Trump takes aim at states' rights, and the Constitution | Salon.com

... a president that represents all americans. yeah, right ...

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Five months into Donald Trump's second term, it already feels like five years. The administration's shock and awe strategy has left the country dizzy. There's the daft tariff scheme that has left Americans worried about an economic crash. We've watched as the civil service, legal system, academia, corporations and even churches have been forced to deal with an unprecedented assault by an administration hellbent on dominating nearly every independent institution in our society. Now, with Trump's mass deportation push into Los Angeles and his decision to federalize the California National Guard, the Constitution itself is being assailed with direct threats to state and local sovereignty.

For as long as most of us can remember, "states' rights" was the bedrock of American conservative ideology. For generations, Southern states used the concept to justify slavery, the Civil War and generations of Jim Crow. And while liberals didn't approve of states' rights arguments being used to deny universal human rights (and believed those arguments were not made in good faith), they did not deny the concept of state sovereignty itself under the Constitution. Short of amending the document, or tearing it up altogether, they recognized it was pointless to pretend that federalism didn't exist or to only recognize the idea when it was politically useful.

The ruling proved that the idea of states' rights still exists among conservatives, at lease when it is useful to their cause.

Recently, the conservative Supreme Court reified the concept with the Dobbs decision, reversing the constitutional right to abortion under Roe v. Wade and holding that states have the right to regulate abortion, even including banning it altogether. The ruling proved that the idea of states' rights still exists among conservatives, at least when it is useful to their cause.

In his first inaugural address, Trump waved the federalism banner, pledging to transfer "power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American people." But over the course of his first term, and now, five months into his second term, he appears to have decided that the ideology — like many other tenets that once defined the GOP — is no longer operative. In a Sunday night rant on Truth Social, he ordered ICE to step up its raids in cities and states that are run by his political enemies:

Trump is being very clear here about why he's targeting these cities. It's not because of immigration, although he's using that as an excuse. After all, two of the three states with the largest populations of undocumented people are the red states of Texas and Florida. And in recent days, Trump has exempted the agriculture, hospitality, and meatpacking industries, which apparently aren't part of the "Democratic Power Center." (The construction and manufacturing sectors better get on the ball and start doing some serious bootlicking.) No, he sees this as a way to start a conflagration in these cities, giving him the excuse to supersede the power of elected state and local officials by sending in troops, whether it be federalizing state National Guards or sending in active duty Marines.

On his way to the G7 Summit on Sunday, Trump claimed that if he hadn't ordered the federalized National Guard to Los Angeles last week the city would be on fire:

That is nonsense. There are protests and the Los Angeles Police Department was and is handling them. But there's a method to his madness, even if he doesn't fully recognize it himself. On Sunday, Dr. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of "Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present," wrote in the New York Times that by calling up troops to patrol Los Angeles, giving a partisan speech at Fort Bragg and presenting Saturday's military birthday parade, Trump is trying to get the American public used to a different relationship with the military. In this new version, we are supposed to see the military as an institution that explicitly serves the president and his political agenda.

Ben-Ghiat goes on to explain that this is often a way that despots exert power, observing:

The Trump administration is now using the second-largest city in the country as a backdrop for its efforts to create the perception of a national crisis. Doing so could allow it to justify measures that would empower the government to act against its own citizens. This is concerning enough. Even more worrying is what history shows us: that all too often, such crises become semi-permanent — "not the exception but the rule," as the anti-Nazi philosopher Walter Benjamin once observed.

The rhetoric in Trump's Truth Social post — that Democratic politicians and their voters are "sick of mind" and "hate our country" — means it is likely there will be more arrests and roughing up of Democratic politicians who try to do their jobs. And we can probably expect more violence, including the kind we saw this weekend in Minneapolis, when a far right extremist assassinated a Democratic politician and her husband, and wounded two others. That's the type of crisis Trump seems determined to provoke.

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But I don't think he should count on the public at large, even in red states, complying with his plans. For all of his activity this past week, there was one event that dwarfed them all:

Based on crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don't have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6 million people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday. That's nearly 2% of the U.S. pop!

Mobilized anti-Trump resistance is exceeding 2017 levels

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— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) Jun 15, 2025 at 7:10 AM

This is rigorous analysis by credible data researchers and it, along with recent polling, shows that the majority of the public is not fooled. (From the way the troops marched in his very low-energy parade, it appears they aren't sold on Trump's efforts either.)

But the military spectacle in D.C., along with the events in L.A., was a sobering reminder of where Trump sees American power being concentrated. Not in the states, as former conservative hero Ronald Reagan believed. And not even in the federal government in Washington, where the streets are being inspected for damage from tanks and military vehicles. But in himself as a would-be king.