RICHARD K. SHERWIN
NEW YORK – A little over a year from now, Americans will vote to determine which political party will control the two houses of Congress. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party currently controls both, but its majorities are narrow (53-47 in the Senate and 219-213 in the House of Representatives). There is no modern precedent for a president’s party to avoid midterm election losses in the House unless the president’s popular approval is well above 50%, and in Trump’s case, an unweighted average of recent polls shows his approval at 45.3%, with 51.9% (a net of -6.6) of voters disapproving.
Under normal circumstances, the president would seek to improve his party’s electoral standing. Yet Trump is doubling down on some of his most unpopular policies. For example, his latest statements suggest that he is committed to sending more National Guard troops to Democratic Party-controlled cities, even though 58% of Americans oppose such deployments. While the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of federal troops for domestic policing, the Insurrection Act of 1807 provides an exception for responding to violent uprisings against the state, and Trump is already threatening to invoke it.
That is why Trump and his advisers are increasingly using terms like “terrorist” and “insurrection” to describe anyone who opposes their agenda. Trump recently claimed, falsely, that Portland, Oregon, has been taken over by left-wing “domestic terrorists” (adding, preposterously, that the city doesn’t “even have stores anymore”). Similarly, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who increasingly appears to be running things, has called federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration “terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” He has also said that the Democrats are not a political party, but a “domestic extremist organization.”
Such labels matter, because Trump himself has explicitly described how he thinks extremists should be handled. If “radical left lunatics” cause trouble on Election Day, he told Fox News last October, the problem “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” That allusion to Election Day is no accident. Moreover, the vagueness surrounding the enemy’s precise identity serves Trump’s purpose. It is enough, as he recently told an audience of 800 top military leaders, to say that America faces an “invasion from within … No different than a foreign enemy.”
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