As anti-Israel protests have spread across many of the country’s most prestigious college campuses this week, several Republicans in Congress have sought to burnish their pro-Israel credentials by calling for the U.S. military to respond.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton exhorted President Joe Biden to send in National Guard units, while obliquely encouraging motorists to run over protestors. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley similarly demanded a militarized federal response “to protect Jewish Americans,” while Mitch McConnell and John Thune penned a lettersigned by 25 of their fellow GOP senators, calling the demonstrators “anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist mobs” and demanding that “federal law enforcement” respond.
Meanwhile, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson paid a visit to Columbia University’s campus on Wednesday where he was greeted by catcalls and boos. Upon leaving, Johnson also declared he would be demanding that Biden deploy the National Guard to quell the protests if they continued.
As Adam Serwer, writing for the Atlanticobserves, these reflexive calls by Republicans for a military response to protests seem to be less rooted in genuine concern that the protests pose a serious danger to the public or Jewish people than “because these powerful figures find the protesters and their demands offensive.” Serwer points out that school administrators have, when necessary, called in local police to address potential violence, harassment, and property damage, and thus far, the protests do not evince the kind of “mass violence and unrest” that would normally suggest the need for federal involvement. He also notes that such a deployment of federal troops would likely escalate the protests.
Without debating the relative merits or lack thereof of the protests themselves, then, it’s important to note that these demands for a federal militarized response are coming almost entirely from one side of the political aisle. As Serwer points out, they echo the same sentiments Republicans expressed in 2020 in response to the protests by Black Lives Matter over the police murder of George Floyd.
In other words, thus far we have seen a markedly asymmetrical, political response by Republicans to campus protests this week. But we are also witnessing something else: an explicit acceptance of a militarized solution to protests where Republicans find it politically advantageous.
Notably, another well-known Republican has also proposed sending the U.S. military and National Guard units to quell anticipated public protests, albeit of a far different nature, should he be afforded another term in office. That person is Donald Trump, and the people he proposes to target are those Americans he suspects would turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest the policies he intends to implement.
Trump has been a magnet for vociferous and impassioned public protest since his inauguration in January 2017. On the first day following that inauguration, he was by greeted by three times the number of people who had attended his swearing-in ceremony, and they were not there to welcome him to the job. Based on crowd estimates at the time, the Jan. 21, 2017, Women’s March in Washington, D.C., comprised some 470,000 people. Simultaneous marches across the country were estimated to have drawn 3.3 to 4.6 million more Americans collectively, nearly all of whom were united in opposition to Trump’s misogyny and policy pronouncements. At the time, those protests were believed to be the largest single-day protests in American history.
One week later, Trump signed Executive Order No. 13769, colloquially known as the “Muslim Ban.” This action also prompted protests in the thousandsmostly situated at U.S. airports where the ban was to be enforced. And in June of 2020, Black Lives Matter protests drew an estimated 15 to 26 million protesters in cities, towns, and small communities around the nation, outdrawing even the Women’s March numbers in what was described as the largest movement in U.S. history. Trump later said he regretted not deploying the military to crush those overwhelmingly peaceful protests.
The plans set forth in the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025a template for Trump’s governance should he be elected again, include policies that contemplate the nationwide mass deportation of immigrants, with the help of local police forces; immediately outlawing of mifepristone, the abortion pill, through an executive order; and dismantling all federal agencies that address climate change. Other noxious policies include the weaponization of the Justice Department to harass and prosecute his political adversaries, wiping out all federal protections for LGBTQ+ people and women, eliminating the Department of Education and replacing it with principles of Christian Nationalism.
These are only a few highlights of what Trump has planned for Americans if he’s president again. Obviously, even if only a tenth of Project 2025 is actually implemented, nationwide protests will follow, almost certainly dwarfing those generated in response to his 2017 inauguration. Those protests will be massive, ongoing, and most definitely not limited to college campuses.
Last year, The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Devlin Barrett reported on Trump’s plans to respond to such anticipated protests. Those plans include “potentially invok(ing) the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations” by American citizens who might oppose the measures detailed in Project 2025. Pre-drafted executive orders “to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement” are helpfully suggested.
As noted by Areeba Shah, writing for Salon, one of the key figures responsible for crafting the Project 2025 plan to invoke the Insurrection Act is none other than Jeffrey Clark, tapped by Trump for a potential role as attorney general in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat. Clark, one of the prime cheerleaders of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—and currently facing criminal charges and potential disbarment for his role—infamously advised that Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act to put down any protests should he refuse to leave office.
Another primary architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, is already widely assumed to be slated for a high-level position—possibly chief of staff—in a new Trump administration. Vought is the president of a right-wing think tank called the Center for Renewing America. As Politico reported in February, Vought’s organization has already submitted plans for Trump’s implementation that include “invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to quash protests.”
Oddly, few commentators have actually taken the implications of these plans seriously enough to tease out exactly what they mean. Or perhaps they are unable to conceive of an administration actually doing this. As noted by Elizabeth Goitein, writing for the Brennan Center for Civil Justice at the time of the George Floyd protests, the last time a president called in federal troops to quell protests occurred in 1992, when President George H. W. Bush, at the request of then-Gov. Pete Wilson of California, ordered troops to respond to rioting after the police beating of Rodney King. Calls to reform the Insurrection Act to clarify exactly when a president is authorized to invoke it have thus far been unsuccessful.
As Goitein explains, there is a good reason the Insurrection Act has been so rarely invoked.
“Simply, Americans don’t like the idea of armored tanks rolling into their cities. It smacks of authoritarianism; it goes against our values and our national self-concept,” she says. “And so, even in cases where the Insurrection Act might provide a legal opening—for instance, in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—the fear of political blowback has been enough to stop presidents from exploiting it.”
There’s also the fact that using the military for the civilian population can escalate the violence. Goitein further explains that “as badly as many police officers have behaved during the recent protests, they are at least nominally tasked with protecting the communities they serve.” But the military does not have civilian experience.
“We’re a combat unit not trained for riot control or safely handling civilians in this context,” a member of the Minnesota National Guard told The Nation. “Soldiers up and down the ranks are scared about hurting someone, and leaders are worried about soldiers’ suffering liability.”
The fact that these Republicans whose motivations are transparently political would so blithely call for federal troops to point their weapons at mostly young college protesters—whatever the merits of those protests—is certainly bad enough. The fact that their standard-bearer, Trump, clearly would have no qualms about using military force to stifle public opposition to his odious policies should he regain office, suggests something even worse.
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