The Opinions - Who Can Stop a President Deploying Troops?

Episode Date: October 11, 2025

President Trump has deployed the National Guard to Memphis and Chicago and has his sights on Portland, Ore. It’s his latest effort to punish his enemies and provoke a response. In this episode, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle, the Opinion columnist David French and the contributing Opinion writer E.J. Dionne Jr. discuss the state of a divided America and what history can tell us about this moment.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle. I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. This week, I am joined by my brilliant colleague, columnist David French, and by brilliant contributing opinion writer E.J. Dion. Guys, welcome. How's it going? Great. Enjoy to be with you both. It's great to be with you, Michelle. I missed you last week.

Well, I am ready to dive back in. But I got to say, I leave town for a week to visit family, and you two let the government shut down and the National Guard invade Memphis and Chicago. I feel this is extremely irresponsible. It's kind of unexcusable. You know, in a previous era of honor and duty, we would just resign and shame, Michelle, but we're not in that era anymore, so we're just plowing on through in spite of our failure. I always feel a sense of guilt.

about everything, Michelle. So now you've just added to my heavy burden. It's just another service that I provide. Thank you, E.J. All right. So that said, both developments have me itching for us to talk about President Trump doubling down, or I mean, I guess at this point, it's more like quadrupling down, on treating the U.S. like two different, even disunited countries. There's Red America, which are his friends and his fans. And then there's Blue America. his enemies, the people who deserve retribution and the boot of his administration on their necks. Metaphorically speaking, of course, at least so far, like, for instance, the government shutdown, where he has vowed to use this opening to target agencies and areas that Democrats favor.

I mean, he's already axed billions of dollars of energy projects, mostly located in blue states. E.J., what do you make of all this? Well, you know, there's a terrible and kind of crazy irony to the fact that we're having this conversation at a moment when the news has been dominated by a peace deal, or at least a ceasefire deal in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, the release of the hostages. And if it comes off, it will be a major Trump achievement. And yet you have this talk of peace there and then an escalation of the political war at home, as you say, suggest. And it's a very odd thing to be treating the outside world one way and our own country in another way. And, you know, I grew up in Massachusetts. I'm accustomed to, you know, political patronage. And yeah, you try to help your side. Some when you're in power and all of that.

But the degree of punishment that's going on here, I think it's very hard to find any precedent to this in our history. And it's really antithetical to, you know, how you operate in a constitutional republic, not persuasion but pressure, not conversation, but intimidation, and not at least a little something for everybody to a total, I win, you lose kind of approach. And this is, it bodes very badly for how we get out of this shutdown, but also how we're going to govern ourselves going forward. I've spent a lot of time lately reading a lot about the 1850s preceding the Civil War when we really were bifurcating as a nation. And this is a case where the leadership of the country clearly is trying to make those divisions deeper. And it's really

dangerous to a free republic. You know, it's like you have the anti-Lincoln in the White House in the sense that, you know, if you're looking at his first inaugural address, he very eloquently, eloquently sort of begged and pleaded that, you know, we must not be enemies. We must be friends. We must remain friends. And of course, that fell on deaf ears. But you've got the exact opposite going on right now in the White House. And I think if you're wanting to look for historic parallels, you're going to go to Red Scare 1 and Red Scare 2. Red Scare 1 after World War 1, Red Scare 2 after World War II. However, this is not, Red Scare undersells it.

This is Blue Scare. In other words, what he's essentially saying is it's not, you know, the communists that we're after, it's Blue America. It's the whole superstructure of Blue America, which they are putting in that category of the equivalent of communist Marxists, and they'll use that language. And so it's turning all of the engines of government against his political opponents, justifying it to his base, basically by saying these people are the ultimate threat to the American experiment. This is Stephen Miller's constant rhetoric. In that way, it makes the Red Scare,

it's worse than the Red Scare because it's like Red Scare metastasized. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there's, again, to go back to the metaphor in the pre-Civil War, Civil War era, the conservatives have always talked about limited government and states' rights. But, As our colleague, Jamel Bowie pointed out recently, when you look at the period of sort of 1857 and, you know, the Dred Scott decision, you really had one part of the country, in this case, the South, trying to impose its regime on the entire country. Northerners who didn't want to cooperate at all with slavery were being forced under the Fugitive Slave Act to help return slaves to the South. And so what you got now is, again, this total contradiction of claims by conservatives to believe in local controller states' rights and claims by conservatives to believe in unlimited government. This is unlimited executive power over all the parts of the country you just don't like because they don't seem to like you. So what are the states that are being targeted?

