It’s tough to believe it has been almost a month since President Donald Trump illegally commandeered thousands of California National Guard troops to help with his nativist assault on Los Angeles. Now, as the state’s wildfire season kicks into high gear, the state has to rely on the whims of the Trump administration to see if it could possibly, just maybe, have its own troops back so that the state doesn’t burn down.
Definitely what the Founding Fathers intended, right?
After first demanding the deployment of 2,000 members of the California National Guard, Trump doubled that to 4,100 in mid-June. Why, pray tell? Well, it’s not all that clear. Sure, Trump had all the generic statements about protecting federal personnel and such, but what it really looks like is that the administration now sees these troops as their own personal force to be deployed wherever they feel like it, for whatever they want. How else to explain the deployment of over 300 National Guard members to the Coachella Valley—more than 100 miles from Los Angeles—to help the Drug Enforcement Agency raid cannabis growers?
On June 24, as multiple wildfires started across the state, the governor’s office reported that the California National Guard crews were operating at only 40% of capacity. More than 300 Guard members who are specially trained to work with CAL FIRE on firefighting and prevention were instead being used for whatever Trump felt like.
The weekend saw the state’s wildfire season start swiftly, and it’s expected to be an especially bad summer. On Monday, the Associated Press reported that the commander in charge of the Los Angeles task force had asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth if 200 California National Guard members could be sent back to fighting wildfires—you know, their actual jobs. The next day, the Department of Defense magnanimously announced that it was releasing 150 Guard members.
It’s great to see this happen, both in terms of necessity and in terms of seeing the administration buckle, but the entire affair highlights what is so very wrong, so warped, about what is happening now.
When the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a lower court’s ruling requiring Trump to return control of the Guard to the state, they essentially endorsed the administration’s argument that the statutory requirement that orders to federalize Guard members occur “through the governors of the States” didn’t mean you needed consent from the governor, but that you just needed to say, This was issued through the state. Which, sure. Additionally, the administration’s stance goes even further, stating that no court can review its determination at all.
Related | Trump sends 2,000 more troops to terrorize Los Angeles
There are many reasons it’s a constitutional crisis that Trump is being allowed to deploy active-duty troops on domestic soil to perform domestic law enforcement duties. It’s a thing so profoundly antifederalist, so intrusive on the authority of states, that it’s unbelievable to think there’s even a debate.
But what’s going on in California shows an additional problem: If the president can take any amount of a state’s National Guard troops for any reason, how can a state meaningfully control the use of its Guard? How can a state rely on having enough personnel for critical state-level challenges if the president can yank those troops away?
When Trump was in power last time, he deliberately delayed wildfire aid from Washington state because he was mad at Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee. Trump also initially refused to provide FEMA wildfire aid to California in 2018 until being told that the areas affected were in Orange County, which had largely supported him.
Trump has figured out a way to weaponize funding to hinder state wildfire efforts, and he now has a way to weaponize personnel to do so as well. There’s no reason to think he won’t use it to harm blue states, just like he always promises to do.
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