By Stuart Gaffney and John Lewis –
At the time of this writing, National Guard troops have been deployed in five American cities at the direct order or urging of President Donald Trump. In three of those cities⎯ Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland⎯Trump has federalized the troops, putting them directly under his command as would be the case if they were deployed overseas.
On the October 10, 2025, edition of The New Yorker’s “The Political Scene” podcast, renowned New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer characterized recent developments as “shocking” and “crossing new barriers.” Federal District Court Judge Karin Immergut—herself a 2019 Trump appointee—found Trump’s deployment of troops to Portland so odious, and without basis in law or fact, that she blocked it from taking place.
In her October 4, 2025, order, Immergut sharply rejected Trump’s justification for the deployment that Portland was “war ravaged” and “under siege” by “domestic terrorists,” finding that “the protests in Portland were not ‘a rebellion’ and did not pose a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” She minced no words: “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.” She heralded the American “historical tradition,” which “boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.”
Under the specter of these threats to our very system of government and liberties, we, like many other Americans, have been searching for the wisest and most effective ways to respond. As part of that search, we recently came upon an unlikely source for reflection: talks and writings of the American Theravadan Buddhist monastic scholar and translator Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu of the Kammaṭṭhāna (or Thai Forest) Tradition of Buddhism.
Ṭhānissaro is not a Buddhist activist focusing his work on political and social change. He views Theravadan Buddhist’s purpose as offering individuals means to free themselves from internal suffering and stress and to live with personal peace and simple happiness and contentment, regardless of their life circumstances or the conditions of the world. When it comes to matters of public concern, Ṭhānissaro asserts that the genuine pursuit of such freedom from personal suffering also leads to the most harmonious and sustainable social change for the better.
It does so because the pursuit is founded on three core, inherently beneficent practices⎯generosity, virtue (in terms of not harming oneself or others, e.g., through killing or lying), and goodwill to all people, even those who act against you. Ṭhānissaro argues that actions based on these attitudes are “good in and of themselves” and serve to “spread long-term happiness in the world: a happiness that heals old divisions and creates no new ones in their place.” Ṭhānissaro emphasizes that Theravadan Buddhism in no way attempts to “impose” this approach or any particular system of justice on the world, but rather offers insights into “skillful … ways of engaging with the world” that people may undertake voluntarily.
Ṭhānissaro’s approach could easily be critiqued as naïve, idealistic, and detached from reality. It could appear ill-suited to confronting the real word challenges we face today from enormously powerful people, like Trump, whose actions appear based on greed for wealth, power, and domination—not generosity; lying and physically abusing or killing others—not virtue; and vengeance and dehumanization of others—not goodwill. Ṭhānissaro himself acknowledges the “drawback” of “some injustices that cannot be addressed by just generosity, virtue, and goodwill.” But he argues that “if they could be alleviated now only by unskillful actions—such as lies, killing, theft, or violence—the trade-off in terms of long-term consequences wouldn’t be worth it.”
In listening to The New Yorker podcast, we realized that Ṭhānissaro’s approach, far from impractical, could have critical real-world relevance, perhaps even urgency, right now. On the podcast, Mayer’s colleague Susan Glasser highlights the potential importance of Trump’s false claims that American cities are “war ravaged” and “under siege” by “domestic terrorists.” She asks a question we and others have been asking: “By using the language of war … and sending actual armed troops into the streets, is Donald Trump … looking to create the very conditions he claims already exist?” Is he tempting his opponents to engage in just enough violence and heightened rhetoric to provide a more persuasive contrivance for imposing martial law in cities or even provoke Trump loyalists to engage in street battle with protesters?
On the podcast, writer Evan Osnos underscores the importance of these questions, pointing to Trump’s Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s final words of his chilling September 30, 2025, speech at Quantico Marine Corps Base. Hegseth implored the gathered troops to “move out and draw fire,” with the rhetoric flourish “because we are the War Department.” Osnos explained that the military order “move out and draw fire” means to “mobilize” as a unit so as to “draw fire from the other side, from the enemy” and “generate the conflict, to essentially hasten the events you expect.” Osnos opined, “[W]hat you see happening right now is the Trump administration is ‘moving out and drawing fire’ in American cities, trying to elicit the very conflict that they believe will provide the predicate on which then to take the political steps to establish a greater sense of emergency.”
In light of this potential strategy, Ṭhānissaro’s approach of maintaining goodwill to everyone without exception—not necessarily liking everyone, much less loving them—but seeing their common humanity, hard as that might be, could provide a very useful foundation for not taking the bait—drawing the fire⎯and giving Trump and Hegseth the provocation they seek.
Ultimately, it can’t be just one sided, and the approach does not dictate any particular actions. But, at the very least, it’s a call to examine our motivations, integrity, attitudes, strategy, and tactics thoughtfully, and not simply to react. It’s a very real-world endeavor in Ṭhānissaro’s words of “how to find harmony through practices that actually are conducive to harmony, instead of trying to divide us.”
John Lewis and Stuart Gaffney, together for over three decades, were plaintiffs in the California case for equal marriage rights decided by the California Supreme Court in 2008. Their leadership in the grassroots organization Marriage Equality USA contributed in 2015 to making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.
6/26 and Beyond
Published on November 6, 2025
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