Bulwark Takes - Trump Threatens to Invoke the Insurrection Act

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

President Trump said he may invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 in response to protests and ICE activity in Minneapolis. Ben Parker is joined by retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling to explain what the Insurrection Act actually allows, when it has been used in U.S. history, and why this situation is fundamentally different.

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Hi, welcome back to Bulwark Plus Takes. I am Ben Parker of the Bullwork here with my colleague, Lieutenant General Mark Hurtling. We're talking about the Insurrection Act today. We're going to tell you a little bit more about what that is, but in case you're wondering why, it's because the President of the United States said this this morning. If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don't obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of ICE, who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the Insurrection Act, which many presidents have done before me and quickly

put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great state. So the Insurrection Act is a very, very old, very vaguely worded law that allows the president to deploy the United States military inside the country, which is why we have our military expert, General Hurtling, here. General Hurtling, tell us a little bit about what the Insurrection Act means to someone who has commanded troops, who has worn the uniform of the country, and when it has been used, and why? Yeah, well, first, Ben, you've summed it out very well. It's, it comes from the earliest days of the founding fathers. I mean, they were concerned from what they saw by the British doing as part of a military, entering quarters, doing things against citizens, that they didn't

want soldiers doing that in a new nation. So it was part of our founding fathers documents. It was part of our freedoms. And in 1807, which is, you know, the president even cited that this morning on his tweet, where he said, hey, I'm going to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. I have the authority to do so, and it's needed. Well, all those things are interesting, but it's factual to note that when presidents invoke the Insurrection Act, they do it under very unique circumstances because there's no rule that says either you can or cannot do it. A president can invoke it just because he feels like invoking it because he believes that the nation and the government is threatened. You know, when we take a look at very quickly the examples of when it was used, the last three

big times it was used. One was in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush responded to the Los Angeles riots were out of control after the Rodney King killing by sending both Army and Marines into that force at the request of the governor, because the governor's police forces and National Guard were overwhelmed by the extent of the riots. The other two times were 1967 when LBJ invoked it during the Detroit riots again at the request of the governor because his forces had been overwhelmed by the race riots of 1967. The time before that was more interesting. That's when President Eisenhower in 1957 invoked it

and sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas because the state and the governor was not doing what the law told them to do. And that was actually bringing people into desegregated school. So Eisenhower federalized the state guard and then sent active forces from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the constitutional rights.

Those are all the past experiences we have had, but they are always well thought out by the president. They usually give a very defined mission. What are the active duty armed forces going to do or the federalized guard? And what is the exit strategy? So those are the things we should be looking for if the Instruction Act of 1807 is invoked by the president.

Yeah, I would add one other difference here too, which is that in those examples, well, except for the civil rights example, but in the other two examples you mentioned, the Interaction Act was invited by the local authorities, by the local government, because regular law enforcement had been overwhelmed. And that's not what's going on in Minnesota and Minneapolis right now. In fact, you can read about this in this morning's Morning Shots newsletter from the Bullwark. We actually see, weirdly, the Minneapolis Police Department is sort of trying to keep the rights peaceful, but they don't really. talk to ICE because ICE won't talk to them so they don't know what the federal government is doing.

And more to the point, the federal government has essentially besieged the city. That's what the editorial board of the largest newspaper in Minneapolis said. There are many times more federal agents right now in Minneapolis and there are Minneapolis police officers. So it's not like the government isn't able to restore order. The government, the federal government is there causing disorder. And Trump's response is we're going to send in more troops. That's sort of backwards from how you imagine the act is supposed to work and how it's worked in recent history. I'd say, Ben, you know, the best way to characterize this as an example that I've been taught about the Insurrection Act, it's usually used as a fire extinguisher to put out a fire.

But if you're using the Insurrection Act to further light more matches, excuse me, it becomes a discretionary. tool of government for actually bringing more harm to the citizens and using military force in a political manner. Yeah, no, I think that would, I think that would be the obvious result of this if you were to invoke the Insurrection Act. But there are more, I would say, downstream effects for the military, for the people that we want to talk about. So I'll start with this one. First of all, if you were the commander who was assigned, okay, you're going to take your unit into downtown Minneapolis. Because, your job is just to, I guess your mission would be to quell the protests, to get people to go back

home, to prevent them from peacefully protesting what ICE is doing, to prevent them from just walking around the streets. How would you know if that's a lawful order or not? Yeah, that's the tough part. And again, you mentioned earlier about coordinating with the local authorities. Where do they need help? Where is the violence? occurrence occurring. What kind of dangers to the government is there? Are there certain cells within the city like terrorist cells or fascist cells that are trying to break the government down, attack local representatives or destroy police departments? So there's chaos. Those are the first things you have to do in terms of your mission assessment, your task analysis. But even with that, as a commander,

