How to Resist Trump’s Militarization of America

Trump is thus not only turning to the military as his primary tool for carrying out government policies. He is simultaneously building a partisan-political military as his personal police force to impose his policy preferences on the entire country. The deployment of troops to help carry out immigration law, to serve as immigration judges, and to police ordinary crime in Washington, D.C., epitomizes Trump’s militarized approach to the presidency.

That leads to my second point: For Trump, the militarization of the government is a key tool for carrying out a deeply racist agenda. From the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2015, which he launched with a racist screed about Hispanic immigrants, Trump’s politics have been built on white racial grievance. And with the use of immigration agents clad in tactical gear, backed up by the U.S. military, to carry out his mass-deportation agenda, Trump clearly sees violent military action on U.S. streets as the best way to enact his white-grievance agenda. The same impulse is obvious in the Trump administration’s renaming of U.S. military bases to honor Confederate leaders—Confederate leaders who waged war against the United States for the purpose of preserving a system of racial slavery.

The interplay between white supremacy and militarization in the United States dates back centuries, of course. The historian Nikhil Pal Singh, for example, has cataloged a long history of racism, warfare, and policing in the U.S. Indian removal policies are one major instance, as are armed slave patrols in the antebellum period. In the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois criticized the fact that Marine General Smedley Butler—who had famously led U.S. military interventions throughout Latin America and built a militarized police force to control Haiti—was taking over and militarizing the domestic police force in Philadelphia too. Almost a century after that, one of the claims made by Black Lives Matter activists in the 2010s and early 2020s was, similarly, that surplus military gear from the war on terror, such as body armor and armored vehicles, was being shipped to local police departments across the country and then redeployed against Black people.