What did Donald Trump do today?

He said protests featuring a man in an inflated frog costume might be an "insurrection."

Recapping recent events: on Saturday, a federal judge in Oregon temporarily barred Trump from federalizing the Oregon National Guard on the grounds that his claims that Portland was "burning to the ground… every night" were "untethered to facts." Then, on Sunday, when Trump tried to get around that order by sending already-federalized California National Guard troops to Portland instead, the same judge barred that action too as an illegal end-run around her first order.

Today, Trump suggested he might try a different tactic: invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that governs how the military can be deployed as a police force against American citizens.

That would solve the legal angle for Trump, except that the law requires that there be

unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.

There are certainly assemblages outside the ICE facility at the heart of Trump's attempt to pick a military fight with another American city, but they're not unlawful, and protests against Trump's policies are not a rebellion in a country with the First Amendment. 

A protestor in an inflatable frog suit stands in front of ICE agents and civilian police. The blue line the frog is standing behind separates a public sidewalk from the boundary of the ICE facility.

By contrast, this was what Los Angeles looked like in 1992, the last time the Insurrection Act was (legally) invoked by President George H.W. Bush at the request of Gov. Pete Wilson:

Of course, Trump may simply try to order the military into cities to claim some kind of optics victory regardless of the legality of it. ICE and other federal agencies have become much more aggressive in their response to Americans lawfully protesting their presence in recent weeks. They've also adopted much more violent tactics while (supposedly) detaining undocumented immigrants, in an apparent attempt to provoke unrest. 

It's important to note that it's not clear how much control or awareness Trump has over his own administration's actions. His confusion over whether he was seeing footage from Portland in 2025 or nationwide protests in 2020 was part of why the federal judge in Oregon barred his deployment in the first place. Trump's mention of the Insurrection Act today was brief and apparently a scripted talking point; he did not answer follow-up questions about it.

Why does this matter?

• Authoritarians cannot stand being mocked and will respond with as much force as possible to prevent it. 

• If there were an actual rebellion in Portland or any other American city, Trump wouldn't need to lie about it.