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

President Trump’s Insurrection Act Claims Under Scrutiny for Factual Inaccuracies

President Donald Trump has made several inaccurate statements in recent days regarding the Insurrection Act, a collection of related laws dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries that grants presidents broad authority to deploy military forces domestically under certain conditions.

The Insurrection Act allows presidents to deploy both active-duty and National Guard troops to perform domestic law enforcement duties from which the military is normally prohibited, provided specific conditions are met. While Trump has been publicly contemplating invoking this measure, legal and historical experts have identified multiple factual errors in his characterizations.

Among Trump’s most misleading claims was his assertion that “there’s no more court cases” once the Insurrection Act is invoked. Legal experts categorically reject this notion. William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor, explained that while the president would likely have significant legal advantages in potential litigation due to the act’s broad language, courts would absolutely review any challenges regarding violations of the law’s requirements or constitutional issues.

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith noted that while the statutory requirements for invoking the act are relatively easy to meet, “every single word of the Insurrection Act will be intensely contested in court should the president invoke it.” The law gives presidents authority to deploy troops when they consider that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it impracticable to enforce federal laws “by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”

Trump also falsely claimed that one particular president used the Insurrection Act “28 times during the course of a presidency.” According to comprehensive research published in 2022 by New York University’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 during the 1870s amid White supremacist violence and political turmoil following the Civil War.

In total, the act and similar predecessor laws have been invoked only 30 times throughout American history, according to the Brennan Center’s findings. After Grant, the presidents who most frequently used the act were Grover Cleveland, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, each invoking it three times.

Kennedy’s invocations came during the Civil Rights era, including when Alabama Governor George Wallace attempted to physically block Black students from entering the University of Alabama in 1963. Johnson used it to protect civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and to respond to riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

Trump further exaggerated when claiming that “50% of the presidents” have invoked the act. The accurate 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 invocations occurred more than a century ago. No president has used the Insurrection Act since 1992, when George H.W. Bush deployed troops following the Los Angeles riots that erupted after the Rodney King verdict.

Georgetown University law professor Stephen Vladeck highlighted another crucial historical point: “There are only a handful of examples, across American history, of presidents using the Act in the face of local opposition.” Most invocations had the support of state leaders.

Vladeck added that the idea of unreviewable presidential power to deploy troops domestically runs counter to founding principles: “Given the extent to which this country was founded on outrage over King George’s use of the military as a tool to oppress the populace, the idea that Congress would ever, or did, give the president unreviewable power to deploy troops domestically whenever he wants is, for lack of a better word, bollocks.”

The White House has not responded to requests for comment on these inaccurate assertions.