Think DOGE is bad, WOGE will be way worse, By Hal M. Brown - Trump is ready to launch his Weaponized Office of Government Extremism. Can he do this?

I think Trump has been testing what he can get away with as he orders his gun totting and missile firing troops to engage in more and more aggressive actions. The most recent two were having the Venezuelan gang members deported by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the action blocked by a federal court, and ordering military strikes against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.

On the latter, consider Trump’s words:

"Today, I have ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen. They have waged an unrelenting campaign of piracy, violence, and terrorism against American, and other, ships, aircraft, and drones."

"It has been over a year since a U.S. flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden. The last American Warship to go through the Red Sea, four months ago, was attacked by the Houthis over a dozen times. Funded by Iran, the Houthi thugs have fired missiles at U.S. aircraft, and targeted our Troops and Allies. These relentless assaults have cost the U.S. and World Economy many BILLIONS of Dollars while, at the same time, putting innocent lives at risk," he added. "The Houthi attack on American vessels will not be tolerated. We will use overwhelming lethal force until