Politics

Joe Biden Can—and Should—Take Over the Texas National Guard

THE NEW ABNORMAL

If Greg Abbott is going to use his National Guard to flout the Constitution, the president should do as Dwight D. Eisenhower once did and nationalize the state agency entirely.

opinion
A photo illustration of President Joe Biden and the Texas flag.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

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Earlier this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) released a statement which suggested the “invasion” of migrants at the southern U.S. border allowed him to flout federal law and defy the authority of agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security.

In the face of such brazen lawlessness, hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie of The New Abnormal insist that President Joe Biden should act on the suggestion of two of the state’s U.S. representatives and take control of the Texas National Guard—a similar action to one undertaken by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957 when Arkansas used its National Guard troops to forcefully block the integration of Black students enrolled at Little Rock High School.

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“I mean, it needs to get done,” Moodie said. “What this administration needs to understand is that these governors, these MAGA supremacists, they do not believe in the rule of law.”

“It’s either, they’re gonna abide by what Donald Trump says if he happens to become president again, or they’re gonna do whatever the fuck they want,” she added. “And so you have to meet that kind of overt disrespect and disregard with the strength and force that the situation requires.”

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Then, Jared Holt, a senior researcher of U.S. hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue joins the podcast to discuss Trumpworld’s “Project 2025”—a joint effort by the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute to consolidate Trump’s power in Washington and purge the federal government of anyone not loyal to their agenda.

“If you have a government of loyalists, I think some of the most radical policies that we hear today on the campaign trail or some of this really vicious rhetoric that surrounds these movements, it gives us cause to believe that if this is the plan, we should start to take some of that stuff a little bit more literally,” Holt said. “There won’t be guardrails in place to slow it down or to force it to moderate out to whatever degree it would have been in the past.”

Plus! A conversation with Josh from the Substack political newsletter Ettingermentum, who joins the podcast to discuss Joe Biden’s bad poll numbers and his path to victory in 2024.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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