President Donald Trump is a tyrant!
That's what the left and MSM (but I repeat myself) tell us.
But, he's hardly the first president to call upon the active duty military to quell an insurrection.
Bonus Army
The year was 1932. America was in the teeth of the Great Depression, its people ravaged by unemployment, hunger, and hopelessness.
Into this came the Bonus Army, a group of some 17,000 World War I veterans and their families who camped on the muddy banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., demanding the early payment of their service bonuses.
These weren’t agitators or anarchists. They were soldiers. Patriotic men who had fought for the country and now sought a promise fulfilled.
President Herbert Hoover saw them differently. Under pressure from advisors who feared the protests could boil over into revolution, Hoover gave the order.
In came General Douglas MacArthur, along with then-Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, and cavalry led by George S. Patton. Armed with bayonets, tear gas, and tanks, they cleared the encampment. The veterans were scattered. One baby died. The press, even then, was livid. Hoover’s already fragile presidency never recovered.
And yet, Hoover was not the first to send in troops against his own people.
Nor would he be the last.
The Myth of “Unprecedented” Presidential Force
When Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act during the riots of 2020, the media treated it like a constitutional coup. CNN warned of a “dictatorial impulse.”
The New York Times suggested the very fabric of democracy was at stake. But like most of what passes for outrage today, this wasn’t new. It was history repeating itself, loudly, ignorantly, and with cameras rolling.
The reality is that presidents throughout American history have used active-duty military to quell unrest when the situation demanded it. Not just the National Guard under a governor’s control. Federal troops. The United States Army.
And it goes all the way back to the beginning.
Washington: Setting the Tone in 1794
In the first major domestic challenge to federal authority, President George Washington crushed the Whiskey Rebellion by marching 13,000 troops personally into western Pennsylvania. The issue was taxes. Farmers had rebelled.
Washington responded not with dialogue circles or community listening sessions but with militia muscle backed by the full weight of the federal government.
No one called him a fascist. No one burned the Capitol.
He was seen as a patriot who had upheld the law and the Constitution.
Lincoln: Law and Order Amidst War
Abraham Lincoln did not hesitate to use the Union Army to enforce the law during the Civil War, not just on the battlefield but in the streets of the North.
When the New York City Draft Riots exploded in 1863, fueled by opposition to the war and race tensions, Lincoln sent troops fresh from Gettysburg to put down the insurrection.
More than 100 people died. The army cleared the streets. Federal authority held.
Again, no headlines screamed of tyranny. Lincoln was understood to be acting under duress, defending the nation’s survival.
Grant: Federal Muscle in the Reconstruction South
Ulysses S. Grant, himself a general-turned-president, sent troops into the post-Civil War South to enforce the rights of newly freed Black citizens.
The Ku Klux Klan was murdering people. Local authorities often looked the other way. Grant responded with active-duty deployments and the Enforcement Acts, which essentially gave federal troops the authority to arrest terrorists and protect polling places.
The lesson? When the states wouldn’t act or actively defied justice, the president did.
Eisenhower: Paratroopers in Little Rock
In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to integrate Little Rock Central High School. He deployed the state’s National Guard to block nine Black students from entering.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and career soldier, federalized the Arkansas Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division, active-duty Army, to walk those students past screaming mobs and into the school.
This was not a reluctant move. Ike made a televised address to the nation, declaring that the Constitution must be upheld, regardless of the state’s refusal to act.
He didn’t wait for a riot. He anticipated one. And stopped it cold.
JFK and LBJ: Riots, Rights, and Riot Gear
John F. Kennedy sent in Army troops to quell the riots when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss. One hundred and sixty marshals were injured.
Two men were killed. Kennedy ordered 20,000 troops to be put on standby and sent federal troops into the city to restore peace.
Lyndon Johnson went further.
In 1967, as Detroit burned for five days in the most destructive riot in U.S. history, he ordered the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. He did it again in 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination set Washington, D.C., aflame.
Again, active-duty troops marched through American streets.
There were no impeachment hearings. No editorials accusing them of using the military “against the American people.” No civil liberties lawsuits are crying foul.
Because the people knew that when cities burn, the Constitution doesn’t demand cowardice, it demands leadership.
George H.W. Bush: South Central Los Angeles, 1992
After the Rodney King verdict, Los Angeles exploded into chaos. Looting. Assaults. Arson. The LAPD couldn’t control it. The California National Guard was overwhelmed.
President George H.W. Bush sent in the Marines and the Army. Federal troops in Humvees patrolled the streets of Los Angeles, using martial law tactics to restore calm. And it worked. The worst of the rioting ended almost immediately after the military rolled in.
He wasn’t called a tyrant.
He was called a president.
And Then There Was Trump
Now fast-forward to 2020. When left-wing riots spread across major cities, President Donald Trump faced the same dilemma many presidents had encountered before him: mass unrest, police unable to control it, and cities burning. In D.C., law enforcement was attacked, monuments defaced, and a church set on fire.
Trump warned of invoking the Insurrection Act, the same statute used by previous presidents from Jefferson to Eisenhower. He mobilized active-duty troops to bases near Washington, D.C., though he ultimately didn’t deploy them onto the streets. He did, however, use federal law enforcement to clear Lafayette Square after an assault on police lines.
That’s all it took. The media went nuclear. MSNBC cried “martial law.” Protesters wept for democracy. And yet, no actual soldiers were ever deployed in the capital.
Why the double standard? Why was Trump villainized for threatening what others had already done, often more forcefully?
Because narrative, not principle, governs the outrage.
A Tool, Not a Threat
The use of troops to restore order isn’t a sign of a collapsing republic. It’s a sign of a government doing what governments are supposed to do: protect life, liberty, and property when other institutions fail.
Presidents don’t send in troops to win a photo op. They do it when the cost of inaction outweighs the political cost of action.
Washington knew this. So did Lincoln, Grant, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Bush. Even Hoover, though his judgment failed him, acted out of concern for stability.
And so did Donald Trump.
History Doesn’t Begin in 2020
Any honest student of American history knows the script. Riots come. Cities burn. Mayors flinch. Governors hedge. And when the republic itself is at risk, the president acts.
The hypocrisy isn’t in the act. It’s in the memory, the selective, weaponized amnesia of a media class that sees only what it wants to see and condemns only what it chooses to condemn.
Donald Trump did not invent federal force. He inherited a constitutional tool forged in the fires of whiskey riots and the Civil War, wielded in defense of law and liberty.
The fact that he didn’t use it more often is restraint, not recklessness.
So the next time a president, this one or the next, sends in the troops, remember: despite what you may hear, it's not authoritarianism. It’s tradition.
It's part of the job.
