Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Trump administration has sidelined Congress, violated the U.S. Constitution, and taken an axe to both the U.S. and the global economies. Trump has issued executive orders that give him unprecedented presidential powers. The courts have blocked many of his policies, but in the budget bill pending in the Senate, there is a clause buried in the thousand-page document that would make it far more difficult for courts to enforce their judgements against the administration. In front of the Supreme Court, Trump’s lawyers have successfully argued that he has immunity from prosecution for pretty much anything he does when he’s in office.

In this way, Trump has dismantled the structures of U.S. democracy. You might think that all of these actions taken together amount to a declaration of martial law. But they don’t. The United States remains, at least formally, a civil democracy, and the president must still answer to other institutions (Congress, the courts).

However, Trump continues to test the limits of his power, and now he is doing so with respect to the military. He is doing so either to govern just short of a martial law declaration—or in preparation to make that declaration at some future date.

Although formally the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president is constrained by tradition and by law from deploying the military however he pleases. In his first term, Trump nevertheless attempted to use the military as a tool of presidential power. He tried to arrange a military parade in Washington, DC. He proposed to use the military against Black Lives Matter demonstrators around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The military said no. His defense secretaries—Jim Mattis and then Mark Esper—opposed these proposals.

In his second term, Trump has replaced career military with loyalists. For........

© CounterPunch