Former President Obama criticized President Trump deploying the National Guard to cities around the country while slamming what he called a “politicization of the military.”
“It wasn’t controversial for me to go to other countries and say, ‘You know what? It’s a good idea for militaries to be under civilian control,’ because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting,” Obama said about his time in office in an interview on the WTF podcast with Marc Maron released Monday.
The former Democratic president said the Trump administration is attempting “what looks like a deliberate end run around” the law that generally bars the military from being used for civilian policing while knocking Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act in Portland amid protests over immigration enforcement.
“That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy,” Obama said.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles in June, Washington, D.C., in August and Memphis earlier this month. The president also ordered the deployment of troops to Portland and Chicago, but both are on hold after court rulings.
In September, a federal judge ruled that Trump ordering California National Guard and U.S. Marines personnel to Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act. Obama, citing the 1878 law, said that a president should not use the military domestically “unless there is an extraordinary emergency of some sort.”
During Obama’s second term in 2015, Maryland National Guard troops patrolled Baltimore amid protests after the death of Freddie Gray. However, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), as commander of the state’s guard, deployed the troops, not Obama.
Three of the four states that Trump has targeted for National Guard deployment are led by Democratic governors, while D.C.’s mayor Muriel Bowser is a Democrat and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee is a Republican. Officials in Oregon and Illinois have vocally protested Trump’s move to deploy the National Guard there.
“If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what Governor [Greg] Abbott [R] says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control,’ it is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” Obama said.
“We don’t want masked folks with rifles and machine guns patrolling our streets,” Obama added later. “We want cops on the beat who know the neighborhood and the kids around, and that’s how we keep the peace around here.”
