Trump sans frontières

Trump made it very clear during the campaign that his biggest regret from his first term was allowing non-insane people in his administration curb his worst impulses. We are getting exactly what he promised:

When unrest erupted around the country in 2020, President Trump’s then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper drew a line in the sand: active-duty military troops should rarely be deployed on American streets to quell protests.

“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,” Esper said, publicly breaking with Trump, who had floated deploying troops to respond to protests against the killing of George Floyd.

Five years later, Trump’s second-term Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, appears to have no such qualms.

Hegseth on Saturday said he was prepared to send active-duty Marines to respond to protests in California if the situation on the ground worsens. The warning followed an order by Trump that was carried out by Hegseth to deploy at least 2,000 National Guard troops after two days of skirmishes between demonstrators and federal officers over deportation orders. The National Guard troops started arriving in Los Angeles early Sunday over the objections of local and state officials.

Nearly five months into his second term, Trump has surrounded himself with senior advisers and cabinet officials who are largely in lockstep with his hard-charging approach to the presidency. While his team frequently put up roadblocks to his plans in his first four years in office, the loyalists he has assembled this time around are eager to implement—and sometimes expand on—his political priorities, according to administration officials and others familiar with the matter.

“Bigger authoritarian lickspittle than Mark Esper” seems in theory like a hard standard to surmount, but Pete Hegseth is like the Bob Beamon of authoritarian lickspittles.