What can they do? What should they at least attempt? Michelle, you're raising a really good question. A heavy sigh. That was a very heavy sigh. And the reason for the heavy sigh is we're in a tough spot here. And we're in a tough spot here in part because Congress over generations helped put us in this tough spot. So if you look at – and I wrote this piece before the Trump administration that we have to reform America's most dangerous law.

And what is the most dangerous law in America? It's the Insurrection Act. Because if you read this act carefully, what you will see is that it places the deployment of troops into cities at the president's discretion. And this is an incredibly dangerous statute, incredibly dangerous. What could possibly go wrong? And this is, though, you know what this is, is the legacy of basic background trust placed in presidents that they are going to be given authority that they'll need in case of emergency, break glass in case of emergency authority. and we just trust them not to abuse it. And there are a lot of reasons in years past

for invoking the Insurrection Act, for example, in Reconstruction era, to try to deal with, you know, neo-Confederate violence and militia violence in the South post-Reconstruction to help, you know, federal troops have been used Insurrection Act and non-insurrection Act context

to help desegregate schools, for example, and to prevent violence during the civil rights era. But this is fundamentally different. this is the president deploying troops, and he has not invoked the Insurrection Act yet, but employing troops under a different Title X authority with the Insurrection Act in his back pocket, fully knowing that even if the courts block this use,

he can pull out that Trump card. It is deeply grievous that we did not do anything about the Insurrection Act before Trump came back into power. And we may very well pay for that. And so the answer to your question, what can governors do? there's not a lot. There's not a lot because the elected president of the United States has been given for generations the authority to call out troops at his own discretion by the language of the

statute. He hasn't used that yet. He's used other statutes, but that's lurking back there. And it means that the options that are available to governors, options that are available to state legislatures are very limited. Congress right now should be rising up. Congress should be responding to this moment. And, you know, we know how that's going. Yeah. I mean, EJ, I would think that if we're depending on this Congress to do anything to short circuit this, we're probably in a lot of trouble. That's absolutely right. I think, you know, since we're going back into history, I think the biggest mistake the founders made, and they realized it pretty quickly because they're, the ones who started the first party system, they wrote a constitution as if political parties didn't

exist because in principle they didn't believe in them. And so they thought the branches of government would be so jealous of their own rights, would have a kind of institutional patriotism, a phrase my friend Norm Ornstein likes to use, that that institutional conflict would be enough for one branch to check the other. In this circumstance, there is no institutional patriotism going on in Congress at all. It's a party spirit that, for the moment, seems prepared to support President Trump on everything. And it's clearly, and maybe David will disagree with me on this, but I think that is clearly infecting the United States Supreme Court as well. And so you really have a kind of party unity on the Republican side that allows Trump to do this.

And I just want to underscore, by the way, that I agree with David. I think Democrats, when they control the Congress and 21 and 22 and had President Biden in the White House, should have at least repealed or at least clarified the terms of the Insurrection Act and place some limits on the president. I suspect that there are a lot of members who deeply regret they didn't try to do that. So, David, there is a legal fight brewing over Trump's attempts to send troops to Portland, and where do you see all this going? You traditionally are the voice of optimism about the courts. Well, so I'm, let me put it this way. Here's a short-hand way to make sense of the court's jurisprudence.

The court, where Trumpism intersects with traditional originalism, he tends to win. When it doesn't, he tends to lose. It's really pretty, it's that simple. So what I would say is let's wait until the end of this term because a lot of stuff got kicked into this term. We've got tariff cases. We've got fit. We've have the Federal Reserve. We have the extent of the president's authority to fire employees without being blocked. We've got a lot of things coming.

And I think a lot of people overread these emergency docket decisions. But I'll tell you right now, what makes me very nervous is for years, Congress pushed a ton of power into the executive branch and tried. to put limits on it. And if the theory is, well, you can't put limits on the executive's exercise of executive authority, then we're in for a rocky ride unless Congress can pull some of that authority back. And so they don't seem inclined to do it, though. Which they don't seem inclined to do at all. E.J. I wish I could have David's confidence in the Supreme Court. Maybe he doesn't take this view, but I don't see a shred of originalism in the immunity decision that the court. issued that went against our understandings of presidential power and the limits on it,

going back to the beginning of the Republican, every assumption we had is to summarize the president is not above the law. I think that immunity decision broke all sorts of new ground, the notion that the president could just tell the Justice Department, do this or do that, and it's okay. And thus, we have the indictment of Jim Comey. I'm not sure I see that as originalism. Correct me if you think I'm wrong, David. Oh, I think the immunity case was not originalism.

