Will you pay Trump’s sacrifice?
Candidate Donald Trump urged his 2016 rally crowds to “knock the crap out of” protesters. Of another protester, he said, “I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you.” He made no secret of his desire to bust heads to keep people in line. (Actually, to have others bust heads on the coward’s behalf.) Americans elected him anyway. And again in 2024 after he’d incited a violent insurrection over losing the 2020 election. What you see is what you get with Trump. A majority of Americans who routinely pledge allegiance to our democratic republic see an autocrat and voted for him.
Trump reaffirmed his desire to rule a police state since retaking the White House. He’s remodeled the Oval Office to look more like a Saddam Hussein palace. His family and several aides are raking in crypto cash from Persian Gulf states, allege Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). Trump accepted a tricked-out 747 from Qatar, a state he once decried as “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” Now all is forgiven, and Qatar is “a steadfast ally in pursuit of peace, stability, and prosperity, both in the Middle East and abroad.”
Like treasure-hunter Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) in Romancing the Stone (1984), Trump ain’t cheap, but he can be had.
In Egypt celebrating the historic ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, Trump rhapsodized about how little crime there is in the autocracy run by Egyptian strong man Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.*
“They have very little crime, because they don’t play games, that’s why. They don’t play games like we do, in the United States, with governors that have no idea what they’re doing,” Trump said. “But they don’t have crime. I ask about crime, and they almost don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Because autocracies bust dissident heads, that’s why. And worse.
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling writes:
Egypt is categorized as “not free” by an analysis from Freedom House, a democracy advocacy organization that formed to rally the world against the threat of Nazi Germany nearly a century ago. Political opposition in Egypt is nearly nonexistent. Civil liberties that are currently taken for granted in the U.S., such as the right to protest or the freedom of the press, are choked by the tight fist of the Egyptian government, which has been dominated by the military since a 2013 coup.
“Most of Egypt’s provincial governors are former military or police commanders,” Freedom House assessed.
Trump’s ongoing project to turn the U.S.A. into his own police state puts him at odds not only with blue-state governors where he seeks to deploy troops, but the chair of the National Governor’s Association, Kevin Stitt (R) of Oklahoma.
“Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” Stitt told The New York Times.
The Trump administration offers a bad-faith rationale for deploying federalized National Guard troops to Chicago and Portland. Protests there against brutal and seemingly random roundups by ICE have sparked loud protests. Talking Point Memo observes:
Judge April Perry, a Biden appointee, blocked Guard deployment in Illinois from the bench Thursday, calling the administration’s characterization of protests as “rebellions” — terminology the law requires in order to trigger the power to deploy troops — “audacious.”
She mentioned, when the Justice Department lawyer brought up threats to federal officers, that “mine started about 10 minutes after I got this case.”
Shorter Perry: Put a sock in it.
Still, the Trump administration and its allies are so confident that they’ll ultimately prevail in the courts that Trump has kept on the shelf a backup plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives the president extremely broad latitude to deploy the military for law enforcement activities, per multiple reports.
Read: “Knock the crap out of” anyone who refuses to bow.
I asked on Monday, What Does CBP Teach Their “Cops”?
- ICE draws weapons on people who ask questions.
- ICE threatens and arrests people for legally videoing their activities.
- ICE demands “papers” from 15-yr-olds and assaults and arrests others.
- ICE hides their faces and drives cars without proper plates.
Since then we’ve learned that ICE threatened to shoot and arrest an ambulance crew in Portland.
Trump and his pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, are asking Americans to accept the dismantling the U.S. Constitution turning their “land of the free” into an autocratic police state under the promise of illusory safety and crime reduction. Benjamin Franklin had scornful words for any people who would do accept that.
* MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday speculated on why, aside from being his favorite dictator, Trump thinks so fondly of el-Sisi.
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