Mother Jones illustration; Jonathan Alcorn/Zuma; Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto/AP;
For the past 30 years, former Graham County, Arizona, sheriff Richard Mack has been railing against federal overreach and warning of encroaching governmental tyranny. As an antidote to this threat to freedom and liberty, Mack, who hasn’t actually been a sheriff since 1997, founded the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in 2011. Its mission was straightforward: to promote his view that elected sheriffs have the authority to defend their citizens by arresting federal agents they believe are violating the Constitution.
“The President of the United States has no power, no jurisdiction—I don’t care if it’s George Washington himself—to tell anyone in your state to change one damn thing,” he told an audience of about 100 anti-government “patriots” and “strict constitutionalists” at a 2010 conference in Valley Forge convened by people fighting the “New World Order.”
So, naturally, I thought of Mack in June, when Trump sent the Marines in to occupy Los Angeles and federalized the California National Guard before deploying it to assist with ICE raids in the city against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. I’d spent some time with Mack in 2021 when I wrote a profile of him. I knew of his history of involvement with anti-government militia groups and fighting everything from gun control laws to mask and vaccine mandates. Surely, I thought, Mack will mobilize his supporters to protest this outrageous federal assault on states’ rights. Isn’t this just the sort of tyranny he’s been warning us about?
Ok, maybe I didn’t really believe Mack would publicly oppose Trump. He’s a supporter. But in early July, when federal troops in tactical gear and Humvees descended on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles to terrorize residents, I did wonder whether it bothered him. After all, he’d been on the frontlines when supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy took up arms against Bureau of Land Management agents who tried to confiscate cattle that he was illegally grazing on federal land. “We don’t believe that bureaucratic policies and regulations supersede the Constitution,” he told one crowd.
“We don’t believe that bureaucratic policies and regulations supersede the Constitution.”
Mack even stood with Bundy’s son Ammon to protest the prosecution of two Oregon ranchers accused of setting fire to BLM-managed range land shortly before Ammon staged an armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles seemed like exactly the sort of thing Mack lived to fight. So I decided to reach out and ask him why he hadn’t come to defend the citizens of LA from this unprecedented federal incursion.
“I think Trump’s doing a very good job,” he told me from his home in Arizona, where he was getting ready to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary. Mack believes that Trump was completely justified in sending federal troops into LA to crack down on rioting and violence. “I’ve researched it and studied it out,” he said. “When Governor Wallace refused to allow black students to enter the U of Alabama, JFK brought in federal troops. I totally support what he did, and what President Trump did.”
Mack’s position isn’t unusual. Since 2009, I have spent a lot of time covering right-wing groups, tea party activists, the Bundys, and other anti-government extremists who have couched their opposition to the federal government or Democrats in the language of the Constitution. They have plied me with multiple copies of their favorite pocket Constitution, put out by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, a group founded by the late anti-communist W. Cleon Skousen, whom Mack credits for his “conversion to constitutionalism.”
These activists fiercely proclaimed their unshakable commitment to the foundational document, which many of them believed was divinely inspired. Yet in May, when Trump was asked if he had to uphold the Constitution, and he replied, “I don’t know,” Mack and his ilk uttered not a peep, even though so much of what they once warned about—and which was dismissed as the rantings of paranoid extremists—seems on the verge of coming true.
Former tea partiers, mandatory mask and vaccine opponents, or elected officials like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who insisted in 2015 that an ordinary military training exercise known as Jade Helm was an attempt by President Obama to invade Texas—none of them have objected to Trump’s use of the military on domestic affairs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a “strict constitutionalist” on the right who has spoken out against Trump’s actions that many courts have already found to be unconstitutional, such as his punishing law firms he doesn’t like. And not a word from any of them about his unprecedented and likely illegal use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dispense with due process in deporting immigrants.
Consider Glenn Beck, who brought Skousen’s interpretation of the Constitution back into popular circulation during the rise of the tea party movement in 2009. He spent hours warning viewers that “the Constitution is hanging by a thread,” and that Obama was planning to invoke martial law to impose a totalitarian government, possibly by creating FEMA camps that it would use for mass detention of the regime’s enemies. (Eventually, after much criticism, he conceded that the FEMA camps were an unfounded conspiracy theory.)
But in July, FEMA announced it would be sending more than $600 million to the states to build detention camps. And the Trump administration has been sending immigrants to “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, where the original plans literally would have used FEMA tents to hold immigrants before deporting them to places like South Sudan without due process. And where is Glenn Beck? Supporting Trump.
At the end of July, Beck even devoted 10 minutes of his radio show to lampooning CNN for its coverage of the Florida detention center, which included reporting on the facility’s overcrowding and lack of running water or sewage system. “That is the same story for many mobile home parks in Florida, surrounded by alligators,” Beck said, cracking himself up.
The Tea Party Patriots is one of the original grassroots conservative groups that sprang up after Obama was elected. “Our vision is for a nation where individual liberty is cherished and maximized, where the Constitution is revered and upheld,” its website says. “One law for all and equal application of the law is a founding principle that distinguishes America from the lands immigrants fled to escape oppression. No American President, Republican or Democrat, should ever go around the Constitution, no matter how important the issue.”
The group’s co-founder Jenny Beth Martin once warned tea party activists against falling for Trump’s siren song in 2016, saying, “Donald Trump loves himself first, last, and everywhere in between. He loves himself more than our country, he loves himself more than the Constitution.”
