Trump’s Misrule of Law

IAN AYRES, JACOB SLAUGHTER, TIMOTHY SNYDER, AZIZ HUQ, MICHAEL BURLEIGH, RUTI TEITEL

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Insisting that cities governed by the Democratic Party are plagued by violent crime and harbor illegal immigrants, Donald Trump has deployed National Guard soldiers to Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, DC – despite opposition from courts and state officials. Now, he has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act – an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy military forces within the United States to suppress domestic rebellion – and called for the arrest of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker.

Ian Ayres and Jacob Slaughter of Yale Law School make one thing clear: Trump’s claim that Democratic cities are “hotbeds of crime” is not supported by the data. Of America’s 50 most dangerous metropolitan areas, 40 – including the top 17 – are in states that Trump won in 2024. If “federal crime fighting followed data rather than politics,” National Guard troops would be heading to the “Republican-led metropolitan areas of Shreveport, Louisiana (20.5 murders per 100,000); Baton Rouge, Louisiana (18.7 murders); Mobile, Alabama (17.6 murders); and Rocky Mount, North Carolina (15.6 murders).”

The University of Toronto’s Timothy Snyder puts it plainly. Not only are the deployjments “obviously illegal and designed to intimidate”; they are also the “political equivalent of a lit fuse,” as they create the “statistical likelihood of an incident that can be used to manufacture some greater crisis.” Preventing Trump from “using the US government and armed forces to establish a dictatorship at home” will require powerful resistance, and America’s federalist system may be democracy’s best hope.

But according to Aziz Huq of the University of Chicago Law School, it is precisely a “failure of federalism” that has enabled Trump’s militarization of American cities in the first place, with “every lever of federal power” being turned into an “instrument of political repression against non-aligned states.” The “breakdown of American federalism” arises from another “structural failure of American constitutionalism”: as “partisan-aligned majorities” in Congress and on the Supreme Court have “abdicated their constitutional responsibilities,” the separation of powers has effectively collapsed.