We'e on the road to tyranny, By Hal M.Brown

 

There was good and bad news on Rachel Maddow last night. It was the same news. The news was that Trump's favorability rating in the polls are horrible. Does this sound like good news? This is one way to look at it. I see it though a dark glass. Trump only believes in polls when they favor him, but he knows that when mulitple polls are unfavorable towards him they are correct.

As polls turn against him this will hasten Trump's drive to cement his dictatorship. He will keep testing the limits until something unconstitional or illegal that he does goes to the Supreme Court.

When it does, he hopes the ruling will be in his favor, but I have little doubt that if the court rules against him, he plans to ignore the ruling and see if he can get away with it.

He's been able to fire highly competent people and install loyalists in their place, to close down federal buildings, to ban DEI references, to get Musk's team of DOGE warriors into numerous departments where they can mess with computer data and, most tellingly, shut down USAID despite the public outcry over the deaths that this was causing

This is penny ante stuff compared with what he intends to do. He wants to be eliminate the American democracy and become the ruler for life of an authoritarian regime. In order to achieve this he can't merely issue orders which defy the Constitution and undermines democracy unless he has the hard power of the state to back them up.

Trump also has shown every indication that he will abandon Ukraine, drop out of NATO, and develop some sort of alliance with Russia.

Trump believes he controls all the hard power mechanisms in the country. I am sure he relishes watching his heavily armed ICE agents, who look like SWAT members attacking a drug kingpin's lair, storming into some house using flash-bang grenades.

Trump, with the approval of Kash Patel as FBI director, now controls all of the departments that can exercise hard power. By hard I mean that they have guns and the power to arrest people, and worse.

Steve Bannon is pushing for Trump to run for a third term. Whether this would pass constitutional muster with the Supreme Court remains to be seen and it might be irrelevant. If Trump succeeds in turning the country into a dictatorship he doesn't need to run for office. If he knows that the majority of voters won't vote for him, he won't bother setting up a fake election so he could win. He could just suspend elections.

I fear that Trump will find an excuse to call some kind of national emergency. This could be as simple as ginning up a lie about needing to stop a fentanyl influx, or protests that even if they aren't violent he says could turn violent. Once Trump knows he controls the military, he could find an excuse to invoke martial law.

Forget the Posse Comitatus Act, he'd just ignore it.

It isn't a sure thing that just because Trump has put loyalists in control federal hard power that the foot soldiers will do their bidding. All of them swore oaths, but there's a contradiction in, for example, the US Army oath. Soldiers swear to obey the Constitution, but also sweat to obey the orders of the President of the United States.

Even if a large number of his hard power Gestapo and SS troops quit or accept early retirement, their places could be filled by people like members of far right militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keppers. Kash Patel could fill some of the expected vacancies in the FBI with the J6 inssurectionists.

The speed limit sign we are approaching on the road to tyranny says “SPEED, NO LIMIT.” The United States is accelerating along this route. Soon it may be unstoppably barrelling down this road. I see tyranny as being just over the horizon. There’s still hope that the brakes can be slammed on, but how fast we get to the point of no return remains to be seen.

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The Oval Office is the new Access Hollywood bus, By Hal M. Brown

We had a preview of what the Oval Office has become when we heard the conversation between Donald Trump and Billy Bush in the Access Hollywood bus.

TRUMP: "I moved on her. Actually, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it. I did try and f*** her. She was married."

BUSH: "That's huge news."

TRUMP: "Nancy [O'Dell - former co-host of Access Hollywood], no this was... and I moved on her. Very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said 'I'll show you where they have some nice furniture'. I took her... I moved on her like a b****. I couldn't get there and she was married. And all of a sudden I see her. She's now got the big phoney t*** and she's totally changed her look."

BUSH: "Sheesh, your girl's hot as sh**. In the purple."

TRUMP: "Whoa! Yes! Whoa!"

BUSH: "Yes! The Donald has scored. Whoa, my man!"

[cross talk]

BUSH: " It better not be the publicist. No it's her, it's..."

TRUMP: "Yeah that's her in the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs [breath fresheners] just in case I start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

BUSH: "Whatever you want."

TRUMP: "Grab them by the p****. You can do anything."

You could dismiss this as crude macho self-aggrandizing bluster, or as Melania called it dismissively, just locker room talk. Boys will be boys, right?

It was far more than that when it came to Trump's behavior with women. Not enough people cared about having a rapist as president to stop them for voting to elect him twice. But, enough about this.

That bus is now the Oval Office. Substitute Elon Musk for Billy Bush and consider what they are plotting and laughing about doing, and the consequences.

