During his first term in 2020, Trump suggested, but didn’t follow through on, deploying the US military to suppress nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin.
According to reporting from The New York Times, this is the first time in approximately 60 years that a president has activated a state’s National Guard force without a request from that state’s governor. President Lyndon B. Johnson was the last leader to do so, sending troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators in 1965.
The last time the National Guard was federalized was also in Los Angeles in 1992, per the Times, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to crush protests and unrest after police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.
While on the campaign trail, Trump said he would do precisely what he did this weekend. At a 2023 rally in Iowa, he said he planned to unilaterally send troops into Democratic-run cities. The then-candidate Trump called cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco crime dens, saying, “We cannot let it happen any longer.”
“And one of the other things I’ll do—because you’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in—the next time, I’m not waiting.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, called Trump’s decision to deploy troops to the state “chilling.”
“For the federal government to take over the California National Guard, without the request of the governor, to put down protests is truly chilling,” Chemerinsky told the Times. “It is using the military domestically to stop dissent.”
