A federal judge rules that Trump needs to show that a rebellion is really taking place in order to call in the army.View this email in your browser [link removed]

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****OCTOBER 07, 2025****

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****Meyerson on TAP****

**Jefferson Davis Trump**

**A federal judge rules that Trump needs to show that a rebellion is really taking place in order to call in the army.**

With each passing day, the two fundamental facts about our current political period become steadily clearer. 

The first is that the only presidential precedent for Donald Trump’s second term is that of the Confederate presidency of Jefferson Davis.

The second is that the most crucial deterrent to the one-sided civil war that Trump is waging is a federal court that insists on basing its rulings on facts as well as statutory language. 

Davis, of course, initiated a war against the United States when he realized that slaveholders’ control of the federal government had ended with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and when he decided to end any trace of federal sovereignty in the South by ordering the attack on Fort Sumter. The South’s was a war against the woke of that day: abolitionists, the growing cosmopolitanism of Northern cities, and the threat of a more egalitarian social order that flickered in the Northern lights. It magnified Lincoln’s and the Republicans’ opposition to slavery—which went no further than banning its spread to the territories—into a threat to its preservation within the South (which the war would compel Lincoln and the Republicans to actualize). 

The social and economic base of the Confederacy was its slaveholders. Ordinary white farmers were the Confederacy’s grunts, but a share of them realized that it was a slaveholders’ war that they were fighting, either as volunteers or draftees. 

Unlike Davis, of course, Trump is using his role atop the federal government to initiate a civil war, but the parallels of his presidency are entirely with Davis’s, not Lincoln’s. Portland, Chicago, L.A., and D.C. are his Fort Sumter. It’s National Guards from the Southern states that he is deploying against Northern cities, in a cause rooted, in the broadest sense, against the many forms that egalitarianism now takes. His social and economic base—the far-right autocrats of Silicon Valley, the shakedown artists (excuse me, “activist investors”) of Wall Street—are, like Davis’s key supporters, rich white trash (whose apex is Trump’s own family).

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As for the most crucially important resistance to the power-mad civil warrior in the White House, we now have a champion: Federal District Judge Karin Immergut, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2019, and who now has twice blocked Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Portland. In her rulings, Immergut acknowledged that courts must provide “significant deference” to presidential orders and actions, as the Ninth Circuit appellate court had previously noted in a similar case. In arguments before her court, Trump’s lawyers contended that his deployment order was based on a federal law permitting the president to send in National Guard troops to suppress rebellions and repel invasions, while attorneys for the governments of Portland, California, and Oregon argued that, in fact, no such invasions or rebellions were taking place.

The claims of invasion and rebellion have been the core of Trump’s presidency; he’s constantly invoked them to justify both mass deportations and the military occupations of Democratic cities. Portland, Trump claimed, was “war ravaged” (as he had also described Chicago, L.A. and D.C.), to which Portland’s attorneys responded, in effect,

**Where? Show us. Show the judge.**

The judge looked and looked and looked some more, but found no rebellion. There had been scattered resistance to ICE agents, but, she wrote, Trump’s lawyers “have not proffered any evidence that those episodes of violence were part of an organized attempt to overthrow the government.” The court, she continued, did owe the president,

**any**president, significant deference, but “‘a great level of deference’ is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground.”

On that argument may hang the one way, or at least the most effective way, to stop Trump’s civil war in its tracks. The question is whether other courts—ultimately, whether the Supreme Court—will choose to strike down Trump’s deployment of the military to blue states and cities because his invocation of his power to suppress rebellions must be linked to the actual existence of rebellions. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito doubtless believe that deference to Trump is such that if Trump declares 2 + 2 = 5, then 5 it is. We must hope that the four other Republican justices believe that at least some factual basis is required for a presidential declaration of war on urban America, for a presidential policy that only Jefferson Davis could love. 

**– HAROLD MEYERSON**

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