Is Trump trying to incite a race riot?

Trump reviews his troops: Police line up for inspection in D.C.'s Lafayette Park on June 1, 2020, after the president let them loose on Black Lives Matter protesters. | AP

Are the Trump administration and its allies trying to incite a race riot in order to invoke martial law or the Insurrection Act? His recent executive orders on further militarizing the police, shielding them from accountability, and rumors of a potential pardon of Derek Chauvin—the killer cop who murdered George Floyd in May of 2020—may foretell an all-out MAGA assault on African Americans in order to institute a full-scale fascist dictatorship in the United States.

In early March, Ben Shapiro, fascist commentator and founder of the right-wing outlet The Daily Wire, launched an online petition to pardon Chauvin, claiming that the jailed former police officer did not actually murder Floyd. His false claims state that Floyd died of substance abuse and a heart condition, not from being racially profiled and assaulted by Chauvin and fellow officers.

Chauvin is currently serving 22 years in prison on federal charges in addition to state charges in Minnesota, meaning a federal pardon alone would not free him. Shapiro thinks that a federal pardon would create conditions for an early release of the killer cop, however, and his petition has already garnered over 50,000 signatures.

Several MAGA commentators and known Trump supporters have encouraged the effort, including Elon Musk and Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk. The fifth anniversary of the murder falls on May 25, 2025, less than a month before Juneteenth and weeks before Trump’s planned military parade in Washington, D.C.

Could he be angling to incite a reaction from Black freedom movement and its allies?

If the bait does not work, what else may Trump have up his sleeve?

For one, his MAGA team has begun labeling Haitian immigrants as gang members, similar to the designation given to Latino immigrants which led to the wrongful deportation of several immigrants to El Salvador’s prison camp. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was among those swept up.

The same “mistaken” deportations could happen to not only Afro-descendant immigrants but also African Americans. Moreover, the continued attacks on “DEI” throughout the federal government, on the Smithsonian museums, and educational institutions, are a general attack on African Americans as a people.

The Chauvin scheme is bad enough, but probably the most extreme provocative action would be the pardoning of Dylan Roof, the white supremacist terrorist who murdered nine Black worshippers in 2015 at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina and/or Payton S. Gendron, who massacred ten African Americans at a shopping center in 2022 in Buffalo, N.Y.

What if one of these tricks work, and Trump gets the huge protests he wants? Would it lead to a declaration of martial law or the invoking of the Insurrection Act? Trump recently signed an executive order asking the U.S. military to explore ways it could support local police via the deployment of armed soldiers and the use of military equipment when needed.

These moves are steps toward dictatorship.

The Insurrection Act of 1807, which grants the president limited authority to deploy federal troops domestically to suppress insurrections, civil unrest, or rebellion when local authorities are unable or unwilling to maintain order, has been used fourteen times. One was President Dwight Eisenhower’s dispatching of federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce desegregation.

Martial law, on the other hand, suspends civil liberties, and the military takes over the typical functions of the civilian government like enforcing laws and maintaining order. Martial law has been implemented at least five times in U.S. history, most recently in Maryland in 1963 in response to violence arising during the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement. Under martial law, the military typically has authority to enforce curfews, make policy decisions, detain people without due process, replace the police, restrict movement of the population, and more.

These are extremely concerning times, and it is up to the people’s movements and democratic forces to build the widest united front against the dictatorship of MAGA. The centrality of the fight against racism is part and parcel to this effort, as Black people have been sounding the alarm bell against white supremacist power and fascist terror for decades, for centuries even.

Whether it be Palestine, the fight for real democracy, the fight for diversity programs and affirmative action, the fight for gender affirming care, the fight for reproductive care, the fight for immigrant rights and due process—we have a responsibility to unite all these struggles into a single effort to block fascism.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Jamal Rich

Jamal Rich writes from Washington, D.C. where he is active with the Claudia Jones School for Political Education.