And I wrote that. And I think the headline was, where is the originalism of the originalists when it came to the immunity case? Well, thank you for that. Yeah. But I will say the immunity case is a rounding error on a rounding error compared to the magnitude of the problems that we're facing. Okay.

Before we go too far down the Supreme Court path, I want to shift us in a different direction with these questions about these deployments. So especially sending one state's National Guard into another state. You know, like Texas National Guard troops have been sent into Chicago, which has led to some pretty nasty exchanges between the governors of Texas and Illinois. And, you know, at least as of Thursday when we're taping this, that's the situation is still pretty. tense. What does this do to the psyche of the country? What impact does this have on voters and a way the Americans think about the country? It's very troubling, especially if you spent time abroad, where when you were in certain other countries and you saw troops on the streets routinely, you said, well, you know, this is a way, I guess things work here. Thank God. It doesn't work like that in the United States. You're not accustomed to seeing troops on the ground. And it's hard to escape the notion that this is an effort to routinize and get us accustomed to people on the streets. And Governor Pritzker in Illinois is very worried that this is a prelude to having troops on the streets during the 2026 election and maybe on election day.

Now, we don't know if that's true yet. But I think that that statement a year ago, someone would say that's a kind of paranoid statement. But I don't think it looks so paranoid now. I think it's the idea of having, you know, having troops on the streets routinely to solve problems that are incredibly ill-defined. And at a moment, when actually crime rates are going down in almost all the places he is sending troops to. Well, Chicago had the lowest murder rate since, I believe,

1965 before the troops came. Yeah, I mean, so no one would say that everything is fine here. in Chicago. And one mistake that people make is try to argue that National Guard troops are descending on some sort of utopia. No, no. Chicago has problems. There's no question about it. But those problems, many of them have been on the mend. And I don't think it's hard to discern what is happening. I think what is happening. It's not, nothing about this is subtle. And especially when you look at the conduct of some of these federal officials, the conduct in particular of a lot of these ICE officers and agents, they're being deliberately provocative. In some cases, they're just committing

outright assault on camera, right, that someone's talking to them and they'll just spray tear gas, whatever, straight into their face. You know, this is the kind of thing. I guarantee you, if I was walking down the street and you were arguing with me, Michelle, and I just pulled out some bear spray and put it in your face, you know what? I just assaulted you. That's assault. I should be arrested. And so I think what you're seeing here is deliberate, the use of the military as a deliberate provocation. I think you're seeing the aggressive use of ice, like having ice agents walking and shows a force. I can literally see out of my window where they were walking several days ago. What you're looking at here is a provocation. It's a, in many ways,

it feels as if the desired in-state here is conflict so that conflict can be met with a harsher response and a harsher response. And it's being sustained in part by the fact that a lot of people in Red America through a lot of years of rhetoric literally believe when someone says cities are burning. You know, Portland is a war zone.

That's not to say that there aren't parts of Portland where there hasn't been violence, but the picture that is being painted is of Fallujah. You know, it's the picture that's being painted is of Gaza, of Mosul, of just conflict zones. And it's just remarkable. Well, what you guys were talking about

is like this kind of trickle-down effort to divide. So you have Red State America being told that Blue Cities are a Hellscape, and Blue State America is told that, you know, that Red Areas are more. marching towards fascism under MAGA or whatever. And this has to have kind of an imprint on America, right? It was like when you have primed your populace not to view each other as disagreeing so much as evil, that's going to linger after Trump is gone. Oh, Trump arose in part because of it.

In other words, you know, when Trump got, came down the escalator in 2015, he did not come down the escalator into a harmonious political society. He came into one where negative polarization had already become a big part of American politics. And then he just came in and made it all so much worse to the point where for an awful lot of Americans, you're viewed with suspicion and anger if you don't hate the other side. And I know that our politicians get this all the time, that when they go home and they go home to their home districts, they're exposed to a constant barrage from the most radicalized members of their community, fight, fight, fight, fight. I hate them, I hate them. Fight, fight, fight. And so this sense of hatred,

this mutual hatred, and the numbers are scary. If you interview committed partisans on either side, the amount of hatred they have for each other is very terrifying. To the point where, you know, going back to some of the dysfunction about Congress, you know, yes, Madison thought that, say, Mike Johnson would say, hey, I'm the Speaker of the House, I'm not a potted plant. I'm not Donald Trump's, you know, subordinate, right? But even if he had that thought, he also knows that even the Speaker of the House will lose his primary if he defies the president. And that that's how committed partisans are to this level of combat. And in Republican land, where I'm most familiar, if you are not opposing the Democrats 100% of the time and supporting Trump 100% of the time,

