The Hartmann Report

08/13/2025

He says he’s deploying the military to Washington DC because of a “crime emergency,” but armies don’t do policing: Their job, and their training, is to blow things up and kill people.

They have no training in evidence-chain-of-custody, arrest procedures, civil rights protections, criminal investigation, or any other aspect of policing. Sending a militia to do policing is like inviting the neighborhood butcher to perform your brain surgery.

In America, it’s also illegal. Under Posse Comitatus, the American military is explicitly forbidden from engaging in any police activities against civilian populations. Even though the Trump administration is bragging that the National Guard arrested almost 50 people yesterday in DC, the Posse Comitatus Act consists of just one sentence:

“Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Armies are really good, however, at facing down large crowds of protestors.

— In 2020, after Aleksandr Lukashenko stole the election in Belarus, over a million people showed up in the streets to protest his increasingly violent repression of dissent. He called out the military to put down the protests, killing dozens and arresting over 25,000 people, many of whom were tortured while in custody.

— In 2021, when massive pro-Navalny protests broke out across Russia, Putin called out the Rosgvardiya (“National Guard”), a new masked militia he’d created just a few years earlier, answerable only to him, that was tasked with identifying and imprisoning immigrants and also used against his personal enemies. They showed up with armored vehicles, helicopters, and troops with automatic weapons to put down the protests: over 11,000 people were “arrested,” many never to be seen free again.

— On December 3, 2024, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Koren declared emergency martial law, justifying it as a necessary move to suppress what he termed “anti-state” forces, specifically his political opposition. Because Yoon hadn’t pre-positioned the military or prepared for the eruption in Seoul’s streets like Lukashenko and Putin had, protestors succeeded in driving him out of office.

Trump is planning to go the Lukashenko and Putin route and is determined not to go down the way Yoon did. That — along with distracting us from his alleged raping of underage girls with his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein — is why he’s militarizing Washington DC and Los Angeles.

These are test runs for when his crimes, corruption, and excesses — particularly if the feds intervene to help Republicans steal the 2026 elections — become so severe that Americans are in the streets in large enough numbers to present a threat to his regime.