Congressional Republicans have spent the week predictably cheering Donald Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops to the streets of Washington, D.C., and placing local police officers under federal control, though some GOP lawmakers appear eager to see the president go even further.
In his latest appearance on Newsmax, for example, Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky said, “We’re going to support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C. ... We spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets trying to reduce crime in other country. We need to focus on the big cities in America now.”
Despite the fact that such an approach appears to be wildly at odds with the U.S. Constitution and our system of government, the hapless GOP chairman of the House Oversight Committee apparently isn’t the only one thinking along these lines.
A day earlier, Republican Rep. Troy Downing of Montana appeared on Fox Business and insisted: “We need to send in the troops” to “liberally run cities across the country.”
Time will tell whether the White House follows such a course, but the Republican rhetoric did remind me of a story from 10 years ago.
Towards the end of Barack Obama’s second term, an interviewer noted that the right had targeted him with all kinds of foolish conspiracy theories, and he asked the Democratic president whether he had a favorite. Obama didn’t hesitate: The first thing that came to mind was Jade Helm.
In case anyone’s forgotten, U.S. military officials organized some training exercises in 2015 for about 1,200 people in areas spanning from Texas to California. Somehow, right-wing activists got it in their heads that the exercises, labeled “Jade Helm 15,” were part of an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the Obama administration, the Pentagon, Walmart and some “secret underground tunnels.”
All of this, according to the conspiracy theorists, was part of a White House martial law plot, in which American civilians on American soil would be subjected to a military takeover.
The far-right fears never made any sense, and it was tough to blame Obama for finding all of this rather amusing. But one of the underappreciated parts of the story was that a variety of Republican officials — including senators, governors and House members — at least pretended to take the conspiracy theories seriously. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott even felt the need to order the Texas Guard to “monitor” the military exercises — just in case Obama was up to something nefarious.
As of mid-May 2015, one polling outfit found that one-third of Republicans believed the conspiracy theory that the federal government was “trying to take over Texas” by way of the Jade Helm plot.
Eventually, the training exercises happened; there was no military takeover; and the GOP base gradually moved on to different conspiracy theories. But the underlying fear is relevant anew: The whole point of the Jade Helm hysterics was conservative activists who seemed genuinely afraid of a tyrannical federal government sending active-duty troops into local American communities — a step that conservatives, at the time, characterized as obvious authoritarianism.
That was the summer of 2015. In the summer of 2025, however, many of those same conservatives have elected Republican policymakers who can’t wait to send active-duty troops into local American communities.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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