On Monday, Donald Trump was at it again, claiming that he was prevented from deploying the DC National Guard to protect the Capitol from the domestic terrorist attack on January 6th because some Democrat–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer or even DC Mayor Muriel Bowser–blocked his order.

“How can I be guilty of a crime when I’m the one who wanted to stop the so-called ‘crime’ by strongly recommending 10,000 plus troops to D.C., and hence the surrounding of the Capitol, only to have this recommendation rejected by Pelosi and the Mayor of D.C., who are in charge of Capitol security?” Trump “truthed” to his thousands of followers on his failing privately-owned social media site.

As with the majority of Trump’s statements, this is a blatant lie.  Pelosi, Schumer and Bowser had no authority to call up the DC National Guard.  As a federal jurisdiction, DC is the only government that does not have a governmental executive that can activate the Guard; only the President has the authority to call up the DC National Guard.  In other states–and even US territories–the governor controls when the Guard gets called up, but DC has no governor–only a mayor–whose powers are limited by Congress, and those powers do not include commanding the National Guard unit from the District. (A curious quirk of DC organizational law prevents the DC Mayor from calling up the DC National Guard, but it doesn’t prevent the Mayor from asking for assistance from other states’ Guard units by asking their governors to activate them, hence Bowser requesting aid from Virginia and Maryland on January 6th.)

Another sign that Trump’s statement was a lie:  he claimed to have wanted to activate “10,000 plus troops” to DC prior to the January 6th attack.  The DC National Guard only has 3,400 uniformed personnel in its entirety.  If Trump wanted 10,000 troops, he would have had to contact neighboring states such as Maryland and Virginia to fill that quota.  There have been no records of any such requests coming from Trump, and in fact, members of Congress were calling those states’ governors while the attack was happening to plead for their help.  (And for those wondering why Trump didn’t just send in the Army:  Trump cannot use “regular” US military to enforce laws due to the posse comitatus act that bars US military from enforcing laws within our borders without a declaration of a state of emergency, another thing Trump wasn’t going to issue to stop his minions from attacking Congress.)

And while Nancy Pelosi does have financial control over what budget items get passed in relation to how the DC Guard gets funded, the Speaker doesn’t have any military authority.  It’s the whole “separation of powers” thing the Founders put in place along with the “checks and balances” that are supposed to work in our Republic.  The President, as Commander-in-Chief, oversees military operations.  Those military operations are supposed to be authorized by Congress by way of a declaration of war or enacting the War Powers Act, and Congress can put a check on military operations by canceling budget allocations.

Trump is pushing this “[Person X] is to blame!” narrative–as he always does–to push blame onto others, and his undereducated minions believe him.  Trump is cynically banking on his followers’ ignorance–and quite frankly, the ignorance of the average American–about the unique function of the DC government to propagate this lie.

The fact that Trump did not activate the DC National Guard even after he had known for days or weeks there was a threat of violence on January 6th–a threat which we know he knew about because of testimony from various witnesses to the House Select Committee, including Cassidy Hutchison–is further evidence that Trump anticipated and wanted the violence to happen.

The argument cannot be made that Trump did not know the procedure for calling up the DC Guard.  Not only does the President have a team of advisors, both civilian and military, to instruct him on proper procedure, but Trump himself had also called up the DC Guard during the summer of 2020, when he wanted to clear the area around the White House of demonstrators so he could hold a photo op at a DC church.  He also used his authority, in that case, to literally fly in law enforcement officers from various agencies of the Executive Branch such as the Bureau of Prisons and ICE to act as his personal muscle.

The House Select Committee likely questioned DC Guard leadership to determine when they were contacted, who contact them, and how they responded.  The committee has the timeline.  And nowhere in that timeline did Donald Trump act to prevent, stop or abate the violence at the Capitol by activating the DC National Guard or any of the other federal agencies he had deployed months earlier to break up largely peaceful protests in the city.

We know that Trump and his cabal are going to lie and deflect constantly to avoid responsibility for his role in the January 6th domestic terrorist attack, but the lesson from Trump’s inaction is a simple one:   should he or a like-minded Republican (cough, cough Ron DeSantis) get into the White House in 2024, he’ll use every agency including the military to impose his demands in an attempt to secure his political power.  We all know what Trump did, and DeSantis has already shown that predilection in Florida through his culture war dictums.  It’s a step the nation cannot afford at this critical time in our history.