10th September 2025
The Speaker of the House of Representative Mike Johnson yesterday told elected civil politicians to “yield” to military force.
A video of the remarks can be seen here.
President Donald Trump is already using ICE and the National Guard like two personal armies.
And Congress and the Courts are nodding along with rather than checking and balancing each abuse of executive power.
There are of course lots of dark moments, lots of points of concern.
Yet the Speaker telling elected civil politicians to “yield” to the domestic use of military force is especially significant.
In both the United States and the United Kingdom, a good deal of our constitutional traditions were borne out of restricting what the executive could do domestically with military force.
The question of who controls “legitimate” coercive and lethal power is perhaps the most fundamental issue in any constitutional politics.
(By “legitimate” is meant that the control will be upheld by the courts if challenged – assuming a challenge is possible.)
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And anyone with a knowledge of Northern Ireland knows that the domestic deployment of troops will cause its own social and political problems.
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Troops are, by definition, not civil police.
And although there can be some overlap in their training and experience, troops are not especially well positioned to do civil policing.
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Of course, the suspicion must be that the internal mobilisation of troops is not for the purported reason of addressing crime.
That purported reason makes little or no sense – as there are other ways the federal government could assist Democrat cities with crime. And the crime rate in Washington DC, where troops have already been mobilised, is historically low.
One reason may be that this is being done for perceived political advantage, perhaps with one eye on the mid-terms.
Imagine troops and ICE “patrolling” voting stations.
Indeed, a good deal of what is happening in the United States seems to be Trump and his supporters thinking backwards from the mid-terms and putting in place measures so as to ensure they do not lose votes and seats.
Trump’s supporters are putting a lot of thought and energy into maintaining power.
Another reason for this mobilisation is that – like a dog licking itself – this is being done simply because Trump can do it, and he knows nobody will stop him.
Congress and the Courts could stop all this immediately, if they wanted to do so.
But they will not.
For they have, well, yielded.
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This is likely something you might consider taking up in a separate post, but the question of “legitimacy” here, I think, is more complicated than “the control will be upheld by the courts.”
As we have seen in innumerable cases, lower courts in the US have held, in carefully reasoned opinions, that administration actions have been unlawful. These decisions have been appealed to the Supreme Court, which has stepped in to stay those decisions often without providing its own reasoning in any detail. Many of these actions by SCOTUS have alarmed experienced legal scholars and commentators, overturning precedent apparently with the main objective of waving on an Executive whose policies six conservative justices find congenial rather than following evidence, text and precedent.
In countries which fall to authoritarian leaders, control of the courts prevents one set of checks on the concentrated exercise of power.
So I think a second aspect of legitimacy needs to be borne in mind: that the actions are taken as a reasonable, proportional and good faith exercise of power, rather than for partisan or self serving reasons. The administration’s actions don’t pass the smell test here.
The President’s spokeswoman gave the game away speaking from the podium at the White House when she said “the President would love to do this in every Democrat run city in the country.” As always, the founding principle of the modern GOP is that the exercise of government power by Democrats is facially illegitimate.
This is likely something you might consider taking up in a separate post, but the question of “legitimacy” here, I think, is more complicated than “the control will be upheld by the courts.”
This could be said of every statement in every post I write. I am happy with how I defined it for the purpose of this post. It is not hard to make law sound complicated, the difficulty is in setting it out in simple terms.
What next?
The shooting dead by a National Guardsman of a respectable, white male registered Republican voter.
Another Kent State University Massacre.
The disarming of US military units for fear they might not obey orders or even go over to the ‘other side’.
Given that the US military does not practice any form of segregation even between men and women, then weeding out the unAmerican from their ranks would be difficult to say the least.
As Donald Trump becomes ever more paranoid, will we see the deployment of a modern day Swiss Guard around the Tuileries, correction, the White House?
A battleship on the Potomac River would be in firing range of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (NW).
And Mar-A-Lago is a bit vulnerable to an irate neighbour of Trump’s losing it over the disruption of his narcotics business.
Meanwhile, a sweaty palmed JD Vance counts down the days to 4th November 2026.
Like Andrew above, I don’t think it’s right to define “legitimate” in “legitimate use of force” as if it meant “legal”. The whole point is that “legal” and “legitimate” are two very different things. Some things are legal but not legitimate (like, apparently, Trump trying to undo his election loss in 2020), and other things are legitimate but not legal (like, apparently, voicing support for Palestine Action in the UK).
