sargent: So here’s what Trump himself said about all this the other day as well. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): We’re going to fight crime. That’s a good thing. Already they’re saying, He’s a dictator. The place is going to hell, and we’ve got to stop it. So instead of saying he’s a dictator, they should say we’re going to join him and make Washington safe. But they say he’s a dictator.
Sargent: So Joyce, he’s mocking the idea that people would be alarmed by what he’s doing, but he absolutely is consolidating power—doing this in other cities as well, like Los Angeles. And there again, in the same rant, he floats lies about crime as his pretext in a way that should, in fact, alarm us. Your thoughts?
Vance: Yeah, I think it is very alarming. The president of the United States should owe a duty of candor to citizens in this country. And the idea that he can just make it up as he goes along at the expense of the Constitution and the separation of powers and, perhaps most importantly here, the notion that we have a federal government—a system of federalism—where powers that aren’t explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states.… And the fact [is] that the Republican Party, which has stood for that principle for so many decades, defended it so fiercely against what they claimed was Democratic overreach, now just [appears] to be sitting around saying, Whatever, do whatever you want to do, Donald Trump. This is, I think, important to note. This is not the Republican Party that people grew up with.
Sargent: Yeah. And I want to get a little deeper into the point you just made there because I think what Trump is doing here is often described as a test run, a dry run for more. And it is that. He has said explicitly he’s going to do it in more cities; by sheer coincidence, the cities he always names are in blue states. It’s also a dry run for the use of pretexts for doing this. And I think that point is lost on some folks, [but] certainly not you. You wrote a very good piece about this. What he’s testing is the ability to make things up as the justification for authoritarian moves like this. Your thoughts on that?
Vance: Right. And we heard this in the opening comments. I heard just a little bit of the hearing that started at 2 p.m. EST today so I don’t know what happened after the first five minutes, but early on, the government floats the argument, Well, Judge, you can’t look behind his decision-making process. This isn’t the first case we’ve heard that in. We’ve heard that in deportation cases. We’ve heard it in impoundment cases. This notion of an all-powerful executive who is able to make discretionary decisions and no one can review them. And look, I want to push back hard on that. I think in many ways what they’re trying to do here is shift the Overton window and set the public up to believe in a more powerful presidency than the one that’s actually established by the founding fathers.
In the Federalist Papers, when Hamilton and Madison and Jay are writing, they are writing everything, including the new Constitution, in the context of the desire to no longer have a king. That’s the predicate for this entire country that we live in. No kings. Right? Indivisible wasn’t just making that up when they did the protest. That’s the foundation for the Constitution. But in essence, we now have a president who’s trying to restore that vision of president as king—and that is not what our law allows for.
Sargent: And the Republican Party is all in with Trump on this, not just the sending of troops into cities but also all in on the use of pretexts for it. Listen to what GOP representative James Comer had to say about this.
James Comer (audio voiceover): Car-jacking.… We had people mugging people at all hours of the day. And it’s all out of control so the president had to send in the National Guard. And I think that you’ve seen, just in the last 24 hours, huge decline in crime. And we’re going to support this, and we’re going to support doing this in other cities, if it works out in Washington, D.C. And again, it’s unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president’s doing.
Sargent: What’s funny there is he gives away Trump’s whole scam by accident. He says suddenly out of the blue, crime has vanished. But in fact, he’s just describing the actual state of things in D.C., which as you mentioned is that crime is significantly down. I’ve got to say though, it’s unnerving as hell that the Republican Party is now all in for both the hypermilitarization and this use of nonstop propaganda to justify it. Where’s this all going?
Vance: Yeah. The Republican Party, I think, sold its soul a long time ago. And look, the reality here is I’m a former U.S. attorney. I was a U.S. attorney for eight years during the Obama administration. I’m a career federal prosecutor. I’ve done a lot of work involving crime prevention. And what you don’t do if you’re serious about crime prevention is send in the military, which is not trained to do that kind of work. You don’t send in the National Guard, which drills, for instance, in crowd control but not in how you handle 14- and 15-year-olds, right? If you’re committed to reducing crime, then you follow data-driven best practices that tell us that community-based policing is the path forward. That’s what they’ve been doing in D.C. That’s why crime is down.
For instance, they’ve set up four nighttime curfew zones in D.C. this summer to tamp down on some of the gang problems that they were having. And that works really, really well. If they were committed to crime reduction, they would be funding those initiatives. And if the administration was sincere about its goal of crime reduction, we would see them claiming victory. But we’re not seeing that. We see them continuing to use the pretext of needing to engage in mass deportations of serious criminals to flood the streets with this police presence that’s intimidating, that’s masked. We saw that on Thursday at the press conference California Governor Gavin Newsom had where just not for nothing masked ICE agents show up. It’s hard to view this as anything other than a test balloon to see just how far this administration can go in violating democratic norms.
