For now Trump is working more or less within the law. He's appointing loyalists as interim US attorneys. At some point he may not bother with lawyers at all. By Hal M. Brown -- Why bother with the fiction of having a legal system when you have armed goons to do your dirty work?

 

HUFFPOST called it ATTACK OF THE TOADIES on their main page yesterday. Their article was titled The Henchmen Strategy: What Trump Is Doing To Make The Law His Own with the subtitle The Trump administration has appointed numerous interim U.S. Attorneys — and it's all part of his quest to twist law enforcement agencies into his personal legal task force.

I am waiting for him to stop bothering keeping up the appearance of actually having a judicial system. It is simply inefficient and wasteful for him to spend money on even ve paying US Attorneys and their office staff. I assume most of the offices are prime real estate properties too and they could be sold. This money could be put into hiring more loyalists in ICE and the other federal law enforcement agencies. I doubt even the most loyal Trump toadie lawyers would be willing to join ICE even if they got to carry big guns because they’d have to take a pay cut from their current salary. ICE agents pay averages $30 an hour.

If, as I predicted would happen in my April 27 Substack Trump could combine DOGE and ICE and we could have an American Gestapo armed with both guns and computers. If this happens they will need far more personnel. There would be able to locate many more enemies and they wouldn’t have enough fright-mongers to sic upon them and drag them off to only the Trump annointed and perhaps God, if He’s paying attention, knows where.

I see a time down the road when Trump won’t need any lawyers at all. I doubt Trump knows that the phrase “let’s kill all the lawyers” orginated with Shakespeare.

It is spoken by Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part 2. Trump loves his lickspittle lawyers and hates the lawyers who rule against him. Whether judges or other lawyers they have been a thorn in his side. I am sure he would like to, figurately speaking or not, kill all of those lawyers. If he had a way to eliminate his troublesome lawyers but it involved sending alllawers to kingdom come he’d probably give the order. With Trump loyalty to him works only to a point. Bye bye Bondi, Alina Habba, and Ed Martin. Trump could mandate that practicing law was illegal.

As for his own lawyers, starting with Pam Bondi, who as Attorney General, is the top lawyer in the Executive Branch and going down the ranks of his other lawyers, one of these days he may realize at 2:00AM while he’s playing with his tweet machine that he no longer needs any lawyers. This incudes those on the Supreme Court. Does anyone really believe he actually likes Clarence Thomas?

Why should be bother with keeping up the fiction that the country has a judicial system. When he’s already burned the Constitution to a crisp why does he need three equal branches of government? Hell’s blazes, why does he even need two? 

He could outdo Putin, who has his own toadies in his bicameral Federal Assembly. He could just declare himself absolute monarch and get rid of Congress and the Supreme Court. He could turn the Capitol into a Trump Hotel and the Supreme Court building into a glitzy Trump store selling his latest gold geegaws.

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Trump told The Atlantic that he runs the country and the world. Take him seriously. Hitler could have said the same thing. By Hal M. Brown -- Jennifer Rubin expresses optimism but also reminds us of how long it took to defeat the Nazis.

By the end of the day today anyone paying attention to the news on all but Trump TV will know about the interview Trump gave to The Atlantic and the two grandiose Trumpian things he said. 

The one that The Atlantic had on their cover and RawStory featured in their article about this (here: 'I run the country — and the world': Inside Trump's bombshell sit-down with The Atlantic) makes the second look hoohum. That was about his teasing the idea of running for third term.

This is an excerpt from Rawsotry’s article with the two parts I think are the most telling in bold:

“'I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,' Trump said in a phone call. “'You know, what I do is such serious stuff.'”

“The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive," he added later. "I had all these crooked guys, and the second time, I run the country — and the world.”

The reporters asked Trump about a rumor they'd heard about him tasking the Justice Department to examine whether he could legally run for a third term, which he denied but left open as a possibility.

“'That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?'” Trump said, laughing, according to the report. “'Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter [democratic norms].'"

He noted that supporters often shout out for him to seek a third term, but he expressed a recognition that wasn't a possibility.

“'It’s not something that I’m looking to do, and I think it would be a very hard thing to do,'" he said.

Taking the second statement about shattering democratic norms first, this tells me that Trump knows very well that when democratic norms are shattered democracy is destroyed. What’s left is autocracy. Who, then is in charge? He is, of course. What does that make him? It makes him a dictator.

What Trump said sbout running the country is true. Despite what optimists want to believe about all the defeats in court, his dismal showing in the polls, and the large anti-Trump protests, he is still running the country. For example, Jennifer Rubin lists numerous Trump failures in “Trump is worse off than he was 100 days ago. The battle for democracy, however, is not yet won.” The subtitle about the battle not yet won contradicts the illustration shown below.

We see a faded odd looking MAGA hat with weird orange straps in three pieces on a dirt road with tire tracks over it. 

Presumably this hat thingy represents Trump and Trumpism.

