It’s Hard to Overstate How Disturbing This Trump Directive Is

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Judging from recent statements, actions, and policy directives, President Donald Trump seems set on twisting the law into a weapon against his political critics—and using the military as its chief agent of enforcement.

In short, he is laying the groundwork for a police state, and he is doing so in broad daylight, assuming that our constitutional guardrails will bend and fold, as they often have under more-piecemeal pressures since his second presidency began just nine months ago.

None of his remarks or executive orders create new law on their own; they direct the executive branch, but they can be struck down in court if they lack solid legal footing. The question is whether, faced with such blatant challenges, our institutions will succumb or resist.

The clearest statement of Trump’s intentions is a “presidential action” issued on Sept. 25, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” also known as National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7.^[2]

The document begins with a false assertion—that in recent years “heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence” have “dramatically increased,” citing the assassination of Charlie Kirk (“cheered” by some “who adhered to the alleged shooter’s ideology”), the killing of a health care executive, and the assassination attempts against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Trump himself.

Notably, it does not mention any right-wing actions, such as the conspiracy to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor or the violent attempt on Jan. 6 to overturn the 2020 presidential election (or Trump’s blanket pardoning of everyone who took part).

But this indicates only the partisan nature of NSPM-7. More troubling are its definitions of domestic terrorism. It claims that the assassination of Kirk and a surge of riots against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents mark a “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns … designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” It calls for a “new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies,” including “funding sources and predicate actions behind them.”

Take a close look at the language buried within those sentences. It’s calling on law enforcement to go after those who are trying to “change or direct policy”—something any political organization does. Which policies? The document makes this clear as well. The “common threads” of these “domestic terrorist” groups “include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as “extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The document calls for “a National Joint Terrorism Task Force” and “local offices” (“JTTFs”) to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations” that “foment” these ideas “before they result in violent political acts.”

Read literally (and why shouldn’t it be?), this is a national security memorandum—signed by the president of the United States—that essentially outlaws what George Orwell called, in a famous work of speculative fiction^[3], “thought crimes.”

Trump elaborated on this on Tuesday, five days after he issued NSPM-7, in a speech to more than 500 generals and admirals at a Marine base in Virginia^[4]. Much of his 75-minute oration was campaign-rally boilerplate, railing against “Sleepy Joe” Biden, the “sleazeballs” in “fake media,” and the injustice of his not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But in between all that was a very clear message^[5] about a new priority for the senior officers in the room—the war at home, waged not only against undocumented migrants (“an invasion … no different from a foreign army”) but also against American citizens.

“This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room,” the commander in chief told the generals and admirals, “because it’s an enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.” He added, “It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved, at all.” The streets of American cities, he said, should be “training grounds” for the armed forces. And he authorized those troops to take the gloves off. He recalled scenes of protesters spitting at National Guard members, who stood there and took it. No longer, Trump said. From now on, “if they spit, you hit—is that OK?” (The audience properly remained silent.) If someone throws a brick at your car window, “you get out of that car,” the president told them, “and you can do whatever the hell you want to do.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had hollered a similar message in a warmup speech to the senior officers. He was overhauling the entire field of military lawyers and inspectors general. “No more frivolous complaints … no more smearing reputations … no more legal limbo. … We’re done with that shit.” Basic training should be “scary, tough … and disciplined too,” with sergeants allowed to “instill healthy fear” and “put their hands on recruits.”

Hegseth had first come to Trump’s attention as a Fox News host railing against the prosecution of American officers being tried for war crimes. Trump later pardoned those war criminals and took them out on the campaign trail. This sends a message to officers and enlisted personnel: Go ahead and beat up those who get in the way, whether they’re enemy soldiers on a battlefield, protesters on American streets, or privates in basic training.

There are schisms on these issues within the U.S. military. Most officers and their underlings abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and edicts to stay out of politics. But others chafe at the bit to let loose the dogs of their wild-eyed fantasies. Studies have uncovered^[6] pockets of right-wing extremism within the military. Several of the Jan. 6 rioters, including those convicted of crimes, were military veterans^[7]. An article in the latest New York Times Magazine^[8] reported on how an era of “vigilante justice” on the battlefield has ushered in a disregard for law within the armed forces.

How the numbers break down—how many officers and enlisted personnel are disturbed by Trump’s and Hegseth’s rhetoric, how many welcome it—is unknown. Whatever the balance, it would be a horrible fate for our democracy if we had to find out.

Finally, there is another trend wending its way through all this: Trump’s use of armed forces to attack small boats in the Caribbean, allegedly piloted by drug smugglers and carrying narcotics to American shores. There have been four such attacks^[9], killing 21 people. Even if the boats were transporting drugs (no evidence of this has been publicly provided), the attacks were clearly unlawful^[10]. Drug smuggling is not a capital crime; at the time of most of the attacks, neither the president nor Congress had declared a war on drug smugglers, who in any case were not attacking Americans in the same way that, say, al-Qaida hijackers and militias attacked U.S. citizens or soldiers.

The attacks were also both unprecedented and unnecessary. In September, a few days after the first military sinking of a boat, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that it had seized the largest haul of narcotics in its history^[12]—76,140 pounds’ worth, with a street value of $473 million, and potent enough to create 23 million lethal doses, in 19 separate interdictions in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific.

The Coast Guard did this not by killing anyone but rather by stopping the boats, boarding them, and arresting the smugglers. That is how the agency has been interdicting drug traffic for decades. In 2022, the most recent year for which there is complete data, the Coast Guard seized 150 metric tons^[13] (about 165 U.S. tons) of illegal narcotics in this way.

It may not be as theatrical as ordering special forces to drop bombs on a boat. As Hegseth bellowed after the first attack^[14], “We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean, and when other people try to do that, they’re going to meet the same fate.” Indeed, Trump has since “determined^[15]”—though with no apparent authority—that the U.S. is now in a war with drug cartels, including those allegedly behind the smuggling boat captains in the Caribbean.

Trump boasted of this as well in his speech in Virginia, chuckling that no boats were daring to come out into the Caribbean, not even fishing boats. Looking at the straight-faced generals and admirals—the nation’s top officers, entrusted with the 2.1 million members of the U.S. armed forces and a nearly $1 trillion budget designed to deter and, if necessary, fight wars against real threats and adversaries—one could only wonder what they made of the juvenile fist-bumping by their two highest-ranking civilian overseers, the commander in chief and the secretary of defense. What sorts of orders might they have to carry out? Would those orders be unlawful? If so, would they—the officers who swore an oath to the Constitution—have the courage to disobey?

Judging from the substantive portions of Trump’s speech, his actions in the Caribbean, his attempts to deploy troops to American cities (which he described as more dangerous than anywhere in Afghanistan, to a room of officers who had fought in Afghanistan), and the underlying context of NSPM-7, that day of judgment may come soon.

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