you asked me how I would feel as a commander going there, invoking this act puts soldiers in a really uncomfortable position because they are facing their fellow citizens. Now, if the fellow citizens are doing extremely damaging things and ruining the countryside and killing people, yeah, it's no problem to use force because that's what the military is trained to do. But if you're facing fellow citizens who are actively protesting, which they have a right to do, then you're placed in a situation where, hey, as an American soldier, I've also sworn an oath to the Constitution, and the Constitution says you can protest acts of government. In fact, it was another thing that the Founding Father said were so critically important. So the soldiers and the citizens who

are doing peaceful protest had the same view of using the Constitution. and the way it was formed and the way it was written. So that puts a senior military leader in a very precarious position because, you know, one of the things when American citizens who haven't served the military think, oh, well, the military is going to go there. Well, let me take you into the background because military commanders and sergeants and lieutenants and captains and generals all have to talk to their troops and give them the rules of behavior, the rules of engagement,

as they're called. What do you want them to do? How do you want them to do it? Who are the authorities? Who are you coordinating with? And what would cause you as a military force to use armed force against your fellow citizens? Those are all tough questions. And that's why context matters in these kind of things. Yeah, it's not clear that the president in threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act has thought that through at all. Here's another thing that I don't think he has thought I don't think a lot of people have thought through. The military is one of the most diverse institutions in the country in terms of any metric you want to choose. I mean, maybe not age, but it's more gender diverse now that it has been. But it's also racially and ethnically

diverse. You've got people from all sorts of different backgrounds. You've got people serving who aren't citizens. And just based on the demographics of the country and the military, if you start looking on those name patches that a lot of people wear in their uniforms, a lot of that them are going to have names that are not American names the way people in the administration might define it. There's a whole lot of people who have sworn an oath to defend the country whose names might be Martinez or Gonzalez. So what are you going to say to private Martinez or Sergeant Gonzalez? And when you say, you know, hey, our orders are to go defend ICE and let them do basically whatever they want. Yeah. And the question, if you carry that further, Ben, is are some of the

soldiers, when the ice people see them, are they going to be put down and, you know, handcuffed? You know, I had deployed to combat many times, and in one particular case, we had a young man who gave his life, who at the time was halfway through studying for his citizenship test. So he was not a U.S. citizen, but he was serving in the American military. You've mentioned race, gender, creed, all those kinds of differentiators in a military. But I'd also say, too, you've got different ideologies in the military. You know, people ask me every once in a while, you know, what does the military think about what's going on here? I can't tell you because it's such a mixed bag of people, all with different ideologies.

Now, they all come together as a team to execute military missions, but they feel differently. There are going to be people who think I should be there. There are going to be people who say, I don't think I should be here. So as a commander, again, you're controlling those organizations, commanding and controlling those organizations when you have people seeing it from different viewpoints. Yeah. You know, so I want to dig into this a little more because we've done a lot of these videos. You've written a lot of articles about how the administration is trying to use the military.

And one of the themes you always come back to is that a lot of the ways they're trying to use the military actually degrade the military as a tool, whether that's thinking about using our most elite special operations forces to attack Greenland, or you've read a great article about how the Secretary of Defense put out sort of a ridiculous statement about chaplains in the military, claiming essentially that they were woke. what does it do to the effectiveness of the American military to defend the country when they have to go and do things like this? What does it do to morale? What does it do to unit cohesion? What does it do to what happens when you go and try to make those soldiers sign up again and say, hey, do you want to do another tour? Yeah, it certainly affects retention. And we saw that after soldiers and Marines were deployed to Los Angeles. There were indicators of huge drops in reenlistment rates for those units.

But I'll add one more thing to what you were saying, Ben, and that is they're intermingling with militarized police forces. And there are sometimes you can't tell the difference because, you know, the amount of kit that ice officers and federal officers and even some of the local police are wearing, when you have an ice officer in camouflaged uniform in the middle of an urban environment. I was looking at one film this morning where the arresting ICE official had obviously a Kevlar vest on, but he had three or four magazines of ammunition on the vest. I mean, I see no need for that unless you're figuring you're going to get into a firefight. So the average American citizen is seeing that on the air and not knowing the difference between

a policing force and a military force, and that's where it becomes dangerous. as we've seen in recent pollings, ICE is losing credibility. They are losing popular support. The military normally has very high popular support from the citizens of our country because they defend the nation against foreign invaders. When you use them in a domestic role, like we're thinking about doing right now, that will certainly decrease the level of support for the military. and to answer your question, what does it do inside the formation? Well, I would tell you, I've been there before where we had to do humanitarian aid or humanitarian relief. And there are some soldiers that say, hey, I didn't sign up for this.

