Michael Smolens: They warned Trump would do this. Now it’s happening.

Last year, a lot of smart people got together to game out what Donald Trump likely would do if elected president again.

Among their top-line conclusions:

• Declare largely peaceful protests a security threat as a reason to deploy military troops, possibly invoking the Insurrection Act.
• Politicize federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, to go after political enemies.
• Purge the federal workforce of people not deemed loyal to the president and withhold funds from certain universities.
• Target undocumented immigrants for mass deportations.

Granted, candidate Trump foreshadowed much of this — some vaguely, some very specifically, such as the deportation effort.

But the think-tank exercise was eerily prescient about Trump 2.0, particularly regarding the response to protests.

The Democracy Futures Project organized by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, took place in the spring of 2024. Participating were some 175 people with a “wealth of bipartisan institutional knowledge,” according to The Guardian. Included were senior officials from administrations of both parties, including the first Trump administration.

There was some national news coverage, but it didn’t seem to get much traction. I mentioned the exercise in an August 2024 column and the response was minimal and mostly skeptical.

Not everything the group suggested might happen has come to pass, such as the arrest of former President Joe Biden’s grandchildren and former Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter. Also, the protests were predicted to be more generally anti-Trump than focused on immigration.

But the major conclusions are playing out to varying degrees. One question now is whether President Trump is really just getting started and how far he will go.

The president this week raised the prospect of using the Insurrection Act to bypass courts that have stalled some of his efforts. First passed in 1792, the federal law gives presidents the power to deploy the military domestically under certain conditions, such as civil disorder, insurrection and armed rebellion. Meanwhile, the subsequent Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.

A Trump-appointed judge who temporarily blocked his deployment of the National Guard in Portland, Ore., was denigrated by Trump and his aide Stephen Miller, a key figure in the deportation policy and protest response.

Miller called federal District Judge Karin Immergut’s ruling “legal insurrection.”

In late September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”

NSPM-7, as it’s called in shorthand, contends that a breathtakingly broad sweep of thought is responsible for the stated problem.

“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” the memo says.

This treatise, essentially blaming violence on the political left, was issued just after the Department of Justice scrubbed from its website a report that said “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

The removal of the report occurred just days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

So what’s actually happening out there?

In some cities, there have been largely peaceful protests against Trump’s immigration raids and deportations — and occasional violent clashes between federal agents and demonstrators.

Trump said he deployed the National Guard to protect immigration agents and federal property or combat crime in general in certain cities, including Portland, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, where he also sent in Marines.

But objective accounts about what’s going on in those cities suggest they are not “war zones” or cities “on fire,” as Trump has said, and there are no signs of organized insurrection to overthrow the U.S. government.

Immergut’s ruling said Trump’s rationale for sending the National Guard to Portland was “untethered to the facts.”

Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff at Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, then made a startling claim Tuesday on the social media platform X.

“I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop ‘left-wing’ terrorism. He is staging it. His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns. This is now very obvious,” Taylor posted.

Taylor has written a commentary and a book under the pseudonym “Anonymous” about how some officials worked to thwart Trump’s worst impulses during his first term.

Violence, crime and the threat of terrorism — domestic and from afar — are serious concerns and need to be addressed. There are real problems in some of the cities, which happen to be Democratic, that Trump is targeting.

But there are more rational and likely effective ways to do it than a showy calling in of the troops, generally against the wishes of governors and mayors, who often say they haven’t been contacted by the administration.

Among the remaining guardrails to blunt overreach by the executive branch are state governors, according to the Democracy Futures Project. Often standing up to Trump are Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and JB Pritzker of Illinois, both potential Democratic presidential contenders in 2028.

But to truly figure out how best to fight criminal ills, perhaps New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, also a Democrat, should be in the conversation. Lujan Grisham deployed the National Guard to Albuquerque, where crime was surging, in a coordinated move that was supported by other state and local officials, including the mayor and police chief. There was also considerable public outreach about the strategy, which was met with some criticism.

But the Guard members, dressed in black polo shirts and pants — not khakis — did not carry weapons, and they played supportive roles to free up more police to directly focus on crime.

Early reports show crime in Albuquerque has fallen across categories this year. Other cities have sought advice from local officials there.

That might not work in all cases. But certainly a methodical and coordinated approach beats what’s going on now.