Trump Is Showing Us Why the Founders Opposed Standing Armies

By Thor Benson  |  September 1, 2025 | 10:44am
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Trump Is Showing Us Why the Founders Opposed Standing Armies

If you know anything about American history, you’re probably familiar with the Founders’ opposition to standing armies. They didn’t want us to have an ever-present Army, Marine Corps, Navy, etc…like we do today. The reasons for that are numerous, but one of the reasons they opposed the existence of a standing army is being demonstrated by Donald Trump today. 

To start, let’s look at why the Founders, generally speaking, didn’t like the idea of a standing army. The main issue at hand here was simple: They feared a standing army gave the government too much power. They were worried that this kind of power would be abused at some point in the future. 

“The Founders’ central fear about standing armies was that they constituted a clear and present danger to democracy by substituting coercive authority for the rule of law,” Gautham Rao, an associate professor of history at American University, told Splinter. “A related fear was that a demagogue or dictator might use a standing army to overawe or intimidate a sitting government into submitting to their will.”

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, a professor of history at Miami University, said that the Founders feared too much “centralized power” because of how they saw that kind of power used in the “old world.” 

“They preferred militias,” Regele said. “Others, like Hamilton, believed in the need for a regular army.”

Militias, at the time, were essentially state-based groups of men who were trained in combat but weren’t entirely devoted to the life of a military man. They were ready to go fight when needed but not a “standing army.” You might think of something like the Army Reserve today, but there are some differences.

Regele said that they feared “tyranny.” According to Rao, after the Revolutionary War was over, the Army and Marine Corps were “very small,” and the Navy was “miniscule.” It was all about militias at that time. 

“State militias… were more robust. This was the Founders’ preferred approach, with military authority dispersed to the states,” Rao says. “That began to change only by the Antebellum era, with the burgeoning professionalization of the military and the rise of the service academy at West Point.”

In terms of what Trump is doing with the National Guard—first in Los Angeles and now in Washington, D.C.—there’s obviously an authoritarian element there, and it seems quite close to what the Founders were worried a president might do if the U.S. had a standing army.

“Trump’s use of the military as law enforcement and in other roles in American cities certainly evokes the Founders’ fears in several ways,” Rao said. “It plays directly into the antifederalist Founders’ fears of executive power that could be abused.”

Rao said that Trump uses rhetoric which suggests that he believes he has the right to do “anything” he wants with the military, which “evokes the Founders’ fears of dictatorial authority.” The Founders believed that emergency powers should be “exercised locally” and that the federal government was “not understood to have the right to use these powers unless local authority had been completely overwhelmed by mob authority.”

Essentially, a standing army could be used to dominate the populace and rule as a dictator, and the Founders didn’t want that. It certainly appears as if that’s what Trump is hoping to do. While we haven’t yet seen things escalate to the point where Trump has unfettered power thanks to his control of the military, the concerns of the Founders are clearly worth considering at this point in time.

 
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