President Donald Trump and his administration have ramped up a specific rhetorical attack on their perceived opponents, casting Democrats and others as fomenting “insurrection.”
Trump and one of his top lieutenants, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, have used the word to describe a handful of groups and events in recent weeks — court rulings against the administration, protesters in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, violence against immigration officers, liberal groups they’ve accused of fomenting violence and even Democrats themselves.
Trump and a top adviser’s use of the word is significant as he considers invoking the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law last used 30 years ago — that would allow him to send active-duty troops to conduct law enforcement operations such as searches and arrests in American cities. NBC News reported this week that Trump administration officials have seriously discussed invoking the act, according to five people with knowledge of the talks.
There’s one prominent recent event, however, that the Trump team has long insisted doesn’t meet the definition of an insurrection: the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol that disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Trump’s legal team argued in front of the Supreme Court last year that the day’s events weren’t an insurrection and that Trump didn’t engage in insurrection himself. The argument came during an unsuccessful attempt in Colorado to keep Trump off the ballot based on the 14th Amendment, which says no one who “engaged in insurrection” could hold federal office.
An insurrection, Trump’s lawyer argued, “needs to be an organized, concerted effort to overthrow the government of the United States through violence.”
Trump has repeatedly downplayed the events of that day over the years, arguing that the 2020 election he lost was the “real insurrection.” He has referred to Jan. 6 as an “insurrection” with the caveat that it was “caused by Nancy Pelosi” — who was the Democratic House speaker at the time — and also called it “a day of love from the standpoint of millions.”
This week, his eldest son downplayed the 2021 attack on the Capitol as part of justifying the administration’s actions and language. “They want to call someone who took a selfie somewhere within 200 miles of D.C. an insurrectionist on Jan. 6, but directly threatening to withhold help from federal law enforcement doing their job, that’s insurrection,” Donald Trump Jr. said Tuesday on Newsmax.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson criticized Democratic leaders for “ongoing violent riots and lawlessness,” saying Trump has “exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets.”
“President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities,” she said in a statement. “And if the Democrats’ only response to the President rightfully restoring law and order is to keep pointing to January 6, they’re even more out-of-touch and broken brained than we realized.”
Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told NBC News that despite the name, the legal circumstances around the Insurrection Act aren’t similar to the legal arguments made surrounding the 2021 attack on the Capitol. That’s because the law “doesn’t hinge” on the definition of an insurrection and instead gives the president wide latitude to invoke it.
“When we argue in court about it, it’s not mostly going to be about the definition of the word ‘insurrection,’” he said.
Instead, the president is able to invoke the act if he’s asked to by a governor or a legislature, if he believes the states are unwilling or unable to enforce constitutional rights, if he believes civil society has broken down to the point that courts can’t seek justice or if something is “preventing the federal government from enforcing its own laws,” Olson said. And not only does the law remove the barriers on using troops, he added, but it is also “more powerful” than other emergency powers because it lacks a time limit or required congressional review.
“This would be a momentous step. It would step much further into … using U.S. military against U.S. citizens,” Olson said, noting that Trump would be going over the heads of local leaders who are arguing it’s not necessary.
Some top Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about Trump’s invoking the Insurrection Act. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Thursday that he wasn’t sure it was “necessary.”
And Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has criticized Trump’s blanket pardons of Jan. 6 defendants and isn’t running for re-election, said this week that invoking the act would be “an overreach.”
“I’m not a historian, but I don’t believe any reasonable person thinks that that was ever the intent of the Insurrection Act. It was about possibly overwhelming our democracy here at this Capitol,” Tillis said, although he added that if he were in the administration, he’d “be pushing the same envelope.”
“I don’t fault them for attempting it; I just think that’s not a credible argument for me,” he said.
Here’s how the Trump administration has talked about insurrections in recent months:
Democrats and liberal groups
In a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this week, Trump compared Democrats to “insurrectionists” while criticizing them for opposing the Republican tax cuts and spending bill passed this year.
Praising the bill, he recounted that he tried to “get it all done” in one bill “because these Democrats are like insurrectionists.”
“They’re so bad for our country, their policy is so bad for our country. I said, ‘Let’s see if we can get it all done,’ in the big — everybody said it’s not doable because it’s the biggest bill ever passed in the history of our country, and we got it all done,” Trump added.
Miller has also used the word to describe potential punishments for what he called “radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence” in an appearance last month on Fox News days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” he said. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection, but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”
Anti-ICE protests
Trump and Miller have also used the word to describe protests in Los Angeles and Portland, which the administration has countered by sending in, or trying to send in, National Guard troops.
“Los Angeles wouldn’t even be there now if I didn’t send in the troops very early, because that was a riot, that was an insurrection,” Trump said in an interview this month on OANN.
Just days earlier, when he was asked in an interview with NBC News whether he was planning to send federal troops to Portland, Trump described the city as a “hotbed of insurrection” over the years.
Miller repeatedly referred to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ pushback against the Trump administration’s decision to send troops to the city with similar language.
“This is the rhetoric of insurrection,” Miller posted on X in June in response to Bass’ holding a news conference with city officials calling on the administration to stop immigration raids. Around that time, he also posted that “Democratic rioters are now waging violent insurrection to overturn the election result and continue the invasion.”
A month later, he posted that Bass’ executive order related to those raids was proof the city is “waging insurrection against the federal government,” days after he referred to Bass’ call for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to “go home” as “the language of insurrection.”
Miller has also labeled attacks on law enforcement as insurrection on multiple occasions.
Court rulings that don’t go the administration’s way
Miller has also referred to court rulings siding against the administration’s position as “insurrection.”
When a judge last week blocked the Trump administration from sending federalized National Guard troops to Portland, Miller posted on X that the ruling was an example of “legal insurrection.”
“Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life,” he wrote.
“This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself,” he added.
And just a few months earlier, Miller responded to a federal judge’s issuing a temporary restraining order on immigration officers’ using people’s languages or jobs as pretext for detaining them in the Los Angeles area — a ruling the Supreme Court later blocked — by calling the order “another act of insurrection against the United States and its sovereign people.”