Former President Donald Trump proposed using the U.S. Military or National Guard against “radical left lunatics” on Election Day and those he’s dubbed the “enemy from within” if needed, but can he actually do that?

Trump’s comments came during an Oct. 13 interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures,” saying that he would bring military force to bear on American soil to quell election day chaos.

“It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard and if really necessary, by the military,” he said. Trump also spoke about threats facing the country and that he was less worried about foreign or outside actors than he is the “enemy from within.”

Vice President Kamala Harris seized on Trump’s comments, saying during an Oct. 14 rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, that he’s becoming “increasingly unstable and unhinged.”

“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country,” she said. “This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America — and dangerous.”

The Insurrection Act

There’s an over 200-year-old law that Trump could turn to in order to use the military: the Insurrection Act.

Passed in 1807, the act allows the president to use “regular military and National Guard forces to suppress domestic unrest,” according to the Brookings Institution.

The law has been relied on sporadically throughout the nation’s history, and some legal scholars say there’s little to stop an acting president from using it.

“The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,” Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Associated Press in 2023. “There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.”

A law passed in 1878, the Posse Comitatus Act, made it a crime to use military forces on U.S. soil — aside from a governor deploying their state’s National Guard, The New York Times reported. But the Insurrection Act can allow for that safety measure to be superseded.

If Trump imposed the Insurrection Act, he wouldn’t be the first president to do so.

Nunn told the AP the Insurrection Act has been invoked 40 times by various presidents, and was relied on heavily during the Civil Rights era to enforce cooperation in Southern communities — perhaps most notably when Dwight Eisenhower enlisted the 101st Airborne to escort Black students into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The Brennan Center, a progressive think tank, called for the law to be amended in early 2024 to prevent abuse. The act is “an outdated law that is in urgent need of reform to prevent abuses of power and adapt to modern times,” the Center said, pointing to Trump’s rhetoric on immigration and desire to put the military to work along the border.

“There are few constraints to this presidential power — neither Congress nor the courts play a role in deciding what constitutes an obstruction or rebellion — and the law does not limit what actions military forces may take once deployed,” the center said.

The American Civil Liberties Union is preparing for Trump to use the Insurrection Act and is drafting lawsuits to block his attempts, The New York Times reported in August.

“It’s very likely that you will have the Trump administration trying to shut down mass protests — which I think are inevitable if they were to win — and to specifically pick fights in jurisdictions with blue-state governors and blue-state mayors,” the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, told the outlet. “There’s talk that he would try to rely on the Insurrection Act as a way to shut down lawful protests that get a little messy. But isolated instances of violence or lawlessness are not enough to use federal troops.”

Scholars believe it would be difficult, but not impossible for Trump to wield the military within the nation’s borders — and it’s the uncertainty that’s worrying.

“There are a lot of institutional checks and balances in our country that are pretty well-developed legally, and it’ll make it hard for a president to just do something randomly out of the blue,” Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press. “But Trump is good at developing a semi-logical train of thought that might lead to a place where there’s enough mayhem, there’s enough violence and legal murkiness.”

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