Good morning. It is June 11th. It is a sunny morning in New York City. Heading into a day that's supposed to be warmer and drier than the past few, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, which the cat is walking around on, the lead new spot belongs to Donald Trump's manufactured crisis in Los Angeles. The two column headline is “Trump Tests Federal Power As 700 Marines Go to L.A.” Next to that is a four column photo of armored vehicles lined up on an on ramp to the 101. The rightmost column is “State Urges Court to Limit Use of Forces During Protests.”

“State and city officials,” the Times writes, “legal experts and Democrats in Congress have called the deployment of active duty Marines in Los Angeles deeply alarming. By tradition and law, American military troops are supposed to be used inside the United States only in the rarest and most extreme situations. ‘The Trump administration is test driving a novel legal theory that you can circumvent the restrictions on domestic law enforcement by the American military,’ said Kori Schake, an expert on defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a forthcoming history of the civil military relations. She added that the administration appeared to be ‘blurring the line’ between federalization of the National Guard under existing U.S. law and the use of active duty American military forces domestically, calling it a ‘dangerous undertaking’. Kori Schake. That's a name that's been around this week. 

She also appears on page 15 in the newspaper. Under the headline, “military parade marches into political storm as troops deploy to LA.” Over a picture of tanks lined up on a parking lot in Jessup, Maryland. “This is not the image army officials had wanted,” the Times writes. “While tanks, armored troop carriers, and artillery systems pour into Washington for the Army's 250th birthday celebration, National Guard troops from the Army's 79th Infantry Brigade combat team, supplemented by active duty Marines, have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles. It is a juxtaposition that has military officials and experts concerned. Several current and former army officials said the military parade and other festivities on Saturday, which is also President Trump's 79th birthday, could make it appear as if the military is celebrating a crackdown on Americans.”

“‘The unfortunate coincidence of the parade and federalizing the California National Guard will feel ominous,’ said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Dr. Schake, the story continues, initially did not consider the parade much of a problem, but is now concerned about the rapid escalation by the administration to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles.” Well, “did not consider the parade much of a problem” is a little bit of an understatement about Dr. Schake’s earlier position. 

What she did, was she published an article in The Atlantic under the headline, “Sometimes a Parade is Just a Parade,” sub headline “Not everything the Trump administration does is a threat to democracy.” In it, Schake wrote that some of the criticism of Trump's military parade plan was misguided. “Trump,” she wrote, “has a genius for showmanship and showcasing the American military can be and should be a patriotic celebration.” She then quoted various critics talking about Trump's aspirations to authoritarianism or calling it a Nuremberg-style parade or saying that it looks like a military that is politicized and turning inwardly, focusing on domestic-oriented adversaries instead of external ones. “During Trump's first term,” Schake wrote, “then Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Paul Selva reflected that military parades are what dictators do. But,” she wrote, “these critics may well be projecting more general concerns about Trump onto a parade. Not everything the Trump administration does is destructive to democracy.” Then she noted that France has military parades and that the U.S. has had military parades after winning wars. “In today's climate,” she wrote, “a military parade could offer an opportunity to counter misperceptions about the armed forces. It could bring Americans closer to service members and juice military recruitment, all of which is sorely needed.” 

No, couldn't. It never could. Of all the subjects on which to envision a different Donald Trump, a public-minded Donald Trump, a Donald Trump who embraces whatever higher-minded purposes you wish to see pursued, his plan to make the Army treat him to a tank parade on his birthday might be the most absurd. The critics, quoted in the Atlantic piece for the purpose of dismissing them as small-minded and overreacting, were exactly correct, which wasn't hard, because this was obvious. Donald Trump wanted the military parade because Donald Trump wants to be a strong man. And crucially, the idea that there's some kind of unfortunate coincidence going on because he happens to be sending the Marines and the National Guard illegally into Los Angeles at the same time he's having his heavily armored birthday show in Washington, DC is frighteningly delusional. These aren't two separate events that happen to be overlapping. They're all one big performance of Donald Trump's ability to make the military do whatever it is he wants to see it do. 

Last term, people told him he couldn't have that military parade and that he couldn't send the troops to shoot protesters. But this time around, he's gotten rid of those people and with them the limits on his ability to play around with deadly force to make himself feel powerful. If you can't grasp that simple fact, you need not to be presenting yourself as an expert on defense policy or for that matter, as the editor of a major general interest magazine. 

Back on page one, on that theme, the second news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece by Adam Liptak, “‘Bogus Emergencies’ Alarm Scholars,” a crucially important point wrapped in a sort of limp appeal to authority, Dateline Washington, “To hear President Trump tell it,” the Times writes, “the nation is facing a rebellion in Los Angeles, an invasion by a Venezuelan gang, and extraordinary foreign threats to its economy. Citing this series of crises, he has sought to draw on emergency powers that Congress has scattered throughout the United States code over the centuries, summoning the National Guard to Los Angeles over the objections of California's governor, sending scores of migrants to El Salvador without the barest hint of due process, and upending the global economy with steep tariffs. Legal scholars,” the Times writes, “say the president's actions are not authorized by the statutes he has cited and are, instead, animated by a different goal. He is declaring utterly bogus emergencies for the sake of trying to expand his power, undermine the Constitution, and destroy civil liberties, said Ilya Somin, a libertarian professor at Antonin Scalia Law School, who represents a wine importer and other businesses challenging some of Mr. Trump's tariffs.”

That is certainly a decrescendo from the beginning of that paragraph to the end. A rhetorical or epistemological strategy that has you starting with expanding presidential power and undermining the constitution and then working your way around to a lawsuit from a wine importer is maybe not the most powerful framework for describing Trump's overreach. The legal scholars may be well positioned to talk about the supposed statutory underpinnings of Trump's actions, but you don't actually need a law degree or to talk to someone with a law degree to get at the other side of the problem as the lead of the story makes clear. 

Trump may be straining the law, but he's outright lying about the facts that are supposed to be the basis for his strained interpretations in the first place. And a newspaper can just say so. The fake emergencies are objectively fake. As the story notes after the jump, judges are ordering Trump's actions blocked for plain factual reasons. “In March,” the story says “Mr. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which grants the president the power to deport citizens of nations engaged in war, invasion or predatory incursion, arguing that Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, was invading the United States. The law had been used just three times before, in the War of 1812, in World War I, and in World War II. “Several judges, the story continues, “have now rejected the idea that the gangs' activities justified the use of the law. ‘There is nothing in the 1798 law,’ Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled last month, ‘that justifies a finding that refugees migrating from Venezuela or TDA gangsters who infiltrate the migrants are engaged in an invasion or predatory incursion. They do not seek to occupy territory, to oust American jurisdiction from any territory or to ravage territory,’ wrote Judge Hellerstein, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, ‘TDA may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion.’”

Again, those aren't just legal interpretations. Those are reportable circumstances. And the difficulty with making it a matter of legal interpretation is that as the story suggests toward the end, the Supreme Court worked around Trump's obviously false statements about an emergency in his first term to let him implement a version of his Muslim ban anyway. And although the story doesn't dig this deep, the court's Trump-constructed supermajority has a strong recent history of deciding in favor of whichever outcome it ideologically prefers, even if it means accepting a completely bogus and easily disprovable set of factual claims to justify it. 

If a football coach holding public prayer sessions on the 50 yard line on game night with TV cameras all around is engaging in a moment of personal non-coercive religious reflection, then sure, Tren de Aragua might as well be an invading army. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those in if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.