What can I say, it’s just the perfect Trump picture.
It’s for sure that there are those with great influence on him who want him to. Thomas Neuburger has the quotes, starting with Stephen Miller:
[This is] Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life. (There are more local law enforcement officers in Oregon than there are guns and badges in the FBI nationwide). This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.
“Legal insurrection … an organized terrorist attack on the federal government”. There are laws against that. Another example, Miller to Hannity:
The Democrat party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat party is not a political party. It is a domestic, extremist organization.
Noem and Hegseth agree (see here and here) and seem to be willing, as commanders of government forces, to fight by his side. Trump also agrees:
[T]hey’re throwing bricks at full force into the window and into the car. It looks like it’s a war zone. And I said, never let that happen again. From now on if that ever happens, and I say it here, you get out of that car and you can do whatever the hell you want to do …
Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room [the Pentagon’s generals] because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.
So, Thomas thinks this might be the start of a new civil war, or at least that’s what Miller wants and Trump may agree. (I think Trump is too fickle to be sure. But by all accounts Miller is the consummate Trump-whisperer.)
But what I see happening is something else. Just declare the Democratic party a terrorist organization and add in RICO penalties. Send law enforcement after them. Some may not be willing to, but ICE will do the job if no one else does, and other cops or military won’t fire on them, they’ll get the pols. Then put them in an ICE controlled prison. If really smart, set up an administrative court with executive appointed judges to try them, and either have the Supremes ratify it, or if that’s too far even for them (unlikely, but possible), ignore them.
Then, with full control of all legislatures, call a Constitutional referendum and change any and all amendments and the Constitution as Trump (or the smart lads who really do the work, like the 2025 crowd) desire, essentially changing America’s form of government permanently.
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Trump’s not smart enough for this, but Miller and various backers are, he’s got a Cabinet full of yes-men and women to back him, he’s purging the military and the three letter agencies of those who might try to stop him, and there’s no particular reason to think it might not work. There’d have to be a massive uprising, or enough soldiers and various types of police who resist to stop him.
If there are, it’s civil war. If there aren’t, well, it may be a low grade civil war anyway, or he may just get it thru. Hard to see most Democrats actually fighting back effectively, or fighting back at all.
Not saying this will happen. I don’t think they have the guts for it, and Trump is fickle. But there’s a large faction with a lot of influence who want it to happen, and they’re working hard to make it happen.
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Nat Wilson Turner
The clampdown might come so fast no one will have time to react in any organized fashion and then it’ll just be a matter of picking off those who pipe up post-facto.
Feral Finster
1. Surely by now, you know that when WE do it, it’s self-defense, a response to outrageous provocation, at worst a measured and justified preemptive strike.
When they do it, it’s pure hate and aggression..
Doesn’t matter what team or tribe, and thing is, they’re both right. The cycle of tit for tat will turn on itself, sort of like the late Roman Republic as it morphed into the Roman Empire.
2. Why rewrite the Constitution? The existing Constitution simply means whatever people of influence and authority decide that it means at any given moment.
Anyway there still are enough people of influence and authority to back Team D.
someofparts
I’ve been in a good mood ever since your last post pointing out that South America will become fortified with Asian weapons superior to anything the US can throw at them. Now, the horrors that await us poor saps here in the “homeland” completes the picture. Not only will the Great Satan be unable to bully anyone with our military, we will be so busy with domestic turmoil that our global web of insidious regime change gremlins will be too busy attacking Democrats to do their dirty work overseas. Talking to people around me, it is hard to imagine people less prepared, or less willing, to fight back.
marku
Constitution? What’s that? I haven’t seen any administration pay attention to it in decades.
j
With neoliberalism unstoppably eating away the wealth of the people, there only ever was two possible endgames for democracy in the US. Coup, or civil war.
Both parties have been working towards this knowingly at least since Biden wrote what later came to be known as the Patriot Act back in ’95, the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act. Hugely important steps were also Obama putting the security state on steroids, arming the police with leftover Iraqi military gear, and normalizing extrajudical killing of US citizens. There is no way to mistake any of that (except maybe the latter) for anything but preparation for when shit goes down.
Both parties have been walking towards this left foot, right foot, hoping it’s them that end up on top. Well team D fell apart before the finish line. At this point I’m not sure a coup is even necessary anymore, the leftovers will see themselves out soon enough.
bruce wilder
I was going to say something like what Feral Finster said. 🤷♂️
I would add that it is very hard to know when the kayfabe stops being kayfabe, which is when no one involved breaks character to acknowledge an actual injury. So, it might be a contradiction in terms, but I don’t expect this to end well AND I will probably be surprised by the climax of the drama. What will never be clear — surprise or no — is whether any of the drama had real traction in the political decision-making: who exactly is in charge and exercising state power with specific intent?