I signed up to be a soldier. I'm not supposed to be doing all this fluffy stuff with local authorities. So that has an effect as well on the formation and the morale of the troops. Yeah. So this issue you've raised with Ice Asian stress. up like soldiers and walking around Minneapolis with a surprisingly large amount of ammunition. And obviously, as we know from the killing of Renee Good, using live ammunition when they feel like it and not afraid to kill people, just to, I mean, to execute people on the ground right

there. And by the way, if I can add to what you're saying, it appears to me, I mean, as a commander, one of the first things you want to reinforce are your rules of engagement and your constraints for a military force, because that's how really you maintain a moral approach to any kind of warfighting situation. It seems to me, as I've watched over the last few weeks, ICE officials doing their job, there are no constraints on their use of force. They are in fact intimidating and bullying the population. They are using excessive forces in at least some of the films we've done. seen. So this is not a, I'm going to put it this way, this is not a disciplined or effective

organization in terms of executing the mission that they've been given. When you're sweeping up citizens as opposed to determining who should be constrained or arrested based on immigration laws, it's not the same thing. So that's why they are losing their credibility is because truthfully, they ain't that good, and they're using excessive force. Right. They are, they are an undisciplined, it's exactly what I was going to ask about. They're an undisciplined organization using a lot of excessive force. And now you're asking to take much more highly trained, much more disciplined, real military

forces and sort of intermingle them. If you're, again, that military commander that's charged with executing this mission, whatever it is, however nebulous it is, how do you think about force protection? How do you think about keeping your soldiers safe when there's guys running around in camo shooting people? Yeah. Do you arm them? Do you tell them to fire back at who, at what? If the insurrection act is invoked, there is more than likely a requirement within the rules of engagement to use deadly force or to point out what targets are legal to engage because of the insurrection.

I mean, if you see someone trying to tear down a building or turn over a police car, you can either constrain them as a police action or you can shoot at them if their actions are dangerous enough. It becomes, I mean, the Civil War was an invocation of the Insurrection Act and two sides were going at each other, brothers against brothers. So that is the kind of situation you put yourself in. And that when Lyndon Johnson or H.W. Bush deployed military forces to situations, they were prepared to use deadly force as part of the reinforcement of local authorities. Just like a local cop would.

Right. No. So it sounds like the, and this is my commentary, not yours. But it sounds like the situation the administration is at least considering setting up is that ICE and Border Patrol and DHS can do whatever. they want. And that's basically what Stephen Miller has said. It's basically what Trump has said that they are totally immune in there. There are no restrictions on their use of force. Even a woman driving away from an ICE officer in her car is a domestic terrorist. And then you're going to be introducing the regular military and saying, if anyone is committing domestic terrorism against these federal agents, you are authorized to use deadly force. It sounds like they're asking for a situation in Minneapolis, like what we just saw in Iran. where people are out protesting in the streets and the government starts shooting.

That's what they're asking for. And that's the irony of the whole situation right now. You know, the president has said, hey, quit detaining Iranian citizens, quit oppressing them, or we're going to bomb you. Well, if the insurrection act is invoked, there is a potential for that same kind of action by U.S. military forces. The potential. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but there is that potential. The other thing that I think is interesting is,

when you're talking about police forces, their primary job, and this is the confusion right now in Minneapolis, their primary job is to protect and serve the citizens. In fact, that's usually when you go in any big cities that's labeled on the sides of their police car to protect and serve. Now you insert something like the ICE forces and the Border Patrol. It does not appear that they are primarily concerned with protecting and serving. They are primarily geared toward arresting and detaining and intimidating and harassing. So you're now going to put a military force in between those without any mask on, but with military uniforms that may be confused, that are doing something between protecting and serving and something arresting, harassing,

intimidating and it can grow out of proportion very quickly. Let's just put it that way. Well, all I can say is I really hope there are some good and seasoned officers like you telling these things to the president and telling him how badly he could go how quickly. And I hope next time we talk, none of these situations we've described has happened because it could get really bad, really quick. Thank you so much for joining me, General Hurtling. You got it, Ben. Always a pleasure. Thanks. And for more of these, we're going to stay on top of this story, on top of all these stories. So follow this channel, like the video, comment on the video if you have thoughts to share, and go to the bulwark.com and become a Bulwark Plus member.