Stephen Miller is pushing Donald Trump to create further complications in Minneapolis, a political analyst has claimed.
Speaking on The Daily Blast, both Greg Sargent and Mother Jones columnist Mark Follman believe the president could be swayed into invoking the Insurrection Act. The law gives the president the power to deploy the US Armed Forces and National Guard in individual states. Whether Trump uses this law in Minneapolis just weeks after the ICE shooting of Renee Good is yet to be seen.
But analysts like Sargent and Follman believe Miller is orchestrating a push for Trump to use the act. Sargent said, "I think the way I would put that is that they think the supercharging of all these violent tensions and malignancies among Americans, among ethnic group against ethnic group, American against American, creates the conditions for their type of politics to take hold.
"I don’t know whether Trump really thinks it through that way, but I’m reasonably certain that Stephen Miller very much does. At bottom though, I think Miller clearly wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
"I’m not in his head, as you say, but I’m pretty sure that he is quietly whispering in Donald Trump’s ear that the time has come to invoke it. And so you can hear in Miller’s rhetoric, he uses all sorts of language that really is deeply kind of shaped around the idea of getting Trump to that place.
"And he’s trying to get Trump to invoke it, and Trump hasn’t done it yet, but it is something that Miller wants and he thinks this sort of turmoil creates the conditions for that."
Follman agreed, suggesting the Insurrection Act would do little to curb rising tensions in the area. He added, " I think that it is a very serious possibility and something that Miller and others around Trump perhaps want to see happen, really ultimately, I think, as a furtherance of maximizing his power and his control, this idea of maximizing the unitary executive theory that Trump’s in charge.
"And so using the Insurrection Act would be another expression of that predicated on, I think, this kind of rising tension and violence and chaos that we’re seeing, largely perpetrated by the operations that they’re carrying out with ICE."