Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

This past June 11, President Donald Trump gave one of his stock speeches full of the usual boasts about his GREAT FIRST 100 days back in office and complaining that it should have been his THIRD term had CROOKED Biden not STOLEN THE 2020 ELECTION. The packed stadium filled with camo-clad Army soldiers at the Ft Bragg Army base in North Carolina, cheered at his boasts and booed as he denounced his enemies. A closer look at the troops shows why they were so enthusiastic in their response, almost as if they were being prompted by staffers holding up cue cards: Although the US Army is 21% black and 16% female, the soldiers listening to Trump were overwhelmingly white and male.

There was a reason for the unrepresentative demographics of the the president’s audience that day. It turns out Trump and his White House staff had insisted only volunteers show up at the event. They had also made it clear Trump only wanted MAGA troops. The instructions from the Commander-in-Chief to the soldiers on the base were: Don’t attend if you “disagree with the president!” (He also added, “No fat soldiers,” which explains why all those present looked so trim and fit.)

That got me to thinking. Suppose Trump is that careful about the soldiers he picks to attend a speech he gives just to avoid embarrassment. What might he do to ensure obedience from troops he sends on the unconstitutional domestic missions he has in mind for them?

I went to my trusty old computer and googled images of National Guard occupations of Los Angeles and Washington, DC this summer, and guess what? Although the total force of the 15,010 National Guard troops in the US is even more diverse than the two million regular military enlistees: 30% black and Latino, and 21.3%women. Yet despite three-in-ten National Guard troops who are Black or Brown, and over one-in-five who are women, the news photos and videos of occupying Guard forces are practically devoid of troops of color, and women are even scarcer. (Check out the screen grab of a CBS video.)

Why does this matter? Because the National Guard is not an expeditionary force tasked with the grim business of maintaining American Empire. National Guard troops are meant to provide a reserve force whose primary role is to defend the American people at home from national or regional emergencies like hurricanes, floods, heavy blizzards, epidemics and other crises (like for example, an insurrection and takeover of the US Capitol Building)— situations, in other words, that overwhelm local or state resources.

To be sure, Guard units have been federalized and sent off to war abroad in prior years, as in Iraq during the.two US invasions of the country. But those are exceptions and were resented by many in the Guard, who tend to be older and to have families.

What Trump is doing now, though, is setting the Guard up as his personal army. It’s apparently a trial run to see how the public, the state governments, the Congress and the courts react to his efforts to toy around with martial law, which is what a president “taking over the law enforcement of a city“ really is. It’s what would be happening nationwide if, as has been proposed, he were to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act by an executive order ludicrously claiming the country is facing an existential threat to its existence because of a mass insurrection among the people. (If there is an existential threat to US democracy, it is Trump’s unprecedented power grab!)

It would be harder for this to happen successfully if a significant number of troops in the National Guard decided they were being asked to violate their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and simply stood down and said “No!” Such a mass rejection of his seditious plans could spread rapidly.

There are some grounds for hope that such a thing could happen.

Military.com is an independent publisher of newspapers for every branch of the US military. Distributed on bases, on ships at sea and at remote posts around the globe, it is widely trusted by the people in uniform. On August 13, it published a stunning opinion piece in those papers provocatively headlined, “4 Out of 5 US Troops Surveyed Understand the Duty to Disobey Illegal Orders,” by Charli Carpenter and Geraldine Santoso, respectively a professor and PhD student, in the UMass Amherst Department of Political Science.

They note that Trump, since taking office for a second term as president, has engaged in actions that have:

…alarmed international human rights observers. His administration has deported immigrants without due process, held detainees in inhumane conditions, threatened the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and deployed both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests.

The two authors write........

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