Is Trump actually going to use the Insurrection Act? Dr Emma Shortis' rundown of the last week in America.
Mon 13 Oct 2025 15.00 AEDT
Photo: Official White House Photo/Patrick Witty
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. ‘This Week in America’ is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
This week:
It was always heading this way. Last week, NBC reported that there were high level discussions happening in the White House about when and how the president might invoke the Insurrection Act. The process for doing it is, according to one anonymous official, is on an “escalatory ladder”. Invoking the Act would allow the president to deploy the military for civilian law enforcement – i.e. to use active-duty troops against Americans, in America. I wrote about how dangerous this all is in The Conversation.
It’s all also another lesson on how the Trump cycle works (as if we needed one). We’re in the part now where we do cute little explainers about what the Insurrection Act is, and whether the president can or can’t use it. As we do the back and forths about how he couldn’t possibly, the New York Times does stories about how some people do think Portland is a “hellscape”, actually, and the whole idea gets normalised.
The next part is that he does it.
In the four years after Trump lost the 2020 election, the movement behind spent a lot of time planning for their return. They learned the lessons of the first Trump administration and did a huge amount of work theorising and working out how to use the levers of power (see: Project 2025).
Some of this work has involved retrofitting an intellectual architecture onto Trumpism. Like Trump himself, a lot of this isn’t new, but builds on old conservative ideas about power and American democracy. A bit like when Stephen Miller had that little brain fade and appeared to say, live on air, that the President has “plenary power.” The Conversation published a great explainer of a lot of this theory and what it is trying to do, and what it means that the movement has the Supreme Court on its side.
You might have seen a bit of the Secretary for Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, lately. Noem is spending a lot of her time generating content – whether it’s railing against choices for the halftime show at the Superbowl or using airport announcements to blame Democrats for the shutdown.
Noem always brings to my mind some great work on the Trump aesthetic. This piece in Mother Jones on the “Mar a Lago face” is great, as is this NYT Opinions podcast episode.
Speaking of – this kind of analysis does such a great job of explaining what’s happening in the broader far-right movement. The cultural markers, the aesthetics – they really matter. That’s just part of the reason I really enjoy Christiana Mbakwe Medina’s substack, Pop Syllabus. Her latest piece, on Meghan Markle and Kim Kardashian, is a goldmine.
I first came across her on Trevor Noah’s podcast, “What now?” which she co-hosts. I find that the show can be hit and miss depending on the guest, but this week’s, with Bernie Sanders, is a good one.
This Week in America, link roundup:
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Keir Starmer is the United Kingdom’s sixth prime minster in the past ten years. For a country that likes to think of itself as the birthplace of modern democracy and a model of stability in a turbulent world, this is not a good look.
It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
