Democrat Lisa McCormick slams Trump's “chilling authoritarian power grab”

When President Trump dispatched 700 Marines onto American streets, he crossed a line that every patriot understood long before this administration redefined brute force as governance. 

In a blistering statement posted to her blog, New Jersey Democrat Lisa McCormick, the insurgent voice of the progressive left, tore into what she called “a chilling authoritarian power grab” that turns the U.S. military into an instrument of intimidation rather than the shield of the Constitution.

McCormick’s words cut through the usual spin like a saber: since when does the military patrol our towns to cow citizens instead of defending them? 

By foisting active-duty Marines into communities whose elected leaders and local sheriffs begged for restraint, Trump and his willing accomplices—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, chief among them—have traded the trust of Americans for the cheap theatrics of fear. This is not democracy; it is the perversion of democracy.

She reminded her readers that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 exists precisely to prevent such abuses, making it a crime to use federal troops for domestic law enforcement except under the clearest constitutional or congressional mandate. 

Yet this White House waved aside those century‑old guardrails, sending soldiers into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., without so much as a coherent legal justification. McCormick warned that ambiguous orders put troops in legal peril, undermine unit cohesion, and erode the very freedoms they swore to protect.

But the Marines were only the tip of Trump’s secretive iceberg. 

McCormick recounted the meat of her argument: masked, unaccountable agents in tactical gear who refuse to show badges or warrants, swooping down on innocent townsfolk. 

In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, she noted, a gardening contractor of Hispanic descent was seized by these “paramilitary thugs” outside his workplace while onlookers were denied the simple courtesy of an ID. 

One agent flashed what could have been a toy badge from Amazon, vanishing as quickly as he appeared. It was a scene more fitting for an authoritarian regime than the land of the free.

She did not mince words about the consequences. 

By cloaking enforcers in anonymity, this administration isn’t just eroding civil liberties; it is unleashing a breeding ground for crime. 

Imposters posing as ICE officers have used the chaos to abduct, rob, and assault vulnerable communities, while actual federal agents hide behind veils of secrecy. 

Republicans shriek that revealing identities would endanger officers, but McCormick dismissed that claim as “rank hypocrisy.” If police and firefighters can wear insignia while facing bullets, federal agents can—and must—do the same.

Now, four detainees who knocked out a flimsy wall have escaped from the private prison in Newark, where Mayor Ras Baraka got arrested while trying to serve a warning that the facility has not passed mandatory building inspections.

Even as federal courts halted the administration’s misuse of the Alien Enemies Act—its latest tool for deporting people without due process—Trump’s aides whispered about suspending habeas corpus itself, the ancient right that prevents indefinite detention. 

McCormick sounded the alarm: today it is immigrants, tomorrow it could be any American who speaks out. This is not mere political theater; it is the scaffolding of a police state.

In the end, McCormick’s rallying cry was unmistakable: Americans must refuse to let their military be warped into an occupying force, their federal agents into secret police, or their Constitution into a scrap of collateral damage. 

“This is not America,” she declared. “This is tyranny in the making—and we must resist it with every ounce of our strength.”