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A few months ago, most Americans likely could not have imagined a U.S. president and his secretary of defense having protesters shot -- even those peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights on public property. But now, with protesters and military personnel confronting each other in Los Angeles -- and a similarly combustible event set to take place this weekend in Washington, D.C. -- no American should be certain an unimaginable event will not unfold soon in one of those locations -- or at another site where some 1,500 "No Kings" events are planned around the country on Saturday to protest Trump's military parade that day in D.C. Possible clashes might be of particular concern when the president and secretary of defense in question are Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. It likely is especially troubling for those familiar with the pair's rhetoric about protesters.
The New Republic (TNR) reminds us of the words Trump and Hegseth have spewed on the subject in an article titled "Would Trump and Hegseth Have Protesters Be Shot? See What They’ve Said; The weekend’s events in Los Angeles bring us face-to-face with a possible reality that until this year seemed unimaginable in the United States. Michael Tomasky writes:
If you’d somehow forgotten what Donald Trump said to top military aides in June 2020 about the people gathered in Washington’s Lafayette Park protesting the killing of George Floyd, now seems like a good time to remember.
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in many interviews while promoting his book in 2022 that, during a White House meeting to discuss the protests, Trump turned to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and asked: “Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?”
Naturally, Esper and Milley were both aghast. But now fast-forward to this past January, and the confirmation hearing of current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. As fate would have it, Hegseth was among the National Guard troops deployed by Trump to quell those George Floyd protests. Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii asked Hegseth about that day, and how he might handle a similar situation were he the Pentagon chief. Per The Washington Post at the time:
“In June of 2020, then-President Trump directed former secretary of defense Mark Esper to shoot protesters in the legs in downtown D.C., an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with,” Hirono said. “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?”
“Senator, I was in the Washington, D.C., National Guard unit that was in Lafayette Square during those events,” Hegseth replied, “carrying a riot shield on behalf of my country.” …
As Hegseth was describing his experience, Hirono pressed the point: “Would you carry out an order to shoot protesters in the legs as directed to Secretary Esper?”
“I saw 50 Secret Service agents get injured by rioters trying to jump over the fence,” Hegseth continued, “set a church on fire and destroy a statue. Chaos.”
“That sounds to me that you will comply with such an order,” Hirono concluded. “You will shoot protesters in the leg.”
The Post’s droll next sentence? “Hegseth didn’t reject her conclusion.” Watch this video, starting at about 3:30; at exactly 4:02, Hegseth had a clear opportunity to say, “No, senator, I can’t imagine ordering that.” He didn’t take it.
This, remember, is the same Hegseth who tweeted over the weekend about possibly calling in the Marines to Los Angeles.
Oh, while we’re recalling stuff, it behooves us to recall this: During a 2023 campaign rally, Trump was talking about those Lafayette Square protests when he said this: “You’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in—the next time, I’m not waiting.”
I’m no math whiz, but I’m pretty sure I can add all that up. It equals the very real possibility that somewhere down the dark road ahead of us, under orders of the president of the United States, U.S. soldiers might open fire on U.S. citizens, along with possibly other civilians who don’t happen to be U.S. citizens. The idea of the military firing on civilians on American soil seems impossible to imagine, something more akin to a totalitarian dictatorship or a rogue state. The idea of U.S. soldiers firing on U.S. citizens exercising a constitutional right they’ve secured simply by being born is beyond incomprehensible. But today, under this president and this defense secretary, there seems a better than remote chance that this is where we’re headed.
Let's establish for the record that a gunshot wound to the leg is not a minor inconvenience. Consider the following insights from an article at PubMed and the National Library of Medicine under the title "[Treatment of gunshot fractures of the lower extremity: Part 2: Procedures for secondary reconstruction and treatment results]":
Abstract
Background: Gunshot wounds of the lower extremities are always serious injuries, especially in cases in which bone is affected. Contamination and extensive tissue damage can be life-threatening for the patient and severely affect the function of the extremity. Contamination and local infections with multidrug resistant pathogens are regularly encountered particularly in casualties evacuated from crisis regions. Treatment of this special type of injury, which differs in the form and extent from conventional high-energy trauma of the lower extremities, usually requires lengthy and extensive therapy algorithms in order to preserve the affected extremity.
Patients and methods: Based on the results of 34 gunshot wounds of the lower extremities which were surgically treated in this department between 2005 and 2011, this article reports on procedures used for wound management, soft tissue reconstruction and restoration of bone continuity. This group included 18 patients with a total of 20 gunshot-related fractures, 40% of which affected the lower leg and 35% the thigh. The affected extremities could be salvaged in all cases.
Results: The therapeutic spectrum required for bone reconstruction after soft-tissue coverage demonstrated in these case examples ranged from conventional osteosynthesis with or without local cancellous bone transplant with platelet-rich plasma, to healing in a fixator, bone resection and the Masquelet method, distraction osteogenesis using a fixator in order to restore continuity and definitive secondary extension using an intramedullary skeletal kinetic distractor (ISKD) nail. Out of 15 bullet fractures affecting large tubular bones 8 could be healed without any shortening, axis deviation or malrotation. In 7 cases definitive shortening by an average of 20 mm (minimum 10 mm and maximum 40 mm) was necessary. The average treatment time before full weight-bearing was achieved within tolerable pain limits was 66 weeks (minimum 4 weeks and maximum 267 weeks). Secondary osteitis and osteomyelitis following primary restoration was detected in only one case.
