From Protest to Pretext: Trump, Troops, and the Illusion of Crisis

Trump isn’t just threatening democracy—he’s performing its breakdown in public, turning law into spectacle, and punishment into ritual.

Trump is looking for a pretext. He isn’t waiting for chaos—he’s provoking it. With the Marines and National Guard now deployed in Los Angeles, we are watching a page turn—not in the story of public safety, but in the unfolding script of authoritarian consolidation.

This isn’t just about L.A. It’s a test. A move to see who pushes back, who stays quiet, and how far he can go without consequences. The justification, as always, is “law and order.” But the real purpose is power—not safety, not justice, not stability. Power.

Trump doesn’t need to rewrite the Constitution to get what he wants. He only needs to bend it—slowly, repeatedly—until what used to be illegal becomes normal. He’s not trying to fix a crisis. He’s trying to manufacture one. One that gives him cover to impose control on his terms.

Martial law in the U.S. has no clear definition. It’s not even mentioned in the Constitution. But it has been invoked—during wars, rebellions, disasters—as a rare, short-term emergency measure. In Trump’s hands, it would be something else entirely: not a response to upheaval, but a suspension of democracy. A way to put the public on hold. To replace rights with orders.

And cruelty isn’t collateral—it’s the point. Every shove, every raid, every humiliating arrest is a message: power no longer needs justification. It only needs spectacle. Trump knows that to rule by force, you must make people feel it. What he’s staging isn’t law—it’s punishment.

Anthropologists have long warned that when societies suspend their norms “temporarily,” they often end up redefining them permanently.

This is how authoritarianism works: not through sudden rupture, but through the slow erosion of what people believe is normal. The law doesn’t disappear. It just stops doing what it was meant to do.

Deploying the National Guard isn’t about restoring calm. It’s a ritualized display of submission. From an anthropological perspective, this is symbolic drama. Uniforms, sirens, curfews—these are signals of who now commands and who must obey. It’s not just about control. It’s about conditioning the public to see domination as stability.

The legal tool he’s likely to invoke is the Insurrection Act—a vague and dangerous statute that gives the president power to deploy troops when civil unrest threatens enforcement of federal law. In the wrong hands, it’s a blank check. Trump could override governors, take over policing, and suppress protest under the guise of “defense.” By the time courts or Congress respond, the damage will be done—and he knows it.

What makes this moment so dangerous is not just the actor, but the stagehands. Courts stall. Agencies hesitate. Political leaders look away. A demagogue doesn’t seize power alone—he is enabled by institutions that fail to stop him.

Trump’s supporters have been fed a steady diet of grievance and fear. Disorder becomes proof of betrayal; Trump, the only cure. This is what anthropologists recognize as myth in action—a story that explains suffering, names enemies, and sanctifies the redeemer.

The myth doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be repeated. And the more brutal the enforcement, the stronger the myth becomes. Public beatings, racialized policing, illegal detentions—these aren’t accidents. They are performances of power. Spectacles of degradation meant to break solidarity, isolate the vulnerable, and teach the rest to look away.

And the result isn’t just obedience—it’s internalized compliance. When fear governs daily life, submission begins to feel like safety. People stop resisting not because they agree, but because resistance feels futile—or dangerous.

The first to be targeted will be those already at the margins: immigrants, Black communities, the unhoused. Authoritarianism is always rehearsed on the vulnerable before it is scaled up. What we allow to happen to them becomes the template for what happens next.

And we’ve seen this script before. Japanese internment. COINTELPRO. The surveillance of civil rights leaders. America has used fear to suspend rights before. The difference now is scale—and intent.

If this move succeeds—if troops on American streets are met with resignation—it will mark a turning point. Not just in politics, but in how we understand power, citizenship, and the very idea of public life. Martial law wouldn’t just suspend rights. It would redefine who counts, who obeys, and who belongs.

What begins as spectacle becomes the structure of the state.

And when brutality becomes routine—when punishment becomes a public ritual—we don’t just lose our rights. We lose the ability to recognize their absence. The troops may leave, but the lesson remains: fear rules, and obedience is the price of peace.

Suggested Readings

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Heyman, Josiah McC. “States and Illegal Practices.” In States and Illegal Practices, edited by Josiah McC. Heyman, 1–24. Oxford: Berg, 1999.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Scarry, Elaine. Thinking in an Emergency. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.

Taussig, Michael. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

Wolf, Eric. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.