15 January—Just this morning, after one of his masked ICE goons shot and injured—but failed to kill (doubtless to his chagrin)—a man in Minneapolis last night, the tyrant Donald Trump—hereafter referred to as Trump Tyrannus—threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State,” the wannabe emperor of the world declaimed on his website.

Getting past the irony of Trump Tyrannus’s declamation, given his own monumental corruption and insurrection, which likely never will be punished, the wannabe emperor of the world was right about many presidents having invoked the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to send military troops to areas in order to quell civil unrest. Here are some such invocations:

President George Washington, invoking the predecessor of the Insurrection Act, the Militia Act of 1792, personally led state militia forces into western Pennsylvania to suppress a large revolt sparked by a new federal tax on liquor production in 1794. Washington, who was 62 at the time, remains the only sitting president to have led an army in the field. Can you imagine an obese draft dodger doing anything like that?

Almost five years later, President John Adams sent troops to put down Fries’s Rebellion, this time in eastern Pennsylvania, but again about a federal tax, this time on real property.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Insurrection Act in response to the secession of seven southern slave states at the outbreak of the Civil War.

After the Civil War, in the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant invoked the Insurrection Act six times—most of any president—to combat white supremacist violence (including by the Ku Klux Klan) in the South.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover did not invoke the Insurrection Act when he deployed troops to deal with the so-called Bonus Army—thousands of Great War veterans and their families who had been affected by the Great Depression and had set up camp in D.C. to try to get early payment of the bonuses they’d been promised.

But the willful screw-up Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur (with Majors Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton hanging on), as was his wont, without legal authority and blatantly ignoring Hoover’s instructions, proceeded as if the Insurrection Act had been invoked and thus sent in cavalry, tanks, and tear gas to disperse the unarmed veterans, and torched their camps.

MacArthur’s disgraceful but entirely unsurprising insubordination—for which he suffered no consequences (of course)—killed two men at the site and resulted in the later death of an 11-week-old baby. (But were any of the troops aware that MacArthur was acting illegally?)

In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court had struck down the “separate but equal” basis of racial segregation, President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to protect black pupils at a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy invoked the Insurrection Act to get a black student enrolled at the University of Mississippi; and in 1963, to get black pupils enrolled at white public schools in Alabama.

In 1965, 1967, and 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson invoked the insurrection Act in defense of black civil rights.

The last invocation of the Insurrection Act was by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson, after the Los Angeles cops who had beat the crap out of Rodney King were acquitted by a no-black jury, fomenting large-scale civil unrest. Like race riots.

Bottom line, it certainly looks like sociopathic Trump Tyrannus is itching to incite another Bonus Army massacre and will use any lame excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act . . .