#5SmartReads is a Webby-honored weekly news digest that amplifies underreported news and underrepresented perspectives. My goal is to help you stay informed without being overwhelmed, and to embrace nuance and reflection over picking a side.
Why can Trump just say everything is an “emergency” and do whatever he wants? (Vox)
So how close are we to this destabilized, autocratic future that threatens us?
Frighteningly close, due to Trump’s aggressive use of emergency powers in his second term.
The president can unilaterally declare an emergency, without any oversight from Congress, on anything they feel is a threat to our safety and security as a nation.
In the first few months of his term, this president has used this power recklessly to implement about 40% of Project 2025. He’s declared emergencies over immigration and drug trafficking, detaining nearly 50,000 people in horrific and inhumane conditions with zero due process. A massive increase in ICE’s budget (via the “BBB” working its way through Congress) would allocate $75B to the agency over the next few years, specifically for detention facilities and removal operations, at the expense of Medicaid and SNAP.
In declaring an emergency over trade, he introduced his nonsensical tariff policy that undermined nearly a century of our nation’s soft power and economic strength in the world.
The National Guard’s deployment in Los Angeles is the latest example of invoking emergency powers to further his aggressive agenda. It wasn’t the first time (the National Guard was irrationally deployed to suppress Black Lives Matters protests in DC, during his first term), and it won’t be the last.
It’s clear he fully intends to go further. And that’s terrifying.
LBJ sends federal troops to Alabama to protect a civil rights march (History)
The last time the National Guard was deployed without request from a state’s governor, it was for the opposite reason of what happened in Los Angeles over the weekend.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson send the National Guard to oversee and protect a planned march from Selma to Montgomery, protecting the thousands of demonstrators who protested an egregious banning of voting rights (preventing over half of Selma’s population from registering and voting) and the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper.
Bloody Sunday - a protest where state and local police attacked protestors with tear gas and bully clubs - had occurred just two weeks before. A federal judge ruled that the march could proceed on March 18, and President Johnson called for Governor Wallace to deploy the Alabama National Guard to protect the demonstrators.
Wallace refused - on live television.
Johnson called up the National Guard and 50,000 troops accompanied the marchers to Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of his memorable speeches. Less than 5 months later, the Voting Rights Act was passed.
History was made then. It was made again last weekend - for the opposite reason.
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