Normally — if “normal” has meaning in this context — politics is a struggle between opposed forces and the outcomes in institutional terms are maybe only imperfectly “intended” by any individual participating factions. I don’t think we hoi polloi have any but a vague idea who the true powers are or what levers of power are being pulled, let alone what their “intent” might be. If we know anything, it is that we are not being told.
Maybe, it is Peter Thiel and his antichrist. Or, Bill Ackman channeling Israel’s chokehold on American politics. Maybe it is Son of Soros conjuring a “No Kings” rally.
The Democratic Party is such a fake political party and has been for so long, it is hard to imagine that it will ever again be any thing but a stage prop. I watched the assassination of Katie Porter this week — good job by someone who no doubt will remain even more nameless than the assassin of Charlie Kirk or the failed assassin in Butler. The possibility of organizing collective political action against “the oligarchs” I would rate as less than zero and the major reasons it is impossible include the investment of the chronically online in the Truman Show put on by the political media and the Democratic Party establishment.
bruce wilder
when the smartest truth-teller in the room appears to be Marjorie Taylor Greene, you know Elvis has left the building forever
Purple Library Guy
Feral, that equivalence nonsense is nonsense. It’s just an excuse to avoid bothering with the actual facts of any given situation.
mago
I’m forever harping on the Silicon Valley bad boys and their dark and sinister agendas. The overthrow and overhaul of democracy would make them happy as pigs in shit, not to denigrate pigs who are very intelligent and quite clean by nature. Andersen and company will throw their weight behind this, and they’ve got clout.
Civil war and armed insurrection is unlikely for many reasons, but the cooperation of the enforcement class would be necessary, and they know from whence their butter comes. Also, blanket surveillance would smother any nascent movement before it could launch.
I don’t know what’s going to happen and was unprepared for the extreme state of current affairs. The chaos is accelerating so quickly and on so many fronts nobody who’s paying attention can keep track. Doesn’t stop people like me from commenting however.
It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
GrimJim
History isn’t repeating, but it is rhyming.
We got the MAGA Horst Wessel after Trump came back into power; now we are just waiting for the American Reichstag Fire.
I’m guessing that it might be a perfect rhyme, with an explosive attack/fire on the Capitol Building. And soon, as the House and Senate are now both out for… who knows how long? If the Capitol goes, Trump can “suspend” Congress “for their own safety.”
Though SCOTUS is again in session; if they get taken out, and the Capitol burns… everything but the Executive is cut off.
Perhaps both?
Some “Antifa” group gets blamed, and Trump will start ruling completely by degree.
Democrats in concentration camps by Thanksgiving? Maybe…
someofparts
Bruce Wilder – What a beautifully expressed post that was. Good to know I am not the only one who saw what they are doing to Katy Porter. I caught glimpses and couldn’t bear to watch.
Feral Finster
@PLG – to give the first example to come to mind, Team D was all about censorship, when they had the whip hand.
Purple Library Guy
Sure. The Democrats were into a bit of censorship. At the margins, within the usual Chomskyan “propaganda model” of the media. They were suppressing people saying the wrong thing about Gaza, if they were people nobody much had ever heard about. Or at least, media companies were–it’s unclear the Democrats either did or had to say anything to those media companies, they were just following their own billionaire-owned instincts. And they were harassing protesters with little arrests where they held them for a day and then let them go, or charged them with crap they knew wouldn’t go through, but defending would strain their resources–although again, most of this stuff had little to do with the national Democratic government.
National regulators were not saying “fire that nationally watched guy or else”. National troops were not deporting protesters to fucking torture gulags. The president was not telling the justice department to prosecute specific people because they’d said things he didn’t like. There are major qualitative and quantitative differences here. I don’t get why this is difficult.
Feral Finster
@PLG: because each of Team D and Team r are going to play escalating tit for tat. Just that Team R has the whip hand at the moment.
j
PLG,
You are correct in that team D has done less than team R to end the rights, freedom, and democracy in the US. But what I see in your post – sorry if I have misjudged it – is the all too common team D voter knee jerk reaction of having to downplay what their party has done in disservice to the country. And this reaction is a big reason why team D have been getting away with all of what they have been doing, be it less than what team R has been doing, or not.
