The Rubicon Has Been Crossed

When Federal Troops Deploy Against American Citizens, We Enter Dangerous Territory

Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

This morning, Donald Trump federalized 2,000 California National Guard troops to suppress immigration protests, bypassing Governor Gavin Newsom’s authority and using a law that hasn’t been invoked since 1965—when LBJ sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators from racist violence.

The parallel is obscene. Johnson used federal power to protect Americans exercising their constitutional rights. Trump is using it to crush Americans exercising those same rights.

This is a serious historical escalation—the kind that historians will mark as a decisive moment when American democracy moved from crisis to something far more dangerous. We haven’t crossed into full authoritarianism yet, but we’ve crossed a line that makes every future escalation easier to justify and harder to resist.

When a president deploys military force against citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, constitutional democracy enters a new and perilous phase.

In my recent essay “The Emergency We Cannot Feel,” I wrote about the psychological defenses that prevent Americans from grasping the scale of our constitutional crisis—how we normalize what should never be normal, accommodate what should never be accommodated, and rationalize what should provoke immediate resistance. I warned that “the gap between the emergency and our feeling of emergency” was creating dangerous conditions for authoritarian consolidation.

Today, that gap has been dramatically narrowed. Federal troops deploying against peaceful American protesters is not something that can be psychologically minimized or rationalized away. This is the kind of escalation that forces a reckoning with what we’re actually facing.

The legal justification reveals the dangerous precedent being established. Trump’s directive cites 10 U.S.C. § 12406, claiming there is “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” The directive states that “protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws” and therefore “constitute a form of rebellion.”

This redefines peaceful dissent as sedition. It establishes the legal framework for treating any protest against government policy as an act of rebellion worthy of military suppression. The protests Trump is targeting aren’t violent—they’re immigration demonstrations where people are exercising their First Amendment rights to oppose federal policy.

Local authorities in Los Angeles County indicated no need for federal assistance. This isn’t about maintaining order—it’s about establishing a precedent that constitutional rights exist only at the sufferance of federal power.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that “active duty Marines” at Camp Pendleton are “on high alert” and ready for deployment. American Marines—trained to fight foreign enemies—are being positioned to potentially confront American citizens exercising constitutional rights.

This is exactly the kind of escalation that makes future authoritarian moves easier. Once you’ve established that peaceful protest equals rebellion, once you’ve normalized military deployment against constitutional rights, once you’ve bypassed state authority to impose federal will—each subsequent escalation becomes less shocking, more procedural, more normal.

This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism: not through dramatic coups, but through precedents that make each new violation of democratic norms seem like a natural extension of the last.

Every military officer who participates in this deployment should understand they’re crossing a constitutional line. Every federal official who enables this action is helping establish precedents that will outlast this administration. Every elected official who remains silent is normalizing something that should never be normalized.

For those of us who have been warning about authoritarian drift, this moment carries a particular weight. I’ve spent years worrying of the systematic erosion of democratic norms, the weaponization of government institutions, the deliberate assault on constitutional constraints. I’ve been told I had “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for predicting exactly these kinds of escalations.

To my former friends who insisted I was overreacting, who claimed Kamala Harris was “just as bad,” who dismissed warnings about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies as partisan hysteria: When will you acknowledge what’s happening in front of us?

When federal troops deploy against peaceful protesters, when a president bypasses state authority to suppress constitutional rights, when dissent gets redefined as rebellion—at what point do you admit that this isn’t normal political competition but something fundamentally different and more dangerous?

I don’t expect apologies. The psychological investment in both-sidesism runs too deep. But I do expect honesty about what we’re witnessing. This is serious. This is historically significant. This is the kind of escalation that moves us closer to the point where constitutional democracy becomes impossible to restore.

The emergency we couldn’t feel has become impossible to ignore. Federal troops don’t deploy against peaceful American protesters in functioning democracies. Constitutional rights don’t get suspended because the president finds protests inconvenient. State authority doesn’t get bypassed to impose federal will against citizens exercising First Amendment protections.

These are the actions of a leader who views constitutional constraints as obstacles rather than foundations, who sees dissent as disloyalty, who treats peaceful protest as rebellion. They represent a fundamental misunderstanding of what America is supposed to be—or a deliberate rejection of those principles entirely.

Trump telegraphed this moment during a 2023 campaign rally: “The next time, I’m not waiting.” He wasn’t talking about waiting for local requests for help. He was talking about constitutional constraints on presidential power. He was promising to ignore the legal frameworks that prevent military deployment against American citizens.

Today, he kept that promise. The constitutional firebreak designed to prevent military action against peaceful protesters has been breached. The precedent has been established. The line has been crossed.

This doesn’t mean democracy has died, but it means we’ve moved significantly closer to a place where it might. Each escalation makes the next one easier. Each precedent makes future violations more acceptable. Each crossed line makes the next boundary seem less important.

What happens next depends on how we respond. Do we normalize this as just another political controversy? Do we treat military deployment against protesters as acceptable presidential prerogative? Do we allow this precedent to stand without serious constitutional pushback?

Or do we recognize this for what it is: a dangerous escalation that threatens the foundations of constitutional democracy and demands immediate, sustained resistance from every institution and individual who claims to value American principles?

The choice is ours. But we can’t pretend this is normal. We can’t rationalize this away. We can’t both-sides our way out of confronting what federal troops deploying against peaceful American protesters actually means.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And today, American constitutional democracy entered a new and dangerous phase that will test whether we still have the courage to defend the principles we claim to cherish.

The center must be held—not because it’s easy, but because once it’s fully lost, it becomes almost impossible to restore. Today’s escalation brings us closer to that point of no return.

We must choose accordingly.