It could be others besides Elon Musk. It could be Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, or if he's lucky enough, Pete Hegseth, but no matter who it is I see them coming up with ever more dramatic and dastardly deeds that they think prove what manly men they are.

I don't know if Trump is creative enough to come up with most of the ideas as to who, or what, to go after. Maybe he is, but I doubt it. We know he announces some of his plans when he's awake in the middle of the night posting on social media.

Some of the things that are being done have Trump's fingerprints all over them. For example, he's been obsessed with tariffs. He may have thought of the idea of making Canada a state by himself. Who knows where the Greenland, Panama, and Gaza notions came from.

My hunch is that people curry favor with Trump by suggesting ways he can go after his enemies or doing it themselves. Looking into prosecuting AOC for treason, why not? Claim 150 year olds are getting Social Security checks? Sure, who can prove they aren't?

Trump finds out about things from TV and social media, so perhaps he heard about drag shows at the Kennedy Center and got the idea of taking that over personally. Next thing we learn is that the concert featuring the Gay Mens Choir, National Symphony Orchestra's concert, A Peacock Among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride, scheduled for May, was cancelled.

The name John F. Kennedy was also in the news within the past few days because the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston was closed for a day because the federal employees working there were fired. Neither the George HW Bush or Reagan libraries were targeted.

These are comparatively minor power plays. Yesterday, Trump and the swinging dick boys really topped themselves. It's like they were on the Access Hollywood bus and worked themselves up into a testosterone and anabolic steroid fueled fever and went out and raped an entire village. This time the village was the entire country of Ukraine.

Trump has assembled a group of mostly men who revel in asserting power and control over those they consider to be their enemies often in cruel ways. With Trump it isn't playacting like his pro-wrestling shenanigans anymore. It isn't selling NFT's with himself depicted as a superhero with rippling muscles. It is real and it is destroying lives and livelihoods.

It isn't just MAGA men who have adopted this domineering phallocentric belief system. Women like Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem have as well. Noem, in fact, has launched an ad campaign warning immigrants of the consequences of trying to enter the United States illegally and she's wearing a white cowboy hat.

I'm surprised the dog killer didn't make the ad carrying the weapon she used to dispose of Cricket.

There are (from their first names) seven women out of 30 members of Musk's DOGE team.

Of course we suffered through having Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

What I think some of these women have learned is that to get ahead in a man's world you have to adopt and even embrace in your own identity the most toxic aspects of what passes for masculinity with these men.

Male or female, there are people from Trump and Musk on down who thrive in the atmosphere of the Access Hollywood bus. It is a place where people are never sated by sadism, it's never enough to fill their empty bellies, there always has to be another way to express their cruelty.

If only it was all performative like pro wrestling or ridiculous like Trump posting an image of himself wearing a crown proclaiming "LONG LIVE THE KING" on a Time Magazine-like cover.

One could say that democracy has been thrown into a pit of cobras. If this was literal, it might not mean certain death if you got democracy to a hospital in time. What is frightening, what got me up at midnight to write this, is that it isn't clear whether there's any anti-venom for the poison of these democracy killing snakes.

Related:

'Made up in his head': J.D. Vance hit with ridicule after bizarre 'masculinity' rant

Afterthought:

If you're a Star Wars fan you will understand this. Even if you never saw the original trilogy, this should make sense since you no doubt have heard of the evil Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi. As the series develops, you discover that Vader is the father of both Luke and Princess Leah.

On the Death Star the evil emperor, Sheev Palpatine, who is more powerful than either of them, wants to get Luke to abandon the Force, the supernatural basis of good, to accept the Dark Side. If he does the Dark Side will be so powerful nothing can stop it.

Luke Skywalker believes that there is good inside Vader which he is repressing. The emperor is sure the Dark Side has the power to seduce him.

Vader and Skywalker do battle in the final scene of the last movie as the evil emperor watches. Skywalker and Vader fight with light sabers but Skywalker refuses to fight to kill him.

Vader disarms Skywalker and he still won't accept the Dark Side. Vader refuses to kill him so the emperor starts to do this with blue lightening bolts coming from his fingers. As Skywalker writhes on the ground, first Vader watches and does nothing. Then as it looks like Skywalker is about to die, Vader throws the emperor into the shaft leading to the nuclear core of the Death Star where he is vaporized.

Then Vader, whose face has always been hidden behind a black helmet, takes it off and reveals his burned face to his son and they reconcile before he, too, dies.