As we have learned from Weber, legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. More practically, it refers to the question whether the people at large consider the government to be legitimate, a belief that may rest on their belief that the government’s actions are legal, but it may also rest on other things. (Weber suggested tradition and charisma.)
This distinction is important because arguing about whether sending the national guard after Democrats in Los Angeles, Washington DC, or Chicago is legal is falling into a trap. Particularly in the US you can always argue that something is legal. I’ve had great fun doing so for literally decades. All sorts of crazy things are somehow legal in the US, or at least arguably legal. That’s what Project 2025 is all about: identifying why various authoritarian things might be legal and then pressing that fact to full advantage.
But even if it is legal, it is certainly not legitimate, and the people should resist Trump’s actions regardless of whether a court deems them legal.
The majority of National Guard soldiers and airmen hold a civilian job full-time while serving part-time as a National Guard member.
Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are causing severe disruption to US business, whilst Trump takes US citizens away from their day jobs.
And as the Israeli Government is learning, the deployment of citizen soldiers poses risks to the individual mental health of the troops and wider social cohesion within the populace.
“The Israelis, as indeed many guerrilla fighters, (have) regard(ed) war as rather like surgery – an unpleasant but sometimes necessary business which, if it has to be waged, should be swift, efficient and precise.”
Norman F Dixon: On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence.
” ‘It’s the robots, sir,’ said one voice. ‘There’s something wrong with them.’
‘What, exactly?’ These were the voices of two War Command Krikkiters.
All the War Commanders lived up in the sky in the Robot War Zones, and were largely immune to the whimsical doubts and uncertainties which were afflicting their fellows down on the surface of the planet.”
” ‘Get to the point.’
‘The robots aren’t enjoying it, sir.’
‘What?’
‘The war, sir, it seems to be getting them down. There’s a certain world-weariness about them, or perhaps I should say Universe-weariness.’
‘Well, that’s all right, they’re meant to be helping to destroy it.’
‘Yes, well they’re finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted with a certain lassitude. They’re just finding it hard to get behind the job. They lack oomph.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘Well, I think they’re very depressed about something, sir.’
‘What on Krikkit are you talking about?’
‘Well, in the few skirmishes they’ve had recently, it seems that they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim.’
Douglas Adams: Life, the Universe and Everything.
History does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.
If you want to look for rhymes in the context of today in America and the American Civil War, then I recommend John Keegan’s The American Civil War.
Be prepared for a shock at the role of the beau sabreur in the Confederate forces.
Re:”Democrat cities”
This, from ChatGPT:
Yes — the phrase “Democrat cities” instead of “Democratic cities” is a deliberate rhetorical jab.
Here’s the background:
The official name of the party is the Democratic Party. Grammatically, the correct adjective is Democratic — as in Democratic mayor, Democratic city, Democratic policy.
Beginning in the mid-20th century, Republican politicians and conservative commentators increasingly started saying “Democrat Party” or “Democrat cities.”
This truncation is intentional: it drops the “-ic” ending, which makes the phrase sound harsher and strips away the positive associations of “democratic” (lowercase d) with democracy itself.
Linguists and political historians often point out that this usage works as a pejorative framing: it subtly denies Democrats the adjective form that connects them to democratic values, while branding them with a clipped, more awkward label.
The usage gained traction in the Nixon and Reagan eras, was popularized by figures like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and has since become common in right-wing political speech.
So when you hear “Democrat cities” (often referring to places like Chicago, San Francisco, or New York in discussions of crime, homelessness, or taxes), it’s not just a grammatical slip — it’s a partisan insult, meant to belittle.
It’s not as if there are law and order problems the cities can’t cope with. It’s a concocted emergency with no actual basis.
I can’t imagine Republican States taking Federal interference lightly from a Democrat President.
I’m concerned that we are being encouraged to think of these developments as a “Donald Trump” thing. It is certainly true to say that rank-and-file Congressional Republicans are terrified of President Trump – more accurately, terrified of his bully pulpit and his ability to terminate their careers with a single vitriolic outburst.
But the fact is that there are enough indepdently wealthy members of the Congressional GOP for some of them to show some resistance to these tendencies.
My concern is the fact that we are not seeing this is that, behind the bluster, there is a tacit acceptance on the part of the GOP that they are and always will be a minority party at their heart, that the transactional embrace by President Trump of (QANON/White Supremacists/Extreme Evangelicals/etc.) is nothing more than a blatant quid pro quo to give him the power he wanted.
