Long before the 2024 election (and before he was OMB Director), Russell Vought’s think tank was working on the rationale for invoking The Insurrection Act to deploy the military on American streets. Project 2025 — the blueprint for seizing power in a second Trump presidency — could only come to fruition if he could get around the pesky legal hurdle of the U.S. Constitution. Ali Velshi looks at how today, National Guard troops have been deployed to five American cities, and much worse is ahead as Trump and his advisors have begun labeling any American who dares protest his power grab as “insurrectionist.”
Demonstration is a fundamental right in America. Against the objections of state and city leaders, the president has called in troops to fight protestors and patrol streets where citizens are not content with their neighbors being kidnapped. Whether you’re a priest or the elderly, the administration has decided that if you disagree, you are an insurrectionist, and that is a potential justification for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.
The act allows the president to send the military against Americans, on American soil, to “enforce the laws,” and “suppress rebellion” whenever there are “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion.” This is a broad, open interpretation that largely leaves discretion to the president, and legal scholars have been warning for decades that this could lead to exactly what we are seeing now.
The president of the United States has decided that its own citizens are the enemy. We are a real-time test of whether our democracy can survive such a threat.
LISTEN: VELSHI ON PROJECT 2025 AND THE INSURRECTION ACT
WATCH: TURNING AMERICANS INTO ENEMIES
MORE FROM MSNBC’S ALI VELSHI