My point, hopefully obviously, is that this is what we hope will happen when we do battle with the Dark Side that has taken control of our country. It took seven some hours over three Star Wars films for good to prevail over evil, for the Force to vanquish the Dark Side.

All I can say is may the Force be with us.

Addendum:

Perhaps not so ironically, Mark Hamil, who played Luke Skywalker, is now is a prolific poster on BlueSky.

This is what he posted this morning next to an an image of Trump’s social media post which called Zelensky a dictator:

You can also follow my daily thoughts on BlueSky here.

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Trump just gave Europe its Pearl Harbor by backing Russia in the Ukraine war. By Hal M. Brown

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This is all over the news, not just on HUFFPOST.

Trump on Tuesday blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s statement comes as US and Russian officials discussed ending the three-year war in Ukraine without any Ukrainian officials present — which Zelenskyy criticized on Tuesday.

“[Zelenskyy] should’ve ended it in three years,” Trump, who has repeatedly and baselessly claimed the war wouldn’t have happened if he were in office at the time, said. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”

Trump added that he likes Zelenskyy “personally,“ but, he added, “I care about getting the job done.”

“You have leadership now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened, even without the United States,” Trump continued.

It is being reported about on TV as I write this:

If you don’t count Trump’s other lies where the truth was in plain sight, the size of his first inauguraton crowd and the Big Lie about the election being stolen in 2020, for example, this is Trump’s most dangerous to democracy gaslighting lie ever. The first democracy threatening lie was about January 6th. We saw what we saw, and Trump wants us to believe we were hallucinating. 

We also saw what we saw when Russia first amassed troops around Ukraine claiming it was just a military exercise, and then began a massive invasion. Trump wants us to think we didn’t see this. We’re the ones who are mentally ill, right?

American’s have a favorable opinion of NATO and our membership (see Pew Research poll). If they could vote on whether we remain as a member we would.

Another Pew Research poll of Americans opinions on supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia shows oeverall support but a division depending on poltical affiliation.

Overall, 30% of American adults say the U.S. is providing too much support to Ukraine in its war with Russia. That’s up slightly from 27% in November 2024, just after the U.S. presidential election. At the same time, the share of adults who believe the U.S. is not providing enough support to Ukraine has increased slightly: 22% say this, up from 18% in November. These shifts mean that U.S. opinion about support for Ukraine is now closer to preelection levels.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are far more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say the U.S. is giving Ukraine too much support (47% vs. 14%). The share of Republicans who think the U.S. is giving Ukraine too much support has increased 5 percentage points since November. Meanwhile, Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say the U.S. is giving too little support to Ukraine (35% vs. 10%); the share of Democrats with this view is up 7 points since November.

If NATO membership and support for Ukraine were up to Americans, we would be in a very different position. Instead, it is up to one person, Donald J. Trump. 

On Feb. 10th I wrote Three weeks in and we have Fort Sumter.

I wrote:

What has just happened mere few weeks into the Trump presidency is that we have had our Fort Sumpter in the form of Trump attacking federal agencies and, as I wrote yesterday, locking Democratic members of Congress out of federal buildings.

The war is about to escalate as Trump threatens to defy court orders and Vance, Musk, and some Republican members of Congress say he has every right to do this.

It is worse than that. There are also thinly veiled threats to try to take control of the media.

In the brief time since I wrote that the move to make us into an autocracy has escalated. 

Yesterday Trump all but announced that we have shitcanned our membership in the community of democratic and mostly democratic nations and allied ourselves with Russia. He started by trying to bully our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and then symbolically ripped to shreds every treaty we have with our allies.

There was a chance that when Trump said what he said he was having a senior moment. He could have walked his words back. He could have done his usual moonwalk somehow saying he didn’t really mean that Ukraine started the war. It looks like it is too late for him to do this because he followed up by continuing to attack Zelinski and in a typical Trumpian move said he wanted Ukraine to give the US half of her national resources. Then, just a few minutes ago, it has been reported that Trump called Zelenski a dictator and that he better have free elections or he may not have a country.

What Trump has done may not have been as much of a surprise attack as Pearl Harbor was. We should have seen this coming. Even so, he might as well as ordered a fleet of aircraft carries to send their aircraft to bomb, not just Ukraine and NATO, but all of our allies.

Trump is now an enemy agent in the NATO alliance. I see a case being made for NATO to kick the country he has taken control of out for their own security.

Trump has declared war against democracy both at home and abroad. He might as well have added two parenthetical words to his slogan so it reads Make America (and Russia) Great Again.

Some afterthoughts:

In the unlikely event that Trump either withdraws from NATO or NATO severs its relationship with the United States, they could do one of two things. They likely would significantly increase military aid to Ukraine. They could go much further than this. They could fast-track Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.

