While the coronavirus epidemic is still raging in the United States, the country has known for several days an intense social crisis, which threatens to degenerate into a constitutional crisis according to the management that will be made of it in the White House. Indeed, since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, on May 25, pacifist demonstrations demanding equal rights for all American citizens multiply in most major American cities. On the sidelines of the latter, riots and more violent confrontations with the police also led several cities and states to impose a curfew and resort to the use of the National Guard, including in the district from Washington.
Such maneuvers are not exceptional in the American context, where the soldiers of the National Guard are regularly called upon to reinforce the police, firefighters or civil security systems, whether in the event of a crisis or natural disaster. It is however much rarer to see a request for intervention from the regular army emerge. This is however what threatens to do Donald Trump, particularly worried by the demonstrations which took place near the White House, and which proposes to involve the army on American soil, under of the 1807 Insurrection Act. However, the deployment of active military personnel for police purposes is worrying at the highest level. To the point that Defense Secretary Mark Esper has publicly rejected this assumption. Even more symbolic, the highly respected and ordinarily very silent General Jim Mattis, former Defense Secretary to Donald Trump, has split from a platform denouncing the calamitous management of the situation by the Trump administration, and the danger what the current President represents for the country and the Constitution itself.
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