55 years after Kent State, Donald Trump courts another disaster

Politicization of the military should alarm every American

Photo credit: AP Photo

They were students, unarmed on their college campus, protesting a bombing campaign half a world away ordered by a divisive president. They were deemed “worse than the brownshirts and the communist element” by the governor, who deployed National Guard troops to disperse them. Soon after their arrival, and for no clear reason, some of the guardsmen began firing their rifles. The protest transformed into carnage. In less than 20 seconds, four students were dead and nine others injured.

The Kent State shootings, 55 years ago today, were a tragedy for the families affected, for the school, and for a starkly divided nation. It was also a catastrophe for civil-military relations, a core balancing act of our democracy ensuring civilian control of an apolitical military that both safeguards our nation from foreign threats and from military rule. With an increasingly unpopular president overseeing an expanding war in Vietnam and protests at home, the nation’s security infrastructure was under unprecedented stress from all directions.

In the half-century since, successive presidential administrations have worked to rebuild trust in the military. From state National Guards up to the Pentagon, policies were tightened, training for Guard personnel improved, and trust with communities was rebuilt. It took real effort, but the intervening decades never saw another Kent State. That didn’t happen by accident.

The Trump administration’s efforts to draw the military into domestic political and law enforcement activities threaten that half-century of progress. President Trump is risking more clashes between the military and civilians in what amounts to the most significant gamble on civil-military relations in generations.

This gamble has four parts:

Invoking national security to justify abuses of power

Within minutes of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the White House website landing page was replaced with a hype video featuring President Trump and rampant patriotic and military imagery — red, white and blue, bald eagles, fighter planes, and salutes. His intended message was clear: President Trump will protect Americans’ safety, with the full weight of the U.S. national security apparatus behind him.

That video was the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s effort to recast wide-ranging issues into national security threats to justify his abuses of power. By painting Trump as America’s singular protector and elevating issues to so-called national security threats, the administration is positioning itself to unlock the full scope of presidential powers. And by stoking fear in the public, he is using a time-tested authoritarian tactic to get public buy-in for (or at least minimize blowback to) increasing government incursions into their civil liberties.

Take President Trump’s invocations of national emergencies as an example. In less than 100 days, Donald Trump declared more emergencies than any previous president did in a year. These declarations aren’t just paper; emergency powers give the president expansive authority on a temporary basis.

It doesn’t stop there. On his first day in office, President Trump designated transnational criminal groups like Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations, likening drug trafficking to terrorism, with the ability to wield powerful legal, diplomatic, financial, and operational tools against these groups.

Also on Inauguration Day, President Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border, saying that an “invasion” by “cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans” had overrun the border (despite significant slowdown of crossings starting in 2023, under the Biden administration). He has consistently framed illegal immigration and drug smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border as an “invasion” — describing immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country and falsely labeling their movement as the “greatest invasion in history.” The term “invasion” isn’t merely rhetorical, but legally strategic in order to justify Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute that allows the President to detain or deport noncitizens if the U.S. is either in a declared war or experiencing an “invasion” by a foreign government.

On Thursday, a federal judge struck down Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, ruling that it was an overreach and noting that “invasion” in plainspeak specifically refers to military forces, not criminal conduct like illegal border crossings or smuggling. While the decision applies only to Venezuelan immigrants in the Southern District of Texas, it marks an important step in challenging the misuse of this wartime authority. (We hope other judges will agree; otherwise, the administration’s expansive interpretation could lay the groundwork for further repression here at home or unauthorized military strikes abroad.)

Diverting national security personnel for a politicized law enforcement agenda

By sinking considerable national security resources into his anti-immigration agenda — even while cutting resources aimed at preventing terrorism and combating foreign propaganda — Trump has pushed military units into work they weren’t trained to do, sacrificing military readiness and jeopardizing strategic advantages against foreign adversaries. The administration is converting much of our national security infrastructure into a sprawling detention apparatus, which includes sending thousands of additional active duty and National Guard troops to the border, even as the president boasts of a 99% drop in border activity.

By throwing troops — as well as Homeland Security, FBI, Marshals Service, and even US Postal Service resources — into immigration enforcement he has diverted resources from these organizations’ essential missions, politicized federal agencies that rely on their apolitical standing to properly function, and militarized law enforcement. American troops on American streets create a dangerous dynamic. By pushing these efforts, Trump is setting the military on a path of potential confrontation with American citizens.

Empowering inexperienced and incompetent political leadership

Deemed lacking the skills and experience for the job by even some Senate Republicans, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by shocking breaches of security protocol, and possibly the law. In addition to bringing his wife and brother into sensitive meetings, he shared war planning information on unsecured systems with those outside of the chain of command, including a journalist and others not cleared to see the intel.

He also unleashed a series of purges that appear to adhere to the secretary’s avowed racial and gender preferences rather than normal performance and experience metrics. Soon after his confirmation, Hegseth began firing senior Black and female officers; oversaw a purge of books and resources celebrating Black achievement at military institutions while preserving racist works like Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”; and even bragged about ending the “Women, Peace, and Security” program signed into law by President Trump during his first administration.

By keeping Hegseth in the post, despite repeated instances of leadership controversy, Trump is overseeing a steep drop in military morale that threatens discipline in the ranks, recruitment and retention efforts, and the professionalism of our armed forces.

Removing checks on the misuse of the military

Within six weeks of his swearing-in, Hegseth made three distinctly ominous moves. First, he fired the three generals and admirals overseeing the JAG Corps — military lawyers that provide legal advice to commanders. Second, he commissioned his personal attorney to oversee the retraining of the JAG Corps, reportedly to instruct them to advise commanders to pursue more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to charging soldiers with battlefield crimes. And third, he announced that he wanted military lawyers who “don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks” to military operations. The message was unmistakable: Our military that was built to defend the rule of law now apparently no longer needs to respect it.

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By diverting and stretching military resources into law enforcement matters and unforgiving political terrain, our nation is less safe from foreign threats and our military is increasingly likely to be put in a position of either disobeying orders or confronting civilians. This threatens to chill civil liberties and militarize our communities. It threatens to put more Americans in the crosshairs of our own troops.

On this solemn anniversary, failing to heed our own history portends calamity for civil-military relations, the military, and our civil liberties.