Former President Barack Obama lambasted President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops into Chicago, arguing that a president sending U.S. troops into American cities “against their own people” is “inherently corrupting.”
Obama, speaking to comedian Marc Maron on the final episode of his WTF podcast published Monday, also suggested that Republicans and right-wing media would have been outraged if he had similarly sent in troops to GOP-led states while they cheer on the current president.
He accused Trump of trying to “deliberately” subvert federal law and politicizing the military for his own means.
“It wasn’t controversial for me to go to other countries and say, ‘You know what? It’s a good idea for militaries to be under civilian control,’ because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting,” Obama said.
“And so when you now start seeing the politicization of the military — deliberately, right,” he added.

He called Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops “a deliberate end run around” of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the use of the nation’s military for domestic law enforcement.
The law says “don’t use our military on domestic soil unless there is an extraordinary emergency of some sort,” Obama said. “When you see an administration suggest that ordinary street crime is an insurrection, or—”
“A terrorist act,” Maron added.
“A terrorist act,” Obama replied. “That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy.”
He suggested that if he had sent troops to Republican strongholds,
“Man, it’s almost too easy of a thought experiment,” Obama said. “If I had just sent the National Guard into Texas, and just said, You know what? Lot of problems in Dallas. Lot of crime there. I don’t care what [Governor Greg Abbott] thinks. I’m gonna kind of take over law enforcement
“It is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” he said.
Federal judges across the country have reined in Trump’s use of federalized troops as the administration surges federal law enforcement into Democratic-led states and cities to combat protests against his anti-immigration agenda.
Trump is temporarily blocked from sending troops into Chicago, but an appeals court isn’t sending service members home, for now, while legal battles are ongoing.
“We have blown through, just over the last six months, a whole range of not simply assumptions, but rules and laws and practices that were put in place to ensure that nobody is above the law, and we don’t use the federal government to simply reward our friends and punish our enemies,” Obama said.
“People are right to be concerned,” he added.

California sued the administration earlier this year in the wake of Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests against large-scale immigration raids and arrests.
A federal judge in California determined that the administration illegally deployed military assets into the city in violation of Posse Comitatus, which the judge said appeared to be part of an effort to create “a national police force with the president as its chief.”
Illinois and Oregon officials are similarly suing the administration over troop deployments to those states, allegedly in violation of Posse Comitatus as well as Tenth Amendment protections ensuring that police authority rests with the states and not the federal government.
Democratic officials have argued that the president is sending in troops for “wholly pretextual” reasons in an attempt to stir up more unrest to justify more federal officers and a wider military occupation, including invocation of the Insurrection Act.
National Guard troops were deployed to Baltimore in 2015 during Obama’s second term in office, after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody sparked widespread protests.
Those troops, however, remained under the command of Maryland’s Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, not Obama.
Maron ended his long-running podcast Monday after 16 years and more than 1,600 episodes with an hour-long interview with the former president, who last appeared on the podcast while he was still in office.