In 2013, Tea Party Patriots filed a suit, alleging that the Obama administration was violating their First Amendment rights by weaponizing the IRS to hold up approval of their nonprofit application. More than three dozen other tea party groups also filed suit, represented by Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the conservative counterpart to the ACLU, the American Center for Law and Justice. He told Congress in 2015, “To be very clear, the IRS was—and is still—used as a weapon against the Obama Administration’s political enemies.”
As it turned out, the IRS was also scrutinizing liberal groups’ nonprofit applications, and there was no evidence that Obama had had anything to do with its handling of the tea party nonprofits, some of which clearly deserved a second look. In 2017, the lawsuits were settled favorably on the tea partiers’ behalf. Today, Trump is openly threatening to have the IRS revoke the nonprofit status of Harvard University and nonprofit groups whose work he opposes.
Once more, there has been no outcry by these constitutional conservatives. Sekulow went on to lead Trump’s first impeachment defense team, and Martin is now one of the president’s most sycophantic supporters. Neither Beck, Sekulow, nor Martin responded to requests for comment.
KrisAnne Hall, a lawyer who helps Mack conduct law enforcement trainings with seminars on the Constitution, is also a veteran of the tea party movement who fought mask and vaccine mandates during the pandemic. When I reached her by email to ask why she wasn’t suing the Trump administration over its constitutional violations, she asked me why I’d never contacted her to ask about President Biden’s unconstitutional activity. She answered none of my questions.
Mack was a founding board member of the Oath Keepers, a militia group made up of many current and former law enforcement and military members. Their very “oath” involved refusing to follow orders from a president if they believed those orders were unconstitutional. Among the examples of an order the Oath Keepers pledged to defy was entering “with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state’s legislature and governor,” which is exactly what Trump did with the Marines and National Guard in California.
The Oath Keepers went on to play a significant role in orchestrating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, for which many were convicted of sedition and other serious crimes. After taking office in January, Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences, so perhaps their acquiescence isn’t a surprise.
Yet Mack, who was smart enough to avoid participating in the Capitol siege, has also been pretty subdued since Trump took office again, perhaps because right-wing media isn’t doing a very good job of informing their audience of Trump’s potentially unconstitutional activity. When I talked to Mack in July, he claimed to have no idea that US Marines were still occupying Los Angeles, long after any civil unrest had taken place.
While he didn’t completely believe me that this was the case, he acknowledged that allowing federal troops to cross the country for domestic reasons conflicted with the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of federal military personnel for domestic law enforcement. (California Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the administration of violating the act when he sued over its having federalized the California National Guard in June.)
The act has long been an article of faith for many militia groups. “At first glance, this would be a violation, what Trump did,” Mack conceded. “Federal troops can be at the border, but they can’t be policing the streets of America.”
Mark Pitcavage—a longtime extremism researcher at the Anti-Defamation League who is writing a history of the U.S. militia movement—says the silence of the anti-government groups and militias during the Trump administration is noteworthy. Historically, the anti-government extremists and militia groups have deeply distrusted every president, from George H.W. Bush to Obama.
“Trump was the first major party nominee that the militia movement has ever supported…They’re basically in his pocket.”
“Trump was the first major party nominee that the militia movement has ever supported,” Pitcavage marveled. “They loved him as a candidate, they loved him as a president, even though he did things that if an establishment Democrat or Republican had done, they would have raised bloody hell. They’re basically in his pocket.”
One person who isn’t in Trump’s pocket is Ammon Bundy, who has long been something of a folk hero for people in the patriot movement. I first started covering Bundy in 2017, when he was on trial in Nevada along with many of his family members and supporters on charges related to the armed resistance to the BLM. He spent more than a year in jail before that case ended in a mistrial because of prosecutorial misconduct. (He’d also been prosecuted in Oregon for the wildlife refuge takeover, only to have a federal jury find him not guilty in 2016.)
In 2021, I wrote a profile of him when he was fighting mask mandates and lockdowns during the pandemic and gearing up for his unsuccessful run for governor in Idaho. Bundy is never without his pocket Constitution and even gave whiteboard lessons on the document to his followers while he was occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But unlike Mack and the other alleged constitutionalists on the right, Bundy told me by text that he found the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement and use of the military in Los Angeles “very concerning!”
He said he was ashamed that his recent troubles thus far have prevented him from being more outspoken about Trump’s unconstitutional actions. (He’s currently avoiding a $50 million legal judgment in Idaho and an arrest warrant for failing to appear in court.) “Gavin Newsom is a tool,” he told me from an undisclosed location while making breakfast for his large family. “He is a very despicable politician in almost every manner. But he is right about Trump’s violation of the Constitution in invading California with the US military.”
A devout Mormon, Bundy had been critical of Trump’s immigration policies during his first administration and lost some followers when he spoke out about it. He is nothing if not consistent, which he acknowledges is not the case with many people who claim to revere the Constitution. “It has been my sad experience that most people will set principles, justice, and good aside to spite those whom they despise,” he said.
Bundy and his supporters have long suspected that the Obama administration had authorized a drone strike on his family ranch. He said people with “more socialist ideas on the left” would have supported such a move, “just as the nationalists on the right have no problem when the president mimics the SS policies in rounding up people who have committed no crime against anyone.” He finds the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts “exceedingly dangerous” and in direct conflict with the Founders’ intent.
“The principles enshrined in the US Constitution apply to all people equally and are intended to protect the rights of every individual within the jurisdiction of the United States,” Bundy told me. What Trump is doing by sending masked ICE agents out to grab people off the street “stands in direct opposition to the founding principles of this nation.”