Rubin is more realistic in what she writes. She begins:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. 
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

– Winston Churchill, 1942

We therefore cannot tell if the last week or so leading up to the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, decency, and truth has definitively shifted momentum toward the pro-democracy movement or just temporarily sidetracked Trump’s march to autocracy. If and only if pro-democracy forces draw the right lessons, cement their alliances, and pursue their MAGA assailants relentlessly will recent events come to be recognized as the end of the beginning of the fight to preserve the American experiment.

She goes on to describe 10 failures or setbacks Trump has had. She concludes with something I have written about:

In short, Trump lost the first 100 days, but democracy has not won the war. Had the Allies not gone on to prevail on D-Day and win WWII, their victory in North Africa in 1942, which inspired Churchill’s memorable observation, would have been viewed in retrospect as a bump in the road on the way to Nazi victory. Without persistent, ongoing opposition, recent victories on multiple fronts cannot end the MAGA threat.

Regular readers of my Substack know I have written about the Nazi blitzkreig and how Hitler invaded Europe, and then how long it took for the Allies to build their military might to the point where they could start the D-Day assault. The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 marking the beginning of World War II. Churchill made his comment on November 10, 1942. 

Trump has four years to consolidate his power, two if you want to believe the Democrats winning control of Congress will make any difference to him. 

At present Trump has armed agents doing his bidding. He has already used ICE, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies to arrest people he sees as enemies. Consider what happened yesterday when DEA agents and other law enforcement were used in Colorado (link)

The real test of whether he has Hitlerian or Putin power will be if he tries to use the military on US soil by declaring martial law to stop protests and round up and imprison protestors. He could attempt to do this by declaring martial law. This is what Wikipedia says about martial law in the United States.

Assuming the military went along with this we will have a true totalitarian country. There will be no coalition to mount a D-Day to save us.

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.Combine DOGE and ICE and we could have an American Gestapo armed with both guns and computers. By Hal M. Brown - Trump could be Hitler with a giant mainframe database of undesirables who are poisoning the blood of America.

 

American ICE agents don’t look like they are members of the Nazi Gestapo. They wore plainclothes. Even so, whether in their black body armor uniforms carrying assault rifles and enough bullets to take on a drug cartel’s lair, or wearing ski maks and in plainclothes, they instill terror in people.

The photo above is from an article about the Gestapo in The History Place.

This is an excerpt from the RawStory article “DOGE could be headed for a 'a new, more dangerous phase' as Musk steps away”

A decision by billionaire Elon Musk to restrict his involvement in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he created so that he can tend to his ailing Tesla automobile company does not mean that the damage being done by the DOGE staffers will be coming to an end.

According to Guardian journalist David Smith, their work is not done and, with Musk out of the picture as the face of DOGE, things could get a lot worse.

Conceding there is a feeling among some that the "lull" that will follow Musk's department is reason for relief, Smith wrote instead it "presages a new, more dangerous phase."

The following is from Chaos unleashed by Musk’s Doge is starting to wane – what does that mean? in The Guardian:

Last week Musk announced that he is hanging up his chainsaw and stepping back from his role overseeing the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, to focus on Tesla, his beleaguered electric vehicle company. The news led some to hope the chaos unleashed by Doge is finally waning.

But it is just as possible that the relative lull presages a new, more dangerous phase. While Musk intends to reduce his schedule, he also said he would continue to work for Donald Trump for “the remainder of the president’s term”. On Friday CNN reported that Doge is building a master database to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants by combining sensitive data from across the federal government.

“It’s well established that they’re using the data not just to cut spending but to advance policy goals,” said Judd Legum, the author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter that maintains a Doge tracker. “As they realise there’s nothing left to cut that they want to cut or can cut, they’ll probably turn to more of those more policy-oriented initiatives.”

The actual Gestapo didn’t have the luxury of large mainframe computers and databases to track down their victims. At present the campaign to “purify” America depends on a variety of mechanisms to identify those it wants to get rid of. Some of them are hit and miss. They deport innocent people and even children who are citizens and this is bad PR. Damnit, they are inefficient!

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. The original idea was to save money and eliminate waste and fraud. 

Wiki defines efficiency as “the often measurable ability to avoid making mistakes or wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste.”

Trump has been upset, to put it mildly, that ICE hasn’t been as ruthlessly efficient as he promised it would be in his immigrant purge. DOGE created the fear and chaos he relishes at goverment agencies, but I doubt this has been enough for Trump.

Now it makes perfect sense for him to claim DOGE was a huge success in its original mission and to repurpose it to be the brains behind ICE. Of course, he’d never admit Tom Homan lacked the brainpower to do the job as Trump promised it would be done. After all, Trump never claimed Homan was an Einstein.

He just needed an assist from the INCEL DODE computer boys.

Consider what Hitler, and Heinrich Müller (shown below), who is not nearly was well known as Göring and Himmler, ran the Gestapo for most of the war, could have done with even the 1960’s computer below. Trump could be Hitler with a giant mainframe database of undesirables who are poisoning the blood of America.

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The ship of state is sinking. Why we ordered a flag to carry at the next protest. By Hal M. Brown and Ann Rutz

We went to a protest yesterday and carried a homemade sign with a quote from Justice Sonia Sotomayer. At the previous protest we had “No King!” signs.

