Some think Trump's aura of invincibility is fading. By Hal M. Brown (Not me. I think he's as invincible as he ever was. He controls the people with guns.)

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This is a reaction to reading The Aura of Invincibility is Fading in The Contrarian (here).

The meaning of the word aura is “the distinctive atmosphere or quality that seems to surround and be generated by a person.” The title of Jeniffer Rubin’s essay in today’s edition of The Contratian, published in SubStack, suggests that the aura of invincibility around Trump is fading. Her subtitle accurately says that “plenty of people are taking swings at Trump.”

If you’ve been reading my Substacks, you know I have not been basking in warm sunshine of optimism. Quite the contrary, I am in the wilds bundled up in my roaring blizzard togs. I am feeling the stinging icy wind against my face. I am not face down in the snow, but I don’t see the way to the warm safety of my cabin. I don’t need the weather channel to tell me that this is such an unprecedented storm that there’s no way to tell when, if ever, it will end. 

There have been lot's of losses for Trump & Co. and many wins for our side, but there is this chilling quote from Gen. Barry McCaffrery: "It is all a "consolidation of power with the people who have the guns."

I think of the heroic World War II Resistance. They had many victories thoughout the war. They even had guns. But for every one German officer killed, the Nazis made civilians pay with their lives 10-20 times over. If the Resistance had explosives, too, but when they blew up a bridge the Nazis destroyed an entire nearby village.

The only way the Nazis were defeated was for the Allies to amass huge military might. I don't see us as being anywhere near to D-Day. 

My partner and I are 81. We may not live to to see the Allied victory.

I think Trump and his henchmen will learn from their mistakes and focus their efforts on doing things that they believe will help them the most to achieve their final goal. We know what this is.

They will realize that their mistake was mounting a blizkrieg-like juggernaut. This was overreach where, using Project 2025, as a plan, they tried to do everything at once. But this wasn't actual warfare where Hitler's "lightening war" made sense. This was a planned takeover of a democracy and they treated it like they were invading countries.

DOGE, as well as killing woke and DEI, weren't necessary for them once they installed people like Pete Hegeseth, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, and others to lead the departments and agencies which had guns. They probably now know that RFK Jr. was a mistake. (The first person just died of measles.) His department doesn't have guns. The same could be said for cutting USAID. Their workers don’t have guns either. 

Greenland, Panama Canal, Canadian statehood, even tariffs, all were unnecessary except as distractions which they didn’t need. Vance’s speech was blowing smoke. Likewise, cozying up to Putin, made no real sense.

Once Musk gave him the millions to help win the election there was no need to let him anywhere near the Oval Office. Like he’s done with others, Trump should have cut him loose without any payback for his services.

Trump & Co. continues to squander their power and waste their energy. For example there was no need to attack the media, kick the AP off Air Force One, and take over selection of the members of the White House Press Corps. They don’t need to control the media. Reporters don’t have guns.

I see this as the the consequence of the personal psychopatholgy of Trump, Musk, and others. Mostly it was Trump who, after the humiliation of losing the election, had his burning need for revenge festered through the E. Jean Carroll trial and literally hit home when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

Trump has a need he can’t control. He has to put on a show. He has to scream “look at me!” He does this every day whether it is through his social media posts, his press appearances, or his signing executive orders making such photos of him doing so with his smiling face this are plastered everywhere. I’ll spare you photos since you’ve seen so many of them.

I predict you will see Trump backing off from many of the unnecessary assaults on democracy and norms, and focus on using the incredible power of the presidency, and the control of the people with guns, to become the monarch he's always wanted to be.

Trump is itching for an excuse to declare a national emergency and to declare martial law. All it will take is for something to happen during a protest rally for him to justify this. There are already are rallies across the country and there will be more and more of them. Some of them have resulted in a few people being arrested. Eventually someone will be hurt, or there will be looting and vandalism. It doesn’t have to be particularly bad, all Trump has to do is say that it was bad.

Then we come down to the question as to whether or not soldiers will follow unconstitutional orders. This sets the country up for a military coup, but I doubt this would happen because it would mean the military throwing out the elected leaders of the country and replacing them with generals who would govern until there could be truly free elections. That would be a step too far for them. I see generals and admirals resigning before they would do this.