your electoral track record over the last 10 years is abysmal. And so that long process has purged the GOP of almost anyone who, at least for the time being, is willing to resist Trump, stand up for the humanity of their political opponents. It's a very dark time, very dark place. E.J., play out that tape. What happens is Trump keeps polarizing us for the next three years? I agree, obviously, with a lot of what David has just said about what's happened inside the Republican Party. But would you both forgive me if I brought up at least some positive news or at least some moderating news? Please. Because I think one of the striking things about the polling that you're seeing is even among Americans who may agree with some of Trump's objectives, they consistently think he's gone

too far that he is, they don't like these methods. You see that in attitudes on immigration where people are happy the southern border is essentially closed, but they say negative things about his immigration policy. They don't like troops in the cities. And so you've got substantial majorities. You've only got about 25% who strongly approve of Trump. What that tells you is that out in the country, there is this real uneasiness with the radicalism of many of these steps, such as the troops in the city that Trump is engaged in. And I think that's why you're seeing governors like Pritzker taking a very strong stand against what Trump is doing in Chicago, because I think he knows, sure, the mega base will denounce him.

But I think there are a lot of Americans who, when he says these troops don't belong here, they're quietly nodding their heads, even if they're not Democrats. I don't know what price the president will pay for this and whether the price will not. be paid until 2026, if then. But I think he is paying a price in public opinion for the radicalism. So here's what I worry about, because I am the skunk at the garden party consistently, is that the partisans are really engaged, but that big mushy group that tunes out politics and doesn't really pay attention, the nastier it gets, the more likely they are to just tune out the noise all together, stay home. And the, you know, so that just leaves the entire country at the mercy of the

extremists. I think, Michelle, you're exactly right. There is such a thing as the exhausted majority. You know, this is a super majority of Americans, more than 60 percent of Americans who are disgusted with politics as they exist. The problem is they're very hard to mobilize because the key word in the phrase, exhausted majority is exhausted. And the current moment only makes the them more exhausted, more willing to push back, I mean, to step back. I feel their pain. I do. Oh, I totally do as well. And but what that means is the highly partisan wings essentially just dominate all discourse until each election cycle. And I think that what MAGA is going to learn is the MAGA is going to learn something that the far left

learned in the late 20 teens moving in the early 2020s, that a lot of your success and sort of online aggression and shaming and mobbing and attacking and an intolerance is very temporary and illusory because the majority of people don't like those kinds of tactics and they're going to over time punish aside that they see as bullying people as being extremely cruel and intolerant. And a lot of MAGA looks at some of the cancel culture heyday of the late 20 teens and says, oh, we can do that and we'll do it better and we'll do it more effective. and we'll do it from the Oval Office down. But the pro-free speech position

over the long-term in American history is a very majority position. Any given individual moment, you might be cutting against the grain. But over time, the pro-free speech position is a majority American position. And I think MAGA is making a giant mistake in taking the whole cancel culture discourse

of 2019-2020 and saying, oh, we'll just do this more and more aggressively. And that's going to, work for us? You know, I am joining you from a conference on national service where a lot of good people, including people from both parties, you know, Governor Spencer Cox of Utah is here, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat is here. And they reflect a kind of civic life in the country, people who do good things in local communities and in neighborhoods. And the idea is to try to have a much,

to revive the service movement, to have more people engaged in solving local problems and lifting people up around the country. And that's why I think the notion that all our discourse will inevitably be dominated only by people with very extreme views, I think that will turn out to be wrong. And it's even turning out to be wrong right now. Sure, if you go on parts of social media, that is what you'll see. But thank God, we are not yet at the point where real life is like social media. I think there is civic life out there in the country that is trying to figure out how do you make some progress in this awful climate. I hate being like this because you sound polyana-ish. I am as worried as I've ever been in my life. But I haven't given up on the civic sense that exists among an awful lot of Americans across a lot of our political lines, not all, but a lot of them.

So you brought up Spencer Cox in Utah, and we've talked about some other governors. And I am a enduring cheerleader for governors who I always think have to be a little bit more pragmatic and bipartisan than their colleagues in Washington. But it sounds like you guys are hopeful that, you know, the next president, whether it's a governor or some unknown or, you know, the Washington players can knit us back together, that this is not an irretrievably broken situation? Well, now I'll go dark on you real quick and say, we need to make sure that we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 28. we've got a lot of work to do now to keep the Democratic Republican tax so those options exist. And so President Trump doesn't run for a third term as some of his people have floated. So I would put that on the table. But then my answer is yes.

