Donald Trump has faced backlash for his comments about using the U.S. military domestically, a few weeks after Mexico gave its army more power.
The former president has been embroiled in controversy after he told Fox News that the “enemy within” should be “handled” by the military, when discussing his concerns about disruptions to Election Day.
“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” he said in an interview that aired on October 13. “And I think they’re the big—and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Last month, Mexico’s Senate approved controversial reform that will give the armed forces control of the civilian-led National Guard, following a previous attempt to incorporate the National Guard into the military in 2022 that failed as it was declared unconstitutional by the Mexican Supreme Court.
Former President Donald Trump participates in a roundtable with Latino leaders on October 22 in Doral, Florida. Trump has faced criticism for his comments about using the military on his own citizens.
AP
Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who served from 2018 to 2024, created the National Guard, which was put under civilian control to quell any fears about the military’s involvement in public security.
While political scientists Newsweek spoke with doubted the likelihood of Trump introducing a similar policy, particularly because of how different the American and Mexican systems are, they said his rhetoric showed resemblance.
“There are similarities between Trump’s proposed policy and the Mexico policy in that both weaken the system of checks and balances and erode at an independent military,” said Nathaniel Carrington, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
He said Trump’s “proposals and past statements seem to follow from the idea that the military is there to do the president’s bidding.”
“If there’s a problem that can’t be easily solved by the political process, he seems to want to send in the military,” said Carrington, who specializes in judicial politics. “Trump seems to want to deploy the military for law enforcement purposes and wants to do so unilaterally without Congress. This is very authoritarian and further erodes the system of checks and balances.
“While the president is the commander in chief of the military, the ability of the president to deploy the military domestically for law enforcement purposes [as opposed to something like humanitarian relief after a natural disaster] is something that would need to involve Congress. Deploying the military domestically for law enforcement purposes without Congress would be quite authoritarian.”
He added: “I do not think this is a situation where Trump learned about what Mexico is doing and then wanted to follow their lead. Trump has long wanted to use the military as a show of domestic strength and to achieve domestic policy goals.”
As an example, Carrington cited former Defense Secretary Mark Esper‘s accusations that during the protests in 2020 after the death of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Trump wanted to deploy active-duty troops and asked authorities if they could shoot protesters in the legs.
This was one of the multiple claims Esper made in his memoir, A Sacred Oath, which Trump has dismissed while calling Esper, whom he fired after the 2020 election, as “lightweight” and “incompetent.”
Jeronimo Cortina, associate professor of political science at the University of Houston, agreed with Carrington that Trump seems to want “more executive power without any checks.”
He said that while there are laws that allow the president to deploy the military internally, expanding authority on it without checks and balances would “1,000 percent be a violation of what the Founding Fathers wanted.”
Cortina, who specializes in American and Latino politics, said the U.S. political system is, in part, based on the “separation and balance of powers.”
“Once you start meddling, once you start, you know, tweaking the balance and separation of powers, then that creates a whole complication,” he said. “The whole system is designed in such a way that one branch is checking the other one constantly and that’s what has given rise to having a ‘stable system’ over almost 260 years.
“So if you mess with that bounce of power, then you enter into something that, you know, the Great American Experiment has never tried before.”
But Cortina went on to say that he does not believe the Supreme Court would enact a law to give the president that kind of power.
“I don’t think that the Supreme Court, even though it’s 1,000 percent polarized, would go that far because of the institutional repercussions of that,” he said. “So it is a matter is more political rhetoric. I’m not sure that the institutional checks and balances would allow President Trump, if he wins, to do as he wishes.”
Cortina stressed that the conversation about using the military internally is different in the U.S. than in Mexico, where you have “contextual variables,” which include the country’s “rampant organized crime.”
He said some communities worried about “basic security” might welcome the military being in charge of security there.
“So that’s a different context in comparison to the U.S. using the military on Election Day, for example,” Cortina said. “It’s a different institutional setting is a different historical setting.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s team via email for comment.
Critics of the former president have long accused him of being authoritarian, something he and his supporters have repeatedly rubbished.
Last year, Fox News host Sean Hannity, in front of a crowd in Davenport, Iowa, gave Trump a chance to assure the American people that he would not abuse his power.
“Except for day one,” Trump responded. “I want to close the border and I want to drill, drill, drill. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
Earlier in the interview, Trump accused Democrats of being the ones that abuse power.