Nobody can do more than imagine how far this will go. One thing I believe is that the United States that was envisioned by the Founders is in grave danger of disappearing. Democrats are hoping that they will take control of the Congress in 2026. If they do, this is no quarantee that Congress will act as a check on Executive Department excess. By 2026 Trump may have consolidated so much power he will just ignore Congress. He’s already breaking laws. 

The same applies to the Supreme Court. If they try to rein in the implications of the previously enacted presidential immunity ruling and rule that the president doesn’t have imperial power, Trump can just ignore them. After all, the Supreme Court doesn’t have guns.

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When the armored FBI Tesla Cybertruck parks in front of our houses, By Hal M. Brown, Also: there's the brutal Chenchen leader helping the Russians who Musk gave a Cybertruck to. He put a machine gun in the back.

Summer, 1940, a small German city:

Isach Mendelsen and his family have just begun to eat breakfast. The two windows facing the street in their second floor apartment are open. They hear the morning hum of their small city, a few cars are going by, and there’s noise of the milkman's horsedrawn cart. They hear the chatter of people outside walking the streets and the sound of a few merhcants opening their stores. Then there is silence. They hear a car stop in front of their house. The engine turns off and the doors open and close.

Nine year old Hyman goes to the window and looks out and sees a new Citroën in front of their apartment building. There aren’t too many cars like that on their street.

“Mommy, daddy, there are men outside,” he exclaims. Isach goes to the window and looks out. Four men in trench coats and wearing hats are walking towards the door of their building. 

(Above: real Gestapo)

He knows who they are. The Mendelsens are the only Jews living in the building. He knows why they are there.

A year from now in a small American city:

Anti-Trump journalist Clark Putnam works from home. He’d been fired from his job at a local television station's news department for not towing the pro-Trump company line. He has barely been making a living writing a Substack about how the Trump adminstration is ruining the lives of ordinary people. With about 200 readers paying $8 a month to both read and comment on his essays, and his wife’s income from her job working at a convenience store. They’d exhausted half of the family savings. They knew it was a mater of time before they’d have to sell their house and find a cheaper place to live.

He has just finished breakfast with his family in their suburban home on a quiet residential street. It is a spring morning. He hears his neighbor start his lawnmower. 

He's mulling over what to write his Substack about. He has to write one every day. This is what his readers pay for. Gradually more people are deciding it is worth paying both to support his work and to be able to make comments. He gets about one or two new paying subscribers each day. That’s $8 or $16 a month but it adds up. This reminds him of the commercials on TV which show a sick or starving child and say “for only $19 a month, that’s only 63 cents a day, you can help this child.” (There’s a reason so many charities choose this amount.)

There was an ICE raid at a hospital where seriously ill immigrant patients were loaded into a van to be taken to a deportation center. That was a human interest story he thought people could relate to. There was also the news that the US Postal Service, long since put under the Department of Commerce, had announced that they would cease to allow mail-in ballots to be sent in postage paid envelopes. It seemed like a small victory that courts managed to stop from outlawing mail in voting but this was clearly an effort to make it more difficult. Mail service was so slow with postal workers fired and post offices closed that many people stopped even buying stamps since they rarely mailed letters.

Clark had settled into a mood of low grade depression and anxiety. He tried to breathe in the aroma of newly mown grass and clear his mind so he could decide what to write about. Then his neighbor's mower stopped. There was nothing unusual in that, but he had a sudden sense of dread that came out of nowhere. It prompted him to look out of the window.

What he saw chilled him to the bone. It was one of those armored Tesla Cybertrucks that the FBI was now using. He'd seen photos of them on the news. He'd watched as Musk met with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at a Tesla plant where the vehicles were being manufactured. He heard Musk explain how powerful they were, how much gear they could carry, and especially how they could stop the bullet from an AR-15. There were videos on TV of FBI agents using Cybertucks as they raided high profile anti-Trumpers. Three or four of these futuristic vehicles pulling up in front of someone’s house was somehow more terrifying to watch than the same number of black Ford Suburbans. 

He thought he was small potatoes. He never thought they would come for him. He had the presence of mind to get the name of a decent criminal lawyer, just in case, and write it down, but in a panic he couldn't remember where he put it. 