I think there are a lot of people out there thinking, how do we repair, not only repair the damage, but to use a phrase that I wish we could use more, it was used by President Biden, but build back better really should be the theme for what happens after 2028. We should not. We should be comforted by history, but not too much. So what would comfort us about history is that we've had snapbacks. We've bounced back after repressive periods in American history. who was the next president and elected after Richard Nixon,

corrupt imperial presidency, a Baptist Sunday school teacher. Like, that's a big zag away from the zig of Richard Nixon, right? Love that thermostatic electorate, yeah. Right, right. And so we have had snapback times throughout American history. That's one of the reasons why America's a much better place right now, even with all of our problems than it was in 1925 or what it was in 1825. But we can't presume from the fact that we always survived before,

that we will always survive in the future. I mean, think about the Civil War. I mean, arguably, if Joshua Chamberlain doesn't fix bayonets on day two of Gettysburg, on a little roundtop, it's a whole different history, right? And so the American experiment is a closely run thing. You know, even in certain other circumstance, there was a snapback after Woodrow Wilson jailed a whole bunch of political opponents, hundreds of political opponents.

We had a snapback, even though you wouldn't put FDR anywhere in the category of a Woodrow Wilson, people were so worried after he won four presidential elections that they amended the constitution to term limit president. We do have snapback moments. I do think we will have one if we can hang on in. And I believe in those two. I think we usually end up taking more steps forward than back, but sometimes the snapback can take a very long time. And the one that comes to mind is Jim Crow. We had enormous progress toward racial equality during Reconstruction. That ended in 1877. It took us, Jim Crow was dominant for about 80 years before we finally successfully pushed it back in the civil rights movement. So, yeah, I think we need hope in our ability to snap back. And remember that we may have to fight real hard if we're going to snap back quickly.

Okay. On that cautionary note, let's land this plane. And before we go, though, I need to get everybody's recommendations for the week. E.J., you were warned to come packing. You got a recommendation for us? I do indeed. I have been completely transfixed by a 19-year-old jazz pianist called Brandon Goldberg, who plays as if he is an old master of the genre. If you want to check him out, there. He did an album at Dizzy's Club here in New York, where I am today. But listening to someone, and there are a bunch of young people out there who are doing great things in jazz, and this makes me happy. Okay. David? So I fear I'm going to let listeners down, Michelle, because I'm normally your

streaming guru. I've got a television suggestion every week because I'm a power consumer. I count on that. No, I've got a book recommendation. So I'm a sci-fi nerd. I've been looking for a good sci-fied series to take my attention after the expanse ended, which was also, by the way, great television show on Amazon Prime. And the same folks who brought you the expanse series, which is a near-future sci-fi series set in the solar system, have brought you a new series.

And book one is called The Mercy of Gods. and it's set in a human-settled planet with overwhelmingly powerful alien intelligence, and it's just really good. It's great world-building. It's great character-building. I know there is a subset of our audience that is sci-fi nerds. I hear from them. They ask me for suggestions, and this is my suggestion, the mercy of God's.

Fantastic. Okay, I'll wait for the series because I do not read sci-fi. I watch sci-fi, but the reading sci-fi is a bridge too far. So I'm going in a different direction, and I'm going with a food recommendation. I think people should dip a toe into the Dubai chocolate craze. You guys know what this is, yes? No clue. No clue.

Okay, so I like my chocolate. I am a kind of particular snob about chocolate, and I have to say, This is something that I was late to. In 2021, this company in the UAE came up with a chocolate bar. It's like this chunky candy bar that's chocolate coating, this inside mush of pistachios and crispy shredded pastries. Within two years, it had gone viral on social media and has taken off everywhere. So now you can get it at Trader Joe's and Walmart, and it started spreading out into a foods. IHOP introduced these as pancakes. There are croissants. Apparently, they were all the rage,

Dubai-style Russian Easter cakes. They have caused a pistachio shortage among some, according to some pistachio companies. And because this is how committed I am to this show, I bought several different brands. I will be expensive. Nice. My research is taking that bullet and eating tons of Dubai chocolate. But I want people to get in on this before it jumps the shark and like goes all pumpkin spice where you've got Dubai chocolate hummus and, you know, the chili. Dubai chocolate. So I'm a curious to skip the Starbucks coffee and the IHop pancakes that were around and just go out and at least kind of savor the moment. You know, as you were talking, Michelle, I remember I saw those stories. And I still.

stopped reading them because I feared, and now you've proven it, that I would run out and eat way too many of those things. But thank you for your dedication to our listeners. I'm taking that bullet so you don't have to, but I think with that, guys, we're going to leave it there. Thank you so much, E.J, for joining us. David, always a pleasure. I will see you guys later. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Michelle. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bashaka Darba, Christina Samuoski,

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