If it is your party, it is exactly your job to criticise them relentlessly and publicly for every misdeed, so that they might repent and change their ways. Turning a blind eye to them just because they are the lesser evil still allows evil to persist, propagate, and prevail. And the results are in.
Now my take on the amount of evil done by both parties is this. Suppose a colony of bacteria in a petri dish doubles every day. Each day you can look back on the previous day, and wonder how come the progression today has been so much worse than yesterday. And one day before the dish is completely full, it’s still half empty. Seems rathers safe still, yet bam, the next day it’s over.
Now one might argue that every other day the colony has not doubled, but only grown let’s suppose 50 percent. But there never has been a day when the colony reduced in size. So while the direction is set in stone, you can argue about which day is the worst, but the end result is clear as day. And the only meaningful question is, how many days does it take to fill the dish, and does it get filled on an odd or even day.
Both parties have been working towards the same end goal. Neither has rolled back anything the other has done towards that goal. There is no redemption of one because they have been playing it slower. Both are evil through and through.
Feral Finster
j: I would not say that Team D has played it slower, just that they do not have the whip hand at the moment.
Fact is, if by some miracle Team D were to return to power, they would have to do unto their enemies on Team R what Team R would do unto them, because if they did not, Team R would not give them a second chance.
“You come at the king, you’d best kill him.”
Now, the interesting thing is when one party seizes power. Suddenly, the old excuses disappear. “We’d really really like to, but Mean Republicans/the Deep State/Cultural Marxists/whatever won’t let us” no longer works,
Then the fights break out over who gets the spoils, no more reasons why we can’t have Nirvana, RIGHT NOW! No longer is there an enemy to unite against. That’s when the knives come out.
“It Can’t Happen Here” is most instructive, even if the target was Huey P. Long, who was the goodthink liberal’s enemy do jour back then, and a far more intelligent and *competent* populist than Trump ever was.
NR
Feral Finster:
“Suddenly, the old excuses disappear.”
The excuses never disappear. MAGA is a fascist movement, and fascists don’t have policies. They don’t have ideas. They only have enemies, and as they run out of enemies it becomes necessary to manufacture more. Right now it’s trans people and immigrants. Once they’re disposed of, it’ll be gay people and non-white citizens. Once they’re disposed of, it’ll be someone else–white liberals, maybe, or atheists. There will always be someone else for MAGA to point to as the reason why people’s lives are terrible. And unfortunately, we’ve seen that a lot of people in this country are stupid enough to believe it.
Feral Finster
“The excuses never disappear. MAGA is a fascist movement, and fascists don’t have policies. They don’t have ideas. They only have enemies…”
@NR let us pretend that is true. Even if it becomes necessary to invent enemies, the point is that the movement will turn on itself.
different clue
Here is an article titled: ” John Roberts is to blame for the GOP’s war on democracy — and he knows it ”
https://www.alternet.org/amp/john-roberts-voting-2674211117
Various particular organizations which make up the Conservative Movement Conspiracy have spent several decades organizing and working to infiltrate and undermine American political structures and institutions. Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society, for example, has been working with the Republican Party ( with the vital collaboration of the Bipartisan Cuck Democrats) to pollute all levels of the Federal Judiciary with carefully vetted and advanced Federalist Society operatives operating undercover as “judges” and “Supreme Court Justices”. John Roberts is a Federalist Society agent operating under cover as a “Chief Justice” of the “Supreme Court”, for example.
The Federalist Society has long cherished a theory it calls the “Constitution in Exile”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_in_Exile
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4563&context=ndlr
The FedSoc, the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party, and numerous Stink Tanks and Spin Mills have spent decades engineering and preparing for this moment. They are using their Trump as a weapons system to achieve their long-sought restoration of their much beloved ” Antebellum” Constitution and “Antebellum” social structure.
Demaganizifying America would require at least a decade to remove all the Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, etc. etc. etc. embeds, tapeworms, brainworms, cancer cells, etc. from all their well encysted positions of hiding within all parts of the Federal governing systems. The Bipartisan Cuck Democrats are unequal to the challenge and the mission. But restoring all “branches” of “government” to Bipartisan Cuck Democrat “control” would provide a few years of breathing space for genuine Decontaminationists to try creating a Genuine Decontamination Party , under whatever name, to work on displacing the Bipartisan Cuck Democrat Party from power without allowing the New Klux Klan Maganazi Republican Party to regain any position before a Genuine Decontamination Party is ready to fill every vacuum on its way to achieving disinfectionist levels of power against all the KlanMaga Republicanazi embeds throughout government.