The Justices sitting on the Supreme Court – most especially the younger Republicans – are there for decades and pretty much un-touchable… yet they go along with blatant over-reaches of executive power and more – they twist and bend the law like a pretzel to give the President whatever he wants.
I’m concerned that President Trump, for all his bombast, really is a “Useful Idiot”. Not for Russia [although yes, certainly], but for the extreme right-wing fringe of the conservative political movement in the US. They will take all that he gives them and more. And when something blows up in their faces, they will point to Trump and claim, “That was him, nothing to do with us!” and quietly, gleefully, take all their policy advances and transformations “to the bank”.
We have already seen it in action. The actions of DOGE have been not only ridiculed, but also are clearly costing tax-payers more, not reducing their dues. The harm done to the US reputation internationally will reverberate for decades. Many of the agencies devastated by cuts may never recover. But you know what else happened? Every single Agency that had a case against, a complaint against, an action pending, or an issue with any one of Elon Musks businesses… has been effectively destroyed. Staff actively working on any case against his companies? Gone.
Washington’s political repeaters [sic], when covering the news “stories” concerning Musk’s departure and DOGE’s lack of results, portray the whole thing as a failed experiment. Yet Musk got to skate away from multiple train-wrecks in a much stronger position than he was before. He more than recouped the $250 Million he spent on the Trump campaign.
Expect the same thing to happen – multiple times – with the Trump Presidency. The Roberts Court aren’t “calling balls and strikes” – they are actively soliciting activitists to bring them cases that will allow them to push the law even further to the right. The Senate is pushing more and more people with extreme political views on to the bench. Henchmen – with no prior experience as a judge – are being raised to Circuit Court.
The is a much larger and multi-facted project.
Right now the objectives of that larger project and those of Donald Trump are in broad alignment – and an indication of just how useful the idiot has become can be gauged by the sheer number and extreme positions in favourable rulings that he is getting, or the freedom he is granted to e.g. flout the Posse Commatatus Act or other irksome laws.
This will not end well.
What do you or other commentators believe the end game of the new right is in America? If everything Trump and others are doing is a means to an end, what is that end? In other words what will America’s society, institutions, political, judicial and constitutional systems look like when their objectives have been met?
I’m concerned that my own views are alarmist – and I suspect I’d need to write a thesis to give you a comprehensive answer. But let me try and summarise it in this way…
We are watching/have seen the emergence of authoritarianism in the United States. Each of the elements of the nation – society, institutions, political, judicial and constitutional systems will now only survive according to the whim of the country’s elected Leader.
Now, to be fair, the emergence of authoritarianism is not a new phenomenon… but I think it will be different this time around because of the self-declared mantle of “leader of the free world” that the United States took for itself. The question I am asking myself is: when the nation that once thought of itself the leader of the Free World decides that it has become an autocracy, does that mean we will see a new Leader emerge, or does that tip the entire world to autocracy? I am concerned that the stakes could really be that high.
The hard part of answering your question is that as a nation trends toward autocracy, the priorities and operations of those parts of the nation that you identify are determined more and more exclusively by the nation’s ruler. In the case of President Trump, however, we have a leader who thrives on the almost-anarchic uncertainty that he developed during “The Apprentice”. Back then, the theatrical, almost whimsical way in which candidates on the show fell in to or out of favour was a “ratings winner”. He used it as a strategy in business negotiations – by making it impossible for his counter-party to know what he wanted, Trump contrived to be the dominant party in any negotiation. Now, the entire country is on the line, but the same process is in play. That’s why I think it is almost impossible to predict how this will unravel, only that it will.
Even more concerning, I think that here in the United Kingdom, we have reached the equivalent of “2015 USA” – a nation in disarray, established political parties thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the electorate – and a populist/extremist with a lust for power ready and waiting in the wings.
As DAG would write: brace, brace.
Military Aid to the Civil Authority (Power) are normally good at two things:
1. Providing a large number of people to a location (possibly with minimal infrastructure) at short notice.
2. Catching the medias attention and showing that politicians are doing something.
Long term they are almost always more expensive and less efficient than the specialist teams that are already exist for example soldiers filling sandbags competing with environment agency flood defences and pumps that can move 7000l of water a minute.
If they wanted to really help a crime problem I am sure the costs spent on the deployment would be better spent by Chicago P.D.
At some point, I imagine Donald Trump will try to charge individual States for the mundane, but very important work undertaken by the US Corps of Army Engineers within a State’s borders.