Conclusion: These results show that the treatment of gunshot wounds of the lower extremities is time-consuming and extensive and requires the complete spectrum of modern trauma surgery. Despite the high risk of complications during treatment it is possible and feasible to apply procedures that preserve the extremities.
Extremities can be saved in many instances, but that is not always the case, as an article from PubMed and the National Library of Medicine makes clear under the title "Lower extremity vascular injuries caused by firearms have a higher risk of amputation and death compared with non-firearm penetrating trauma":
Abstract
Objective: Firearm injuries have traditionally been associated with worse outcomes compared with other types of penetrating trauma. Lower extremity trauma with vascular injury is a common presentation at many centers. Our goal was to compare firearm and non-firearm lower extremity penetrating injuries requiring vascular repair.
Methods: We analyzed the National Inpatient Sample from 2010 to 2014 for all penetrating lower extremity injuries requiring vascular repair based on International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision codes. Our primary outcomes were in-hospital lower extremity amputation and death.
Results: We identified 19,494 patients with lower extremity penetrating injuries requiring vascular repair-15,727 (80.7%) firearm injuries and 3767 (19.3%) non-firearm injuries. The majority of patients were male (91%), and intent was most often assault/legal intervention (64.3%). In all penetrating injuries requiring vascular repair, the majority (72.9%) had an arterial injury and 43.8% had a venous injury. Location of vascular injury included iliac (19.3%), femoral-popliteal (60%), and tibial (13.2%) vascular segments. Interventions included direct vascular repair (52.1%), ligation (22.1%), bypass (19.4%), and endovascular procedures (3.6%). Patients with firearm injuries were more frequently younger, black, male, and on Medicaid, with lower household income, intent of assault or legal action, and two most severe injuries in the same body region (P < .0001 for all). Firearm injuries compared with non-firearm injuries were more often reported to be arterial (75.5% vs 61.9%), to involve iliac (20.6% vs 13.7%) and femoral-popliteal vessels (64.7% vs 39.9%), to undergo endovascular repair (4% vs 2.1%), and to have a bypass (22.5% vs 6.5%; P < .05 for all). Firearm-related in-hospital major amputation (3.3% vs 0.8%; P = .001) and mortality (7.6% vs 4.2%; P = .001) were higher compared with non-firearm penetrating trauma. Multivariable analysis showed that injury by a firearm source was independently associated with postoperative major amputation (odds ratio, 4.78; 95% confidence interval, 2.07-11.01; P < .0001) and mortality (odds ratio, 1.74; 95% confidence interval, 1.14-2.65; P = .01).
Conclusions: Firearm injury is associated with a higher rate of amputation and mortality compared with non-firearm injuries of the lower extremity requiring vascular repair. These data can continue to guide public health discussions about morbidity and mortality from firearm injury.
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Trump and Hegseth have proven that their thought processes do not go very deep and do not include much forethought before words come pouring out of their mouths. Tomasky, however, sees reason to believe that brainier thinkers, with more consideration than their "leaders," will allow cooler heads to prevail in hot-button environments:
I hope people allow what’s happening in Los Angeles to de-escalate. No one should give up the right to peaceful protest, of course. But everyone should be mindful that Trump and Hegseth, and Tom Homan and Stephen Miller and JD Vance, are just waiting for an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act. Homan, the border czar, said over the weekend: “You’re going to see more work-site enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation. We’re going to flood the zone.” That means more protests, which means more confrontations, which means many more opportunities for something to happen either by intention or even perhaps by accident.
Once we’re down the Insurrection Act road, there’s no telling where this leads. It’s not an accident, by the way, that JD Vance called what happened in L.A. an “insurrection”; labeling it as such makes it easier to invoke the Insurrection Act, whose Section 253, passed into law in 1871 when the Ku Klux Klan was terrorizing people, allows the president to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” Vance undoubtedly used the word to troll us about January 6. But there’s also a legal rationale for using it.
Presidents have invoked the act in the past, and our democracy survived just fine. That said, the reasons for those invocations have always been specific, the durations short. Now our concern is that if Trump decides that Blue State X isn’t enforcing the law in the way he wants it enforced, he will call the lawlessness an insurrection and then do who knows what, for who knows how long.
And finally, get a load of this, which Insurrection Act expert Joseph Nunn wrote about last year in Democracy journal (which I also edit): “Because the Insurrection Act refers simply to ‘the militia,’ and not specifically to the National Guard or the organized militia, a president could, in theory, use it to call private individuals into federal service—including members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other private militias.” Nunn notes Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes used this interpretation of the act in his defense at his trial. No wonder that Nunn calls the Insurrection Act “a nuclear bomb hidden in the United States Code.”
Donald Trump won the election. A narrow majority backs his immigration policies (although support drops when people learn more specific facts about how they’re being carried out). Those of us who opposed his election and oppose his immigration policies have to live with this democratic verdict. Our recourse is to do everything we can to make sure the next democratic verdict (assuming there is one) repudiates the man and his policies.
But this is not about immigration policies. This is about the use of state power against the people of the United States, or at least the ones he doesn’t like. And now, potentially, it’s about the state doing violence against those people. Again: We have a president who said, “Next time, I’m not waiting,” and a defense secretary who refused to deny that he’d allow soldiers to shoot protesters.
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