He watched as four heavily armed men in FBI body armor exit the car and begin to walk towards the path to his house. "Honey," he said to his wife, "it's happening, they are here for me."

The back story:

This was first reported earlier in February:

'Sleazy corruption': $400M award reportedly for 'Armored Tesla' outrages Musk critics

It was denied but then new information came out yesterday:

A new document undercuts Trump admin's denials about $400 million Tesla deal

It never made sense that an armored Cybertruck would be appropriate for ferrying diplomats from place to place. It does make sense for the FBI Gestapo to adopt them their primary mode of transportation. When they do their raids they offer the protection from being shot at. If they need to pursue anybody they are incredibly fast. 

And finally, there’s this:

If they needed more firepower they could mount a machine gun in the back. (Read article)

Excerpt:

The warlord leader of Chechnya has mounted a machine gun on a Tesla Cybertruck that he says he plans to send to Russian forces on the battlefields in Ukraine.

Ramzan Kadyrov published a video on Saturday of himself driving the vehicle, which he said had been sent to him by “the strongest genius of our time,” Elon Musk, before it was adapted.

Musk later denied giving the vehicle to the Chechen leader. “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.

In the slickly produced video, a grinning Kadyrov is seen driving the vehicle through an empty square in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. He then gets out of the truck and stands behind the machine gun with an ammunition belt draped round his neck.

“We received a Tesla Cybertruck from the respected Elon Musk. I was happy to test the new equipment and personally saw that there’s a reason that it is called the ‘Cyberbeast,’” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram.

Kadyrov said he “literally fell in love” with the vehicle, which he said was “invulnerable,” “fast,” “comfortable” and “maneuverable.”

Now we know. Musk, who has threatened to cut Starlink to the Ukrainian military, has already helped the Russians. This is the General he gave the Cybertruck to:

For decades, Kadyrov has been criticized for alleged human rights violations. The US State Department sanctioned him in 2020, saying it “has extensive credible information” that Kadyrov was responsible for “gross violations of human rights,” including torture and extrajudicial killings. Kadyrov has also been sanctioned by the United Kingdom and European Union.

Monday’s Substack:

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Yesterday I wrote that the tyranny blitzkrieg has entered our village, now they are about to burn down our houses. By Hal M. Brown

 

Please click here to read my Substack for today.

The Substack is always free If you'd like to follow me please subscribe. Comments there are always welcome. 

Trump & Co. have just blown by the "SPEED, NO LIMIT" sign on the road to tyranny, By Hal M. Brown

 

The Trump blitzkrieg smashed into the speed sign in their juggernaut to conquer democracy. They are now in the village where we live which is on the other side of the hill.

Maureen Dowd is not Walter Cronkite, who on Feb. 27, 1968 appeared on television and delivered an editorial claiming that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate.” (Read article). He was the most trusted news anchor in America, if not the most trusted person in the United States. LBJ knew that when you lost Walter Chonkite, you basically lost support of the country.

Certainly not everyone reads The New York Times. For one thing it requires a subscription to so unless you go to the library. There are many people who never even heard of Maureen Dowd. She became a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine in 2014. In 1999, Dowd received a Pulitzer Prize for her series of columns on the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal. She has been a regular columnist for the Times since 1995.

Yesterday she wrote “Fail Ceasar,” a column well worth reading if you have subscription.

This is how she began her column:

“Remember, I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.”

It sounds like President Trump, to the world. But it was Caligula, to his grandmother.

At least America’s Emperor of Chaos has not made his horse a consul. Yet.

A horse might be better than some of the sketchy characters surrounding Trump.

After pillaging and gutting the U.S. government, the Western alliance and our relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump is thinking of himself as a king and cogitating on a third term. He basks in the magniloquent rhetoric of acolytes genuflecting to an instrument of divine providence.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference this week, a group calling itself the “Third Term Project” erected a sign depicting Trump as Caesar. A wag on X wondered if they knew what happened to Caesar.

She concludes:

Many who had hoped to tune out Trump this time realize they don’t have that luxury. It’s far more dangerous now. There are frightening moments when our 236-year-old institutions don’t look up to the challenge. With flaccid Democrats and craven Republicans, King Donald can pretty much do whatever he wants to whomever he wants.

