A federal judge on Saturday prohibited Donald Trump from deploying Oregon National Guard troops into Portland on the basis of a fabricated emergency, just as a federal judge in California held a few weeks earlier that his deployment of troops into the streets of Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act.
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” wrote Karin Immergut. “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law.”
There are two notable differences between the cases: The first is that Immergut is one of Trump’s own appointees. The second is that Trump blew past her order contemptuously. If he couldn’t deploy Oregon’s own national guard against the residents of Oregon, he’d federalize National Guard forces in other states and deploy them into Oregon and other blue states.
We can only surmise that this workaround was the brainchild of Trump’s mentally ill senior adviser Stephen Miller, who chooses to communicate like a Reichsminister.
Immergut quickly intervened to broaden the terms of her restraining order. But she’s just one judge, and the administration seems hell bent on establishing martial law in some jurisdiction on the basis of lies and fantasies.
One of the targets of these lies is Trump himself. The executive-branch’s normal chain of command has broken down, and Miller derives power by propagandizing his own boss, who then delegates him authority to retaliate. Trump reportedly intimated to Oregon’s governor that he’d been manipulated into besieging Portland by watching old B-roll footage of street unrest on Fox News. He seems to have been duped by an A.I.-generated video depicting himself promoting “medbeds,” which are like hyperbaric oxygen chambers that cure all ailments—except unlike hyperbaric oxygen chambers, medbeds don’t actually exist.
And, perhaps under Miller’s sway, Trump seems to believe the politics of the ongoing government shutdown favor him. Both men continue to insist, in their own noxious ways, that Democrats provide votes to fund this madness.
IN SICKNESS AND HEALTH CARE
It is heartening, on the whole, that Democrats are winning the battle for public opinion over who’s to blame for the government shutdown.
Democrats aren’t primed to scrap the way Republicans are, and need positive reinforcement from the public in order to maintain a fighting posture for more than a few days.
It’s frustrating, though, that many of them will misread the polling to vindicate their decision to choose expiring health-care subsidies as the basis of this confrontation.