Fact Check: Examining Trump’s Inaccurate Statements on the Insurrection Act

In recent days, President Donald Trump has made several inaccurate claims about the Insurrection Act, a collection of related laws from the 18th and 19th centuries that he has suggested deploying to address unrest in some U.S. cities.

The Insurrection Act grants presidents broad authority to deploy both active-duty military and National Guard troops to states under certain conditions, allowing them to perform domestic law enforcement functions normally prohibited for military personnel.

Among Trump’s misleading assertions was his statement Sunday that invoking the act would mean “there’s no more court cases.” Legal experts reject this claim as fundamentally incorrect. While the act does provide presidents with significant discretion, any decision to invoke it would almost certainly face legal challenges.

William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor, called Trump’s assertion “categorically false.” Banks explained that while the act gives a president “tremendous discretion” and courts might generally defer to presidential judgment, they would still review whether the invocation meets the law’s requirements and adheres to constitutional principles.

Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith noted in a recent article that “every single word of the Insurrection Act will be intensely contested in court should the president invoke it.” While the statutory requirements for invoking the act are relatively easy to meet with “decently competent lawyering,” courts would still hear challenges.

The act’s text does provide broad presidential powers, allowing deployment of troops whenever the president “considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable to enforce the laws” through ordinary judicial proceedings. It also authorizes military deployment to suppress “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that deprives citizens of constitutional rights when states fail to provide protection.

Trump also falsely claimed that one unnamed president used the Insurrection Act “28 times during the course of a presidency.” According to research from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, no president has invoked the act more than six times. President Ulysses S. Grant holds that record, having used it six times in the 1870s during the tumultuous Reconstruction era following the Civil War.

The president further exaggerated by stating that “50% of the presidents” have invoked the act. The actual figure, according to the Brennan Center, is 17 out of 45 presidents, or approximately 38%.

Important context missing from Trump’s statements includes the fact that 19 of the 30 total invocations occurred more than a century ago. No president has deployed the act since George H.W. Bush did so in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King verdict. Additionally, in the vast majority of cases, presidents invoked the act with the support of state leaders, not over their opposition.

Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck pointed out that there are “only a handful of examples, across American history, of presidents using the Act in the face of local opposition.” These rare instances typically involved either universally recognized threats, such as the British invasion during the War of 1812, or situations where states themselves were violating federal law, as in the Little Rock school desegregation crisis.

The act has been used in significant moments throughout American history. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson each invoked it three times during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Kennedy used it in 1963 when Alabama Governor George Wallace attempted to block Black students from entering the University of Alabama and public schools. Johnson deployed it to protect civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and during riots in multiple cities following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

Trump’s recent comments come amid his criticism of lawsuits challenging his deployments of National Guard troops to cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Memphis, and Washington, DC under narrower legislation than the Insurrection Act.