Newsom v. Trump: Court Slams Trump’s Illegal Military Deployment

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Federal Judge Charles Breyer rules Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act, blocking his bid to turn the National Guard into a national police force under his command.

By TRH Global Affairs Desk

NEW DELHI, September 2, 2025 — US President Donald Trump’s latest bid to centralize power has just hit a constitutional wall. In a scathing opinion, Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to California was flatly illegal, a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits using the military for civilian law enforcement.

Governor Gavin Newsom, who led the challenge in Newsom v. Trump, put it bluntly: “Trump is breaking the law by trying to create a national police force with himself as its chief.” Breyer’s opinion echoed that fear, noting there was “no rebellion” and “no civilian law enforcement unable to respond”—in other words, no justification for rolling tanks into Los Angeles streets.

The court’s injunction is sweeping. It bars Trump and his allies from deploying Guard troops in California for arrests, security patrols, crowd control, or even traffic enforcement. Unless Trump can prove a valid constitutional exception, his soldiers are sidelined until at least September 12, 2025.

For civil libertarians, this is not just a legal skirmish but a fight for the soul of American democracy. The Washington Post described the ruling as “a constitutional firewall against militarized politics,” while the New York Times warned that Trump’s plan amounted to “dismantling the civilian character of US democracy in favour of personal rule.”

This episode is part of a broader pattern. During his presidency, Trump flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act against Black Lives Matter protests, and now, at nearly 80, he still seems intoxicated by the fantasy of generals marching in lockstep at his command. The ACLU has called his actions “an authoritarian impulse dressed up as law and order.”

Trump’s defenders claim he is merely “protecting federal property.” But as Judge Breyer wrote, traffic blockades and crowd control are not the work of soldiers in a free republic—they are the work of civilian police accountable to the public.

The stakes go beyond California. If Trump had succeeded, every governor would have faced the prospect of federalized troops overriding local authority. That is not conservatism. It is caesarism.

This ruling may be temporary, but its message is enduring: in America, the military does not answer to the whims of one man. It answers to the Constitution.

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