Trump Open To Invoking The Insurrection Act

President Donald Trump on Monday said he would consider using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military if federal courts prevented him from deploying the National Guard to protect federal buildings and conduct law enforcement operations.

The comments came a day after a federal judge blocked the president from sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, which Trump claims has been taken over by left-wing “domestic terrorists.”

Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he did not yet see the need to use the Insurrection Act, but “if I had to enact it, I'd do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

“You look at what’s happening with Portland over the years, it’s a burning hell hole,” Trump added. “And then you have a judge that lost her way that tries to pretend that there’s no problem.”

The Insurrection Act of 1807 is a federal law that allows the president to nationally deploy the U.S. military or federalize state National Guard troops to quell what the president deems an insurrection against the United States.

Earlier Monday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said the administration had been contending with a “legal insurrection” and that rulings stifling the White House’s agenda amounted to “an insurrection against the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

“We need to have district courts in this country that see themselves as being under the laws and Constitution and not being able to take for themselves powers that are reserved solely for the president,” Miller added.

Trump has flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act before. During the 2024 campaign, he said he would use the law to suppress unrest. And at the end of his first term in office, some of his supporters urged him to invoke the law to try to hold onto power after his loss to former President Joe Biden.