Force Is Not Power
Invoking the Insurrection Act could mark the beginning of the end for the presidency.
Earlier today, I wrote that the Republican coalition is no longer stable. It isn’t disciplined. It isn’t even coherent. It’s a spinning top—accelerating, not consolidating—and the faster it spins, the closer it gets to tearing itself apart.
That context matters, because here in Minneapolis, the conversation has shifted from protest management to something more dangerous: invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying special forces troops to our streets.
That is not a show of strength.
The theory behind it is familiar: overwhelming force restores order, intimidates dissent, and reasserts control. But that theory belongs to a different era. This is a permanently recorded environment, where legitimacy is shaped not by official statements, but by cell phone footage.
If federal troops are deployed against civilians, the result will not be unity.
It will be rupture.
Not because Americans are uniquely volatile, but because Republican officeholders are.
The danger here is misunderstood, in part because federal troops have already been deployed domestically without triggering collapse.
But that’s the wrong conclusion.
What we’ve seen so far is static, defensive use of military force: guarding federal property, reinforcing perimeters, operating under tightly constrained rules of engagement. That posture is legible. It is limited. And while controversial, it does not force immediate political clarity.
What is now being discussed is something else entirely.
This is a dynamic form of domestic force projection—military units operating in public spaces, engaging civilians directly, and making split-second decisions normally reserved for law enforcement. Soldiers, not police, attempting to impose order in an open civilian environment.
That shift is not semantic. It is structural.
The moment military forces move from defending federal buildings to controlling the populace, the system crosses a line it cannot easily retreat from. The risk is no longer symbolic overreach, but operational miscalculation—misidentification, overreaction, escalation—captured in real time by hundreds of witnesses.
This is where coalition failure becomes inevitable.
A guarded courthouse with protestors mad outside produces talking points. A military patrol confronting civilians, possibly with deadly force, produces footage. And footage does not respect spin.
The moment a uniformed force is used against unarmed civilians on camera, the coalition fractures along predictable lines. Governors hedge. Swing-district Republicans panic. Media allies splinter. Donors disappear. And every member of Congress is forced to answer a question that they cannot answer:
Was this justified?
Some will try to paper over it with language about “terrorism” or “lawlessness.” That framing only works if the visuals cooperate.
They won’t.
This is the mistake force-first systems make: they assume obedience travels downward faster than legitimacy collapses outward. It didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan, but somehow they think it will work in Minneapolis. In reality, we know that legitimacy fails first—and when it does, force accelerates the collapse rather than preventing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s Kabul, Baghdad, or Minneapolis.
You can already see the strain. Figures who once cheered escalation are hesitating. Not because they’ve found principles, but because the cost curve has shifted.
Domestic military deployment, absent a true crisis, is not a display of control.
It is a tripwire.
Once crossed, leadership is left with only bad options: defend the indefensible, or abandon the executive they previously protected. Either choice detonates part of the coalition. There is no third path.
This is why the Insurrection Act is so dangerous—not because it will succeed, but because it cannot be used absent an actual insurrection or invasion. It forces clarity in a system built on ambiguity. And clarity is lethal to coalitions held together by denial and perfidy.
The paradox is simple: the more aggressively force is threatened or used, the weaker the presidency becomes.
If impeachment comes, it won’t be driven by moral awakening. It will be driven by institutional self-preservation. History suggests legislators choose themselves.
Force is not power.
In this environment, it’s exposure.
If active duty troops invade Minnesota and kill civilians, all bets are off anyway. I think the Insurrection Act is an exercise in self-deterrence, such that it is becoming an excuse to refrain from doing what is necessary to stop a tyrant. Trump couldn’t care less about demarches, strongly worded memos, or even threats of impeachment by some Republicans. I constantly see comments about how we should keep protests peaceful and to be careful not to “give Trump what he wants,” but I find this admonition comical, given the very obvious fact that our cities (Minneapolis in particular) have already become militarized. Plus, given the Republicans’ acquiescence to Trump on the Venezuelan War Powers Resolution, I’m pretty confident that even a river of blood flowing in the streets of Minneapolis would elicit little more than the usual pearl-clutching by Collins and Murkowski.
Let’s face it, the Republicans know that they’ll be clobbered this November, which is probably why Trump is openly musing about cancelling elections. I know we keep saying that Trump can’t legally do that, but as J6 demonstrated, the legality is not really the point. What is the point is creating enough chaos to allow for a fait accompli, similar to what he’s trying to execute in Greenland. Given that Republicans could impeach, convict, and remove Trump today for any number of high crimes and misdemeanors, we can only conclude that Republicans are hedging for now to see how this plays out, but the fact that they are even slightly open to the idea of accepting the invasion of a state and the killing of American civilians means that governors are going to have to exert their role as CinC of their respective states’ National Guard a lot more aggressively and creatively than they may be comfortable with thus far.
A call for unity from ocean to ocean:
"The person down the street who votes differently than you is not your enemy. They are your neighbor. They worry about the same things you worry about. They want their kids to be safe and their bills to be paid and their country to be a place worth living in. They have been manipulated just like you have been manipulated, fed a different flavor of the same poison, sorted into a different tribe by the same algorithm, pointed at you as the enemy by the same people who point you at them.
The working class Republican and the working class Democrat have more in common with each other than either of them has with the billionaire class that funds both parties.
You share the same struggles. You face the same rigged systems. You are being crushed by the same economic forces that have transferred more wealth upward in the last fifty years than at any point in human history. And instead of uniting against the people doing this to you, you are screaming at each other on the internet about pronouns and flags and whatever fresh outrage the algorithm served up this morning.
This is exactly what they want. A nation at war with itself cannot resist a takeover. A people consumed by mutual hatred will accept any authority that promises to protect them from the manufactured enemy. Every empire that fell was divided before it was conquered. Every free people who lost their freedom were set against each other first.
The red versus blue war is not real. It is a show put on by people who own both teams. It is professional wrestling and you think it is a real fight. The wrestlers go backstage after the match and laugh together while you are still screaming at the guy in the other section who was rooting for the wrong character.
This Is Our Country Not Theirs
This nation belongs to the people who live here and work here and raise families here and will be buried here. It does not belong to billionaires who hold citizenship in three countries and will flee to their bunkers the moment things get bad. It does not belong to tech oligarchs who view democracy as an obstacle to efficiency. It does not belong to foreign interests who have purchased so much influence that they might as well be writing our laws themselves.
We have to stop letting them divide us. We have to start seeing each other as fellow Americans again instead of enemy combatants in a culture war that was manufactured to keep us weak. We have to remember that the person screaming at us online is also a victim of the same manipulation, and maybe if we stopped screaming back and started talking, we might realize we have been fighting the wrong enemy this entire time.
Turn off the television. It is not informing you. It is programming you. Question everything, including the sources you trust, especially the sources you trust. Talk to people who disagree with you and do it without trying to win. Listen to why they believe what they believe. You might discover that the monster you have been told to hate is actually just another person trying to make sense of a confusing world with imperfect information, exactly like you.
Remember who you are. You are an American. Your ancestors came to this land or were brought to this land or were already on this land, and regardless of how they got here, they built something together that was supposed to be different from the old world’s tyrannies and aristocracies. That project is not finished. Every generation has to fight to keep it alive against the forces that want to drag us back to a world where a handful of rulers own everything and everyone else serves at their pleasure.
Stop letting them divide you. Your enemies are not your neighbors. Your enemies are the people who profit from your division and are building machines to replace you the moment you are no longer useful.
Start acting like it before it is too late". —The Wise Wolf