President Donald Trump has been threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act for a very long time. Dating back to his first term, he has repeatedly floated the rarely used law, which gives a president extraordinary powers to dispatch the military to put down domestic unrest.
And now he’s doing it again, this time in Minneapolis amid increasingly heated anti-ICE protests.
It has often appeared as if Trump really just wants to deploy the military on US soil. He’s already done it in extraordinary ways without the Insurrection Act, by sending the National Guard to blue cities. But the Supreme Court late last month delivered a major blow to that effort.
That left the Insurrection Act as a potentially more legally viable fallback. And, lo and behold, less than a month after the Supreme Court ruling, Trump has blitzed Minneapolis with thousands of ICE agents. We’ve seen shootings and one killing by those agents amid heated protests. (The administration contends they were acting in self-defense, with the latest firing after he was assaulted). And now, the president has again threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the troops.
There is a problem with the Insurrection Act, though, and it’s apparently the same one that has prevented Trump from using it before: It’s drastic. CNN’s Alayna Treene reports White House officials have been concerned about the politics of this idea. It’s the kind of thing you want to be very sure people are ready for and feel is legitimate.
It seems unlikely Americans feel that way now.
Indeed, if anything, they seem to think the unrest in Minneapolis is the government’s fault in the first place.
The big example is, of course, the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent last week. Despite the administration claiming Good was at-fault and even engaged in “domestic terrorism,” multiple polls have now shown Americans strongly disagree.
They all show people saying that the shooting was not justified or appropriate by between 18 and 30 points. The CNN poll showed registered voters said it was “inappropriate” by a 2-to-1 margin, 56%-26%.
In other words, the episode that’s viewed as triggering a possible government military crackdown is … something the American people blame on the government itself – and by wide margins.
The new data also suggest Americans think the government is already being too heavy-handed more broadly – and that it’s actually creating problems.
The CNN poll, for instance, showed 51% said not only that the shooting was wrong, but that it reflected bigger problems with the way ICE is operating.
It also showed Americans said 51%-31% that ICE’s enforcement actions were making cities “less safe.”
And a new Yahoo-YouGov poll, likewise, showed Americans said 54%-34% that ICE raids had “done more harm than good.”
These numbers are particularly remarkable because Americans overwhelmingly seemed to want the government to deport more people. They have generally agreed with Trump’s goals here. And yet, it’s apparently gone too far for them. Trump has squandered that advantage.
Also complicating the matter for Trump is that this is merely the latest entry in a growing narrative of overreach.
If Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to cities like Chicago, Portland and the District of Columbia last year were trial balloons for the Insurrection Act, they’re trial balloons that didn’t go well. While Americans initially seemed open to the idea of using the guard to improve safety in crime-ridden areas, they eventually came to oppose the effort by double-digits.
Trump’s approval numbers on crime – a longstanding strength for him – have even dropped.
And beyond Trump’s deployments of federal law enforcement and National Guard personnel, Americans tend to think he’s going “too far” in a whole host of areas, including his tariffs and his foreign policy. An AP-NORC poll this week, for example, showed 62% of Americans said that Trump was going too far in using presidential power to achieve his goals.
The situation in Minneapolis is fraught and dynamic. And we’ll have to wait to see what polls say about this specific idea of the Insurrection Act. But none of the indicators point in the direction of an American public that is asking or ready for a historic military crackdown.
If anything, they suggest Trump’s heavy-handedness with the military and ICE on US soil has already worn quite thin – and it could be viewed as fuel on the fire.
If Trump were to make good on his threat to send in the troops via the Insurrection Act, he’d risk looking like he’s inflaming a problem he’s created. And there’s a strong possibility the situation could spiral out of control in ways that could overshadow the rest of Trump’s second-term-project.
To the extent he presses forward, it’ll be one of the biggest political risks he’s taken as president.
Of course, recent history suggests that if Trump wants to do this kind of thing, it’s quite possible he’ll just do it.