If you don’t have subscription you can read a summary of the column in RawStory in their article titled 'Far more dangerous': NY Times' Maureen Dowd shares terrifying realization.

If only Maureen Dowd was Walter Cronkite. If only the country had a Walter Cronkite. There is no single person with the ability to sway a large portion of the public to see the truth of what Trump is about to turn the country into.

To the contrary, many people in the media are still trying to minimze what he is doing. They try to cherry pick all the things that they think have been impediments to his turning the country into a dictatorship and they tell us that this means the blitzkrieg can be turned around. They won’t even call it a blitzkrieg, which means lightening war, even though it is an appropriate term because this is how the Nazis conquered Europe and parts of Russia. Their blitzkrieg could barely be slowed down, let alone stopped.

The optimists point to MAGA setbacks in court and public opinion polls showing an unprecedented low approval ratings for Trump and the things he is doing. They suggest that everyone contact their representatives in Congress. They advocate going to actual protests. Show Trump how many people are against him, but better hope no protests turn violent, or even lead to minor law breaking, since this will give Trump an excuse to declare martial law. 

The Meidas Touch Network YouTube channel announced it has more viewers than Fox News a few days ago. 

If you follow their news (see below) you might think we are winning the war against Trump and Trumpism:

Regarding the Trump & Co. rationale for many of their actions, I want to emphasize something I don’t think has been reported. I believe that the entire DOGE, anti-woke, and anti-DEI personnel purge is an attempt to rid agencies and departments of as many people as possible so they can be replaced by obedient foot soldiers. While some MAGA officials probably believe this is important, I am certain Trump, and possibly Musk, see ginning this up as being a means to an end. I also don’t see any strong belief with Trump that immigrants are really “poisoning the blood of the county.” Hitler might have this believed this about Jews, but I think this was a position heavily promoted by Trump to rally his troops into a fear fueled fever so they would support him.

In his Substack yesterday Robert Hubbell (Profile) wrote “Reflections on the news through the lens of hope.” The key word is “hope.” So many people, quite understandably, can’t cope with the levels of anxiety and despair that believing the country is about to turn to tryanny will lead to will cause. Just about every post in The Contrarian, the Substack started by Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen, lays out ways to fight the good fight against Trump. For good measure, to keep morale up they have recipes and a pet of the week - gotta keep that sense of optimism.

This is part of what Norm Eisen wrote in “Spring Training-for democracy:”

But there are stumbles too. Pitchers don’t have their pitches down. Batters are rusty and out of sync. Teams have made major personnel changes since the championship parade last November—but the new rosters haven’t quite gelled yet.

The same is true of the patriotic opposition to Donald Trump throughout the first month of his administration. Across the country, Trump’s illegal actions are being stopped by the courts, they’re being protested in the streets and questioned at increasing volumes in town halls. For every illegal action, pro-democracy lawyers and organizations (some bipartisan) are working to file multiple lawsuits and have multiple demonstrations against it. The coalition of pro-democracy forces has won many fights—but not all of them.

Take Friday. The coalition had three important wins: a judge issued a preliminary injunction against Trump’s anti-DEI policies, another court blocked DOGE out of Treasury, and SCOTUS refused to interfere with a lower court order reinstating a wrongly fired agency head. There was a loss too: a judge denied a preliminary injunction in one of the cases to protect USAID. And there were two new major lawsuits: AP sued the Trump administration over being unfairly banned from press pool access, and NYC sued over $80 million in FEMA funds being withheld. (h/t Ryan Goodman.)

Just like my Dodgers and everyone’s teams in spring training, it feels like democracy is still gelling; still working to hit its stride. Team Democracy will not triumph in every contest, although, on the whole, I thought Friday was a good day and fairly representative. (I can’t resist noting that our team at State Democracy Defenders Fund is undefeated so far in the dozen-plus cases we have filed or worked on in the past month. Remember, by subscribing to The Contrarian, you are supporting those legal efforts, in addition to enabling our journalistic efforts.)

He is keeping that optimism flame alive!

I received the image above via email asking for donations. I’m supposed to believe that Trump and Musk are really shaking in their boots. It says it’s a miracle, IT’S A MIRACLE!”. I don’t believe in miracles. If a highly contagious lethal virus which only infected psychopaths became a pandemic, I might might change my mind about this. 

