Obama rails against Trump’s National Guard deployment in Illinois
Former President Obama slammed President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Illinois on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast on Monday.
“If I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, ‘You know what? A lot of problems in Dallas, a lot of crime there, and I don’t care what [Texas Gov. Greg] Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement, because I think things are out of control.’ It is mind-boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” Obama told Maron.
“When I used to travel around the world, this is back when democracy promotion was still bipartisan,” Obama said with a laugh. “[Former President] George Bush was for it, [former President] Bill Clinton was for it. I was for it. [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio apparently was for it, right?”
“It wasn’t controversial for me to go to other countries and say, ‘You know what? It’s a good idea for militaries to be under civilian control,’ because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting,” Obama continued.
Obama said because of “a law that’s been around for a long time, Posse Comitatus, that says you don’t use our military on domestic soil,” using the military on American soil “is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy.”
“And that was understood by Democrats and Republicans,” Obama continued. “I always try to — I mean, it’s almost too easy of a thought experiment.”
During his discussion with Maron, Obama criticized law firms, universities and businesses that he said should “take a stand” to uphold the law, protect academic freedom and value diversity.
“If you’re a business, you say, ‘You know what? We think it’s important, because of what this country is, to hire people from different backgrounds,'” Obama told Maron. “And we’re not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that’s been cooked up by [Stephen] Miller. We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.”
On Saturday, former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said on Fox News’s “The Journal Editorial Report” that the National Guard’s deployment would be a losing issue for Trump in the future. Rove referred to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll that showed 58 percent of U.S. adults say the president should only deploy troops to areas with external threats.
“This ultimately, I think, will tend to be a loser if the question is: Should the president do this or should he have done it,” Rove said. “On the other hand, it might get him a slight improvement among the people who are concerned about crime by saying, ‘Well, at least he’s taking action.’”
About 200 soldiers from the Texas National Guard and roughly 300 soldiers from the Illinois National Guard were activated in the greater Chicago area last Wednesday night, according to an updated mission summary from U.S. Northern Command.