Here’s the latest comedy-and-news episode from Bill Maher’s “Real Time”. His theme is Trump’s use of the military and ICE to do law enforcement, with Maher’s view summed up with these quotes: “When Donald Trump was a little boy, someone forgot to teach him the difference between a policeman and an Army man.” and “Will militarizing our cities make them safer? Yes—but not safer for democracy. . . It’s not worth the tradeoff.”
He takes out hard after Trump’s implicit dissing of the police by sending in police substitutes. This substitution, says Maher, is just a “pretext”—presumably to show how powerful he is (he’s not explicit about this).
He also goves after progressives’ own dissing the police (“ACAB“). This is a pretty good one, with more humor than usual, but with its serious message.
ICE is law enforcement. ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And the National Guard has not been detaining people.
You’ve completely missed Maher’s (quite valid) point: We must not normalize the military patrolling American streets. Their job is to defend the United States from foreign enemies, not to defend politicians from citizens.
A quibble. Military officers take an oath to “… support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic …” While I share your sentiment in that I wouldn’t want to normalize the presence of uniformed and armed military members on the streets of American cities, there are situations consonant with US law in which the military can be mobilized for action having nothing to do with “foreign enemies.”
When I served at the Pentagon it was standard for many of us to have clothing lockers in our offices. This allowed us to wear civilian clothes to and from work. In part, this was convenience, as there was a dry-cleaning business in the building. But it had the added benefit of lessening the number of uniformed members on public transit, a desirable result if not an explicit policy.
Right now I find it hard to object to National Guardsmen or military veterans – if only on their own time – riding on the Charlotte light rail system and monitoring passenger behavior, if there are not enough police officers to provide sufficient coverage. (The same in Chicago, what with 50-plus shootings and seven deaths over the Labor Day weekend. I trust that Governor Pritzker has made the appropriate post-facto prayerful supplications.)
Was the murderer waiting for “just the right person” to set him off? Apparently other passengers at the time on board were not sufficiently disturbing to his delicate aesthetic sensibilities to provoke him to attack one or more of them. Since he did not knife himself in the neck, the murderer apparently was not so mentally ill that he lost his predilection for self-preservation. (To not kill oneself seems to be an act of rational self-preservation.) Had an armed National Guardsman been present in that car, possibly the attack on the Ukrainian immigrant would not have happened, though it’s possible that the mere sight of the Guardsman could have set off the murderer causing him to attach the Guardsman (and/or the Ukrainian lassie), with the latter successfully defending himself and/or others. The media would have a field day one way or the other.
Regarding media coverage, the Tues 9/10/25 PBS News Hour finally had a segment on the Ukrainian immigrant murder but, in my view, used it as a convenient “lede” to post-haste transition to critiquing Republican support for National Guard deployment and nationwide lack of mental health care. I wouldn’t expect Republicans to be much concerned about mental health (when have they ever been?), but what meaningful have Democrats on the local, state and national levels done about the problem in the last twenty years?
I look forward to Mr. Maher addressing directly and at length the murder of the Ukrainian.
As well as the assassination of Charlie Kirk.