Donald Trump’s ‘state of exception’ cracks down on California
Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt provided the gameplan that Trump and Vance are following
As chaotic and corrupt as his first term was, Donald Trump’s second administration has been far more lawless, beginning with his shocking decision to give full pardons to the violent January 6th rioters. Since then, Trump has been selling pardons to the highest bidder, rolling out cryptocurrency bribery scams, and vowing to accept a $1 billion “gift” of an airliner from the government of Qatar.
But it wasn’t until this past weekend that Trump inadvertently revealed his long-term vision in response to a peaceful protest against federal agents seeking to deport some unauthorized immigrants in Los Angeles. While his political team is glued to his poll ratings, Trump’s policy team is going for something much more insidious, the “state of exception” doctrines of the fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt.
Karen Bass, the city’s mayor, and Governor Gavin Newsom, repeatedly insisted they did not need any presidential meddling. But Trump would have none of it. On Saturday, he federalized 2,000 National Guard troops and ordered them sent to Los Angeles.
“A once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals,” the instigator of the violent Capitol occupation wrote Sunday on his personal social media website.
“These lawless riots only strengthen our resolve,” he continued, saying that he had authorized administration officials to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles” from a supposed “invasion.”
The words of Trump’s post may sound like his standard-issue immigration fear-mongering, but a closer look reveals something far more insidious: Trump desperately wants this crisis and is doing everything he can to make it worse.
While California’s attorney general said her state was likely to sue against Trump’s unilateral move, at a Sunday news conference, the convicted felon president said he’s also considering sending in active-duty Marines to suppress the protesters, but refused to state what kind of standard he would set before such a deployment. “The bar is what I think it is. If we see danger to our country and to our citizens, and we’ll be very, very strong in terms of law and order,” Trump told reporters.
Dispatching military forces to violently put down people protesting against his policies was one of Trump’s biggest dreams during his first term. He explicitly tried to do it in 2020 against Black Lives Matter demonstrators who had gathered outside of the White House but was rejected by then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who went public with his refusal, saying that "the option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations."
While Esper wisely refused Trump’s authoritarian desires to sic the military on citizens, Trump’s current Defense Secretary, the blow-dried former Fox host Pete Hegseth, has been overjoyed to deploy Marines against civilians. “If violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert,” he wrote in a Saturday social media post.
Newsom stepped up his pushback Sunday evening, talking to Trump via MSNBC: “You’re creating the conditions that you claim you’re solving. And you’re not.”
Trump’s unnecessary injection of himself into California’s politics is certainly an effort to boost his flagging poll numbers, which are at their lowest-ever averages as of this writing. But it’s more than just that. Trump’s world-historic corruption and blatant politicization of disaster relief funds demonstrate beyond doubt that he and his top aides do not care the slightest about the rule of law or the state of California—what he and his team care much more about is the “state of exception.”
Most people have never heard the term, but the state of exception is the core legal doctrine of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi scholar who created the legal philosophy that undergirded Adolph Hitler’s gradual seizing of power in Germany.
Writing during what he considered to be the “decadent” Weimar Republic in the interwar period, Schmitt argued that democracies excessively elevated freedom and then collapsed in a mess of contradictions and endless debates.
In the name of upholding the rule of law, he contended, elected governments dissolve into chaos because officials are unable to agree how to enforce the law. Instead, Schmitt wanted a “sovereign,” who would have unlimited ability to force his will upon the state, a power most evident in deciding the “state of exception,” when the regular rules of law should—and should not—apply—such as in response to the burning of the Reichstag.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” remains one of Schmitt’s most famous dictums. And it’s exactly how Trump is governing in his second term. His order to federalize National Guard troops—which is so broad that it does not mention California or Los Angeles at all—is the first time in decades that a president has done this against a governor’s will. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson dispatched federal troops to protect civil rights advocates from segregationists. This time, Trump is doing it to avoid giving due process to people he wants to deport.
This is a consistent modus operandi for the administration. According to the Associated Press, Trump invoked “emergency powers” in 41 separate actions after just 136 days in office, a threshold that former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama didn’t reach until over a thousand days in office.
During his first 100 days in office the second time, Trump signed more executive orders than his five predecessors combined, far surpassing all modern presidents except for Franklin Roosevelt, America’s chief executive during the Great Depression and World War II. According to the Washington Post, Trump has a large stockpile of draft executive orders which he keeps at hand to enact whenever he wants to seize control of a news cycle or punish political leaders who challenge his authoritarian demands.
Schmitt is an obscure figure outside of online fascist circles, but unsurprisingly, Vice President JD Vance is well-acquainted with his ideas, a fact he demonstrated in a 2023 interview in which he namedropped the Nazi lawyer out of the blue, in an attempt to say that liberals had gone too far in their opposition to Trump.
“The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — there’s no law, there’s just power,” he said.
Vance’s unprompted Schmitt reference was no rhetorical flourish. Between the time that he denounced Trump as “America’s Hitler” and the time he agreed to serve as Trump’s vice president, the former Ohio senator developed a disturbing admiration for extremist thinkers, including Curtis Yarvin, a neofascist blogger whose interminable rants about replacing American democracy with monarchy have made him a Republican superstar as the party has embraced authoritarianism.
“So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin who has written about these things,” Vance said on a reactionary podcast in 2021 when asked what counsel he might have for a second Trump presidency. “I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.”
The admiration is mutual. “In almost every way, JD is perfect,” Yarvin told Politico earlier this year.
Yarvin called his idea RAGE, short for Retire All Government Employees. Less than four years later, Vance and Trump called their version of it DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictatorphobia,” Yarvin has said. Years later, Trump echoed the sentiment, arguing that he should have had the right to terminate the U.S. constitution in order to support his lies about the 2020 presidential election.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he wrote in a 2022 social media post. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Far-right Christians like OMB Director Russ Vought and senior Trump official Michael Anton have been champing at the bit to overthrow American democracy and replace it with dictatorship for decades. Donald Trump wants to give it to them—and himself. David Frum is exactly right:
“Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried. But he might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections’ integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him—and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.”
These are dangerous times.