Sargent: Yes, I think there’s no question about it. There’s this new Pew poll I want to bring up. It finds Trump’s job approval at 38 percent with 60 percent disapproving. That’s abysmal. And it’s gotten some attention, but there’s a finding in here that hasn’t gotten attention. It’s this: 56 percent of Americans are not confident in Trump’s ability to effectively handle law enforcement and criminal justice. Only 44 percent are confident. That’s striking. This poll was taken while all this stuff has been unfolding in U.S. cities. I think it’s backfiring for Trump. They are absolutely convinced that the public will mindlessly, robotically march behind them if they just say, Crime, and, We have to send in the military and we’re going to bait Democrats into opposing it. But Americans don’t want the military roaming their streets. They understand the principles that I think you laid down earlier. This is not something that is going to be popular over time. I think it gets worse for Trump. What do you think?
Vance: I think the problem is whether Americans will wake up in time, right? There’s a breaking point, a tipping point past which Trump has normalized the use of law enforcement, maybe of military troops on American soil. It’ll require sign-off from the Supreme Court. It’s unclear what will happen when these issues reach them. These would seem to be clearly established legal principles that would prevent what Trump wants to do, but the court has gone there in the past. And so I don’t think that we have confidence about how the Supreme Court will rule on these issues. And it may be that Americans wake up only when it’s too late.
Sargent: Well, that actually gets to a dilemma that I wanted to ask you about. On the one hand, there’s a downside in acting too frightened of what Trump is doing because part of his game is to scare us and cause us all to think that politics is hopeless, that they’ve won. But on the other, there really is a slippery slope here. Even if some of these initial moves by the National Guard are toothless looking—the selfies and so forth, and there were reports that in Los Angeles they were just lying around for long periods of time—nonetheless, it is acclimating American voters to the presence of the military on U.S. streets, acclimating them to potentially illegal abuses of power, [and] really in a way, I guess, acclimating them to authoritarian rule, potentially. How do we navigate that odd tension?
Vance: Yeah. Look, democracy is a participatory sport. It’s something that we all have to be engaged in. I think the real problem here is that those of us who are paying attention understand the tension here and have begun to figure out for ourselves how we balance it. But the reality is that so many Americans either have continued to believe Trump’s lies or are people who, for whatever reason, have decided to tune out—maybe because they think it’s too much for them to handle or they think it doesn’t impact them personally. And that’s the real problem in this country: political apathy and the failure to understand that democracy isn’t just something we’re given. Democracy is something we have to continue to fight for in every generation. And look, our fight looks real different than past generations. We’re not fighting a war on a battlefield. We’re fighting a war on American soil in voting booths for Americans to wake up and see what Donald Trump is doing before it’s too late.
Sargent: Yeah, I just worry that on the one hand, there’s really this problem in getting too spooked. Do you know what I mean? They really—
Vance: I do know what you mean, and I think it’s a real concern, right? This notion.… Well, I’ll tell you. I had a conversation this morning with a friend, and we were talking about whether or not people should protest. And she articulated a concern that if there was, say, a general strike that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act and use that to put everything down and to, perhaps, take control in advance of the next election cycle. And I think that fear can become paralysis and keep us from acting. And yet, it’s also a realistic fear. Right? That could absolutely happen. And so I think the reality is the country needs to reach more of a uniform consensus. Unfortunately, that may require letting things get worse so that enough people wake up.
But you know, I just hear comments from people who either say, Oh, I can’t take it anymore, or, I’m just going to go on vacation out of the country for a month because I’m wealthy enough that none of these issues will impact me, or whatever it is that people say. I don’t mean to be dismissive—this is a difficult time to live through and people react in all different ways—but all of those people who are just ignoring things, we really need them to come back in the fold and care in a physical demonstrable way about this.
Sargent: And I guess we should underscore that Trump and Stephen Miller and some of the more overtly fascist and authoritarian advisers around Trump really do want people to tune out. They really are trying to acclimate American voters to this military presence, this authoritarian display. And that’s something we can’t let happen, is it?
Vance: I think that’s right. They’re absolutely counting on most Americans to sit back and let it all happen.
Sargent: Joyce Vance, harrowing stuff. Folks, if you enjoyed this discussion, please make sure to check out Joyce’s forthcoming book, Giving Up is Unforgivable, a manual for keeping a democracy. Joyce, it was really, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Vance: Thanks for having me.