WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump ramps up his use of the military to quell domestic dissent, he has on his side a Pentagon chief apparently ready to carry out any order Trump gives him, possibly including a potentially illegal one to shoot American citizens.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, specifically asked during his January confirmation hearing whether he would have obeyed a 2020 Trump demand to shoot protesters — as Trump had wanted then-Secretary Mark Esper to do in his first term — would not answer and instead dodged the question.
“I was in the Washington, D.C. National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events holding a riot shield on behalf of my country. I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fences, set the church on fire and destroy a statue,” Hegseth said in response to Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono.
A minute later, Hegseth cited Trump’s leadership as the reason he would not provide definitive answers to that or other questions.
“One of the things that President Trump is so good at is never strategically tipping his hand, and so I would never in this public forum give one way or another what orders the president gives to me in any context,” he said.
The question and Hegseth’s answer may suddenly be relevant again following Trump’s orders to the military to protect officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement carrying out raids to arrest migrants who are in the country illegally. Protests grew violent in Los Angeles over the weekend after Trump deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to the city on Saturday night.
He continued threatening to add more troops and possibly broaden the deployment in remarks Sunday after a weekend of golf at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey. “We’re going to have troops everywhere,” he told reporters.
On Monday, even as California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued Trump and Hegseth to rescind the deployment because he had not requested it, as he said the law requires, Trump escalated the situation by adding 700 Marines, a full battalion, to the mix.
It is unclear what, precisely, they can accomplish. Federal law prohibits them from arresting people unless Trump were to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. While he has referred to the protesters as “insurrectionists” multiple times, he has not used his authority to declare the riot an “insurrection” against the United States, which would suggest that the participants are trying to overthrow the national government.
“Trump is just abusing his power,” Hirono said Monday. “At first, it’s the National Guard, without reference to the governor, and now that the Marines, what is he trying to prove that he is king. ... It’s because he thinks that the rule of law doesn’t apply to him, and I think it’s a very dangerous precedent for him to be doing all of these things. So it’s just, who’s to stop him?”
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell blamed Newsom — whom Trump regularly calls “Newscum” in his remarks and social media posts — for the violence.
“Under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s feckless leadership, California’s state and local officials have actively subverted federal immigration laws, enabled so-called sanctuary cities, and refused to protect federal law enforcement officers,” Parnell told HuffPost. “Because of this leadership failure, President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stepped up to protect our communities from violent mobs. We have an obligation to defend federal law enforcement officers, even if Gavin Newsom will not.”
“Donald Trump has manufactured a crisis and is inflaming conditions,” Newsom said in a social media post on Sunday, later adding in a separate post, “Local law enforcement didn’t need help ... Trump sent troops anyway — to manufacture chaos and violence.”
Trump in 2020 was angry about protests around the country sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, and particularly those taking place in Washington, D.C., near the White House.
According to Esper, Trump wanted the National Guard troops who had been deployed to open fire on the protesters: “He says, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something.’ And he’s suggesting that that’s what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters,” Esper told CBS News in 2022.
On June 1 of that year, both Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley were present with Trump when he ordered Lafayette Square adjacent to the White House cleared so he could have his photo taken holding a Bible in front of a church there.
Both Esper and Milley publicly apologized for their presence in the days after and stated that the military had no role in that autumn’s election. The remarks incensed Trump and eventually led to Esper’s firing after Trump’s election loss in November.
No such pushback is likely to happen with Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, now in charge of the military.
“Secretary Hegseth stands firmly with President Trump and will work with our interagency partners to restore order,” Parnell said.
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.