Joyce Vance titles her Substack today “A little Morning happiness” and has three photos of her chickens. She prefaces her photo essay with “There has been too much news lately to take a night off, which means I’ve been hearing, increasingly, from some of you who want a few chicken pictures to interrupt the doomscrolling. So here you go.” I can appreciate the need to take a break to keep one from desending into a pit of anxiety and despair. She concludes: “Back to serious things: In case you missed it, last night’s piece on the Friday Night Massacre in the military is an important one and the Kash Patel piece provides some important context about the confirmation of prior FBI Directors that can be helpful in explaining why this confirmation was both wrong and a serious departure from how Directors are selected and confirmed.”

There are exceptions to those who are downplaying how Trump’s juggernaut is damn near unstoppable. One is Sabrina Haake who writes a Substack called The Haake Take. In her column “Dear President Zelenskyy” she concludes by predicting violence in our homeland:

As the world’s wealthiest men team up to impose maximum harm on the world by embracing Nazism and partnering with Putin, one of the world’s most lethal dictators, please take heart. It’s obvious violence is coming to the US, but America will sort itself out. We always do the right thing, as Churchill reportedly said, after other possibilities have been exhausted.

I close here in shared weariness in knowing there really are evil men in the world who will do anything for power and wealth. Also, in sympathy and apology, heartbroken for both our countries, but not defeated.

Read the most recent Haake Take :

Trump has just fired top generals. He knows he has to control the military to achieve his dictatorial goals.

Kash Patel has reassigned something like a thousand FBI agents from DC to offices around the country. These are senior agents who made their way to the DC office because they were the best of the best. No doubt they will be replaced by agents, people with guns and the power to break down doors and arrest people, with Trump loyalists. Some of them may be members of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, or J6 insurrectionists.

It is debatable whether members of the military swear an oath to not only obey the Constitution, but also to follow orders from the President. It could be argued that obeying the Constitution takes precedence over obeying the President when he issues an unconstitutional order. (More about this here.)

If a soldier defies a order because it is considered by them to be unconstitutional, I doubt the new JAG officers in the different branches will look kindly on this. Hegseth has fired not only top generals, but also the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force (reference).

Congress has been neutered. The Republican members are so desperate to hold onto their positions that they are willing to bend at the knee for Trump. Those up for reelection in two years think Trump, and Musk with his money, can make sure they lose a primary. They don’t want to admit that there might not even be a free election in two years. There might not be a functioning Congress. 

If Trump has his way, within two years the three co-equal branches of government won’t exist with each one acting to restrain the other, and as intended by the Founders, keeping the country from becoming a monarchy.

We still don’t know what will happen if the Supreme Court issues a major ruling limiting Trump’s imperial power. My hunch is that he will defy the order and dare them to do anything about it. Of course, they can’t. Trump controls all the means to enforce federal law.

If Trump has his way the only law enfocement left in the country will be local police departments and state National Guard units. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could end up in a kind of civil war. When we go to our granddaughters indoor soccer games in the winter we drive by a large Oregon National Guard facility with lines of military vehicles outside. I’ve said to my partner that I could see a time when they were deployed to the Idaho border to protect our state from their National Guard which Trump and Hegseth ordered to take over Portland and other cities in the state because they are sanctuary cities. (Reference)

If only we were merely on the road to becoming a country like we were under English rule before the War for Independence. Compared to Trump, King George III, imperialist that he was, was a sweetheart.

On Friday I wrote “We’re on the road to tyranny” using the illustration which you see I modified for this Substack.

In just two days the actions from Trump & Co. led me to revise this image and so it will illustrate my title. It is meant to show a cloud of exhaust from the Trump tyranny blitzkrieg just having gone over the horizon. It is out of sight there, but it really has just begun to take over the village on the other side of the hill. The village is us.

As I finish writing this I have MSNBC on.

They are talking about how important it is to take everything Trump says and does seriously. They say we must not dismiss his words as hyperbole. Michael Steele said that we need “militant democracy.” I suggest that the last time militant democracy against a power as formidible as Trumpism was successful was in World War II.