Trump’s Recruitment Plan for Military “Reaction Force” Is a Nightmare

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order to bolster his federal occupation of Washington, D.C., and create a “quick reaction force” in the National Guard that could be deployed to tamp down civil protests across the country.

Hidden in that executive order is a chilling directive to the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” led by White House adviser Stephen Miller to “establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities” in support of his previous order declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C.

The order continues:

“Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.” [emphasis added]

The move is sure to receive a warm reception from the far-right vigilante groups that are already, as The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote, nodding along to federal forces’ actions on the streets of D.C.

Grant observed, for example, that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, in a recent interview, spoke favorably of Trump’s crackdown on the capital and urged him to call up a militia for immigration enforcement. “He should call up all of us,” Rhodes said. “Every able-bodied male in this nation, age 17 to 45 could be called up as the militia.” For Rhodes and his ilk, Trump’s Monday executive order is surely a step in the right direction.

Some of President Donald Trump’s biggest supporters are arguing that he just made a very bad move.

On Monday, the president offered a concession to China amid ongoing trade talks with Beijing, informing reporters at the White House that the administration would permit hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to continue their studies in the U.S.

“We’re going to allow their students to come in,” Trump said. “It’s very important, 600,000 students. It’s very important. But we’re going to get along with China.”

But that did not sit well with his MAGA base, who claimed that the administration would never accomplish its “mass deportation” if it allowed immigrants into the country.

“I didn’t vote for more Muslims and Chinese people to be imported to my country,” far-right provocateur Laura Loomer wrote on X. “Sorry but these immigrants from communist countries and Sharia shitholes where child rape is legalized don’t make America great.”

“Please don’t Make America China,” she continued. “MAGA doesn’t want more immigrants.”

In another post, Loomer urged Trump to “do the math,” lamenting that the country would never “get rid of the millions who came in under Biden” if it followed through on Trump’s plan.

“If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations?” she wrote.

Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was also outraged, preaching on social media that the country should not “let in” thousands of students who she claimed could be “loyal” to the Chinese Communist Party.

“If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15 percent of them to fail then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP,” Greene wrote. “Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student’s opportunities? We should never allow that.”

America’s relationship with China has been fraught since Trump returned to office. Earlier this year, the president imposed a whopping 145 percent tariff on all Chinese goods—a threat that provoked a quick response from Beijing, which imposed a 125 percent tariff on U.S. exports in return.

China’s defiant negotiating strategy with the U.S. became an international model in May when Trump’s tariffs plummeted, proving that the country’s refusal to play the White House’s waiting game had earned them a significantly better deal.

But the U.S. leader’s economic threats have continued, nonetheless. In the same White House presser Monday, Trump curiously fixated on magnets, warning China that it must hand more over or face a “200 percent tariff or something.”

President Trump and his Justice Department have finally given up on charging D.C. woman Sidney Lori Reid with a felony after failing to convince three different grand juries that she deserved eight years in prison for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining.

This is a pretty impressive failure on D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s part. It’s not often that prosecutors are denied an indictment from a grand jury given the preexisting bias towards federal prosecution (defendant’s lawyers aren’t even allowed in the room in front of a grand jury).

In July, Reid was accused of assaulting, impeding, or interfering with federal agents while they transferred two alleged gang members into FBI custody at a D.C. jail. According to prosecutors, she recorded the agents and tried to block them from getting to one of the detainees. After being pushed against a wall by agents, prosecutors claimed Reid “forcibly pushed” an FBI agent’s arm off of her with the intent to injure the agent.

The argument didn’t work in court, as Reid’s lawyers argued she was simply arrested by officers who didn’t want to be filmed, and the physical altercation occurred because of the agents.

Federal prosecutors have now refiled the case as a low-level misdemeanor.

“Three grand juries have now declined to indict Ms. Reid for felony assault on a law enforcement officer,” her lawyers, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, wrote in a statement Monday night. “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people, but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”

If Reid had been charged with the felony, she would have faced up to eight years in prison.

The case proves the obvious: The Trump administration is being overly aggressive, and is more focused on making brutal legal examples of people rather than actually having a punishment that fits the “crime.”

“Seeking an indictment for a third time is extremely rare and usually only reserved for the most serious of crimes,” attorney Christopher Macchiaroli told D.C.’s local WUSA9. “If a governmental entity cannot convince a supermajority of grand jurors that there is a fair probability that a crime was committed, it is virtually impossible to believe that twelve jurors in the same relevant jurisdiction could unanimously at a future date find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest standard of proof under the law.”

The charges levied against Reid are the same ones levied against Sean Dunn, the Subway sandwich thrower in Washington, D.C., who had his apartment raided by agents when he was arrested.

Reid’s outcome should be a positive sign for people like Dunn, but the Justice Department isn’t giving up on their efforts to ruin people’s lives over low-level arrests just yet. Senior Justice Department official Akaash Singh told his prosecutors to ignore the losses and criticism, and to continue to overcharge people, according to The New York Times.

A demonstrator who identified himself as a disabled combat veteran was arrested Monday after burning an American flag in protest of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.

Speaking through a megaphone to the onlookers outside of the White House, the protester explained that Trump’s latest decree penalizing flag burning was an affront to the First Amendment.

“I fought for every single one of your rights to express yourself in however you feel that you may want to express yourself,” the protester said, in a video shared to social media.

“No president can make a law—period—no Congress can make a law infringing on First Amendment rights,” he added. “I’m burning this flag as a protest of that illegal fascist president that sits in that house!”

The protester then lit the flag on fire.

Despite Trump’s claim that burning the American flag “incites riots at a level we’ve never seen,” no such riot materialized. The protester was promptly arrested by the Secret Service.

The Secret Service released a statement that it detained the man “for igniting an object” and that he was turned over to Park Police, who said they’d arrested him for violating a statute that prohibits lighting a fire in a public park, according to NBC News.

Trump’s blatant attack on free speech built on fictitious grounds is an affront to the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 in 1989 that flag burning was protected speech under the First Amendment.

Donald Trump’s move to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for unproven allegations of mortgage fraud is unprecedented. It also raises the troubling likelihood that the administration is using a federal agency to make its way through an enemies list.

In a shocking instance of presidential meddling with the central bank, Trump on Monday announced that he was removing Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board, for cause. Cook, for her part, refused to step down and responded with a statement: “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said. “I will not resign.”

As Georgetown Law professor Adam J. Levitin wrote Monday at the blog Credit Slips, it’s far from clear that the allegations against Cook (of misconduct unrelated to the carrying out of her duties) can even constitute “cause.” The accusations are also quite flimsy.

But what may be most notable is how the attempted firing of Cook came about. The allegations of mortgage fraud were laid out by Bill Pulte, the MAGA director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, who claimed Cook declared two primary residences.

As Levitin observed in an earlier post calling for Pulte’s resignation, it’s unlikely that the FHFA head just happened upon the alleged fraud “in some routine audit or the like.” Rather, he wrote, Pulte likely directed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac “to pull her application”—an unheard-of move.

Taken with the Trump administration’s evidently politically motivated mortgage fraud claims against Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Cook’s corrupt firing raises the troubling possibility that Pulte is working through a list à la Richard Nixon’s list of political enemies to be targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Unless Pulte somehow had particular knowledge about issues with Cook’s application, which is unlikely, then one has to conclude that Pulte handed Fannie and Freddie a list of political enemies and asked for their loan files for review,” Levitin wrote. “That’s got to be how the DOJ indictment of Senator Adam Schiff and NY Attorney General Letitia James arose too.”