Today this was the main page of HuffPost:

As you see, they decided to illustrate their two main front page stories with a photo of an American flag flying upside down.

By now everyone knows that flying an upside down flag is a symbol of distress. Below is the wesbite of American Flags.

Their article begins:

Typically, an upside-down American flag is a sign of distress or extreme emergencies. Some may also use it as a form of protest, which is protected as free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Nonetheless, we’ll give a deeper explanation along with historic examples of when the flag was flown upside down.

Every Friday we have had a local protest at a big box grocery store on a busy street. As people drive by they see the protest with people carrying signs but it is difficult for them to take in and read all the signs. People following the the news about protests see photos of some of the more compelling signs but at an actual protest we decided that the upside down flag sends a simple and powerful message. We ordered one which will arrive tomorrow:

Until Trump’s election my guess is that most people who ordered and flew American flags were Trumpers. Now anti-Trumpers have begun to fly the flag either in the normal way or upside down. For example the man in the photo I took at a Hands Off protest a few weeks ago. 

He didn’t have to fly it upside down since it was clear what message he was sending.

When at a protest we think displaying the flag, whether upside down or not, is a good idea. Perhaps if there are enough people with flags having some right side up and the others upside down would send the message that we are all democracy loving patriotic Americans and we are in DISTRESS!

We plan to display our flag upside down so there’s no ambiguity in what we mean.

Addendum: If you don’t make it to local protests held in your areas regularly, don’t forget the National Day of Action Against Donald Trump Planned for May 1. Here’s What To Know.

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Hitler turned anti-semitism into a reason to demonize Jews, Trump is trying to turn fear of Hispanic gangs into reason to hate all brown skinned immigrants. By Hal M. Brown

 

The Nazis succeeded in demonizing Jews. Trump is doing the same thing with Hispanic immigrants. While the typical immigrant looks like a normal person who happens to have brown skin, conveniently for him gang members with the same color skin have tattoos all over their faces and bodies. 

While all, or perhaps most, members of Hispanic gangs aren’t violent, Trump wants to portray them as rapists and killers.

In many ways Trump has more going for him than Hitler did in turning Jews into the enemy of other Germans.

Some Jews may have had large noses making them look different but what made them easy to cast as enemies was the existing anti-Semisticism based on their religion and animosity towards them because many were successful members of the merchant class.

Even though other Germans had contact with Jews until they were segregated into ghettos and knew they weren’’t violent criminals” Nazi propaganda was successful in characterizing them this way. For example: 

The following is from an article in this U.S. Holocaust Museum website:

Demonizing the enemy is an effective technique for wartime propaganda. Hitler recognized this technique during World War I. Although most wartime propaganda demonized the political and military leaders of enemy countries, the Nazis went further. They considered all Jews—men, women, and even children—to be a deadly threat to the German people.

On posters and in speeches, newsreels, and radio programs, Nazis demonized and dehumanized European Jews. They depicted European Jews as carriers of deadly diseases such as typhus to justify segregating them in ghettos. They identified European Jews as a violent threat, calling them bandits and terrorists. Nazi propaganda held the Jews responsible for causing World War II, for which they would have to pay. All Jews, Hitler’s propagandists proclaimed, were accomplices in an international plot to enslave the non-Jewish world. Using such false claims, Nazi propaganda presented its war against Jews as a struggle between good and evil.

There were no Jewish criminal gangs in Germany in the 1930s, at least not in the way we describe a criminal gang. The Nazis wanted to cast them as criminals. This is from The Construction of “Jewish Criminality” in Nazi Germany:

This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.

Trump has lucked out. There are criminal American Hispanic gangs that can easily be depicted as the kind of people who would break into your house and do unpseakable things to you and your family.

Trump went from making the ludicrous claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pet dogs and cats to lucking out because the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is really composed of some real bad guys. Consider:

27 Members or Associates of Tren de Aragua Charged with Racketeering, Narcotics, Sex Trafficking, Robbery and Firearms offenses

The following fact doesn’t matter:

There's little evidence to support the administration's contention that large numbers of the deportees are members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua. Reporting by USA TODAY last fall found ICE, the FBI and law enforcement agencies in states with reports of the gang's activity had tallied fewer than 135 members of the gang, while the Trump administration says it deported more than 200 members to El Salvador last week alone. USA Today

The logical next step for Trump and his minions is to begin to plant the idea in public perception that anyone who has crossed, or is trying to cross, the southern border trying to make a better life for themselves will become a member of a violent criminal gang. 

Trump and minions like Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have the perfect foil in Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They are trying to convince the public that although he may look like a normal nice family man he’s really a secret gang member. This does not bode well for him or any other person deported without due process ever returning home. If they can pull this off with him they will keep doing it with others. 

Plans to build a huge detention facility (aka prison) in Texas have been paused (see article), but I expect Trump will stop sending anyone to El Salvador due to public pressure and will eventually build facilities in the United States. We will end up with an American Gulag. They will provide lots of jobs for those who couldn’t meet the standards for thuggery to be members of ICE or other Trump Gestapos.

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