This would mean a NATO war with Russia. This would be World War III. There’s no way to know which side Trump would be on. If he decided to be on Russia’s side, not only would the American public be outraged, but it is quite possible our military would refuse to back him. This could lead to a military coup. Hesgeth would be barred from the Pentagon, the nuclear codes Trump has control of would be disabled, Trump would be arrested for treason, and a tribunal of generals would be put in charge of Executive Branch of the United States.

Addendum:

This is what Trump posted:

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn't be won, that never had to

start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and "TRUMP," will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn't Sleepy Joe Biden demand Equalization, in that this

War is far more important to Europe than it is to us

— We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation. On top of this, Zelenskyy admits that half of the money we sent him is "MISSING." He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and

the only thing he was good at was playing Biden "like a fiddle." A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only "TRUMP," and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the "gravy train" going. I love Ukraine, but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have

unnecessarily died - And so it continues.....

The Russian webstie posted this along with what Trump posted:

Read my daily thoughts on Bluesky

Airplane crashes and more: turnabout may not be fair play, but Trump and Musk deserve it. By Hal M. Brown

 

So far it doesn’t appear that mistakes by air traffic controllers or anybody else can be blamed for the airplane crash that happened in Canada. Everything now points to it being an unavoidable accident. I am not an expert, but I think it’s possible that failure for air traffic controllers to close the airport and reroute planes due to the danger of ground level wind sheer could be considered to have been a factor.

Even if Canadian investigators from their version of our FAA, Canadian Transport determine it was an unavoidable accident it increases focusing more attention on air traffic safety and the Trump/Musk firing of probationary employees of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Trump and his GOP minions have always blamed everything that has gone wrong in the country on President Biden, and before him on President Obama. Whether it’s a single incident of an illegal immigrant murdering someone or the rise in Fentanyl overdoses and deaths, it is blamed on Joe Biden. You name it, if it is or was bad in the last four years they blamed Biden.

It’s an old trope that airplane crashes come in groups, often in groups of three (see article). With so many planes flying there are bound to be accidents. Some will be minor and some will be more serious. A very few may be catastrophic. 

It doesn’t matter whether or not the causes of any of them can be blamed on the cuts to the FAA. They will be a reminder that Trump and Musk have no regard for the safety of, not just the flying public, but the public in general.

There are other things besides airplane crashes that they can’t control. For example, if outbreaks of the bird flu and measles make the news, Trump’s pick of RFK Jr. to head HHS will be criticized no matter whether or not anything he did was a causative factor.

If there’s a life threatening outbreak of a food borne disease we’ll see stories about cuts to the USDA and FDA. If a drug rushed through the approval process turns out to have fatal side effects look for the blame to be put on FDA cuts.

If ICE agents inadvertently shoot a child, Trump, with his selection of the macho posturing Tom Homan, will be blamed by the progressive media.

If there’s a radiation leak at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington state, which is 248 mile north from where I live in Portland, it may have nothing to do with the firings of their expert employees and, when they realized their mistake, their inablity to reach them to tell them to come back to work. As unlikey as this is to happen, if it does Trump will be forced by our side to take ownership of this.

If there are even worse wildfires in California, or in states Trump doesn’t hate, the DOGE firing of fire fighters will be blamed. There could be other natural disasters, some devastiing to red states, where understaffed agencies will cause more death and disruption because of cuts to FEMA.

We’re a Willie Horton - George Floyd - Luigi Mangione society. All it sometimes takes is something done by or that happens to one person to move public opinion, for good or bad. 

I doubt somebody who couldn’t get service at the VA or who had their Social Security benefit cut will self-immolate themselves in front of a federal building, but it could happen. 

The elimination of USAID funding for most of their life saving programs is the most egregious and heartless exmaple of DOGE deaths. Unfortunately these are faraway consequences easily ignored by those who don’t want to have their Christian values challenged. The results of Trump’s cruelty has to hit close to home for it to lead to a signficant number his supporters to turn against him. In fact, close to home probably isn’t enough. It has to be literally in the homes of these people whether on TV or better yet, in their own lives. 

It may be unsavory, it may be wrong at some levels, because just because somebody did something unfair to you, you can say that this doesn’t morally justify doing it back to them when you have the chance. It may break Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” dictum. Even so, I think there’s a case to be made for, in some cases, you can apply the tenets of situation ethics. This leads me to sayng that turnabout is fair play.

Addendum:

There’s another cliche that applies to this:

This is a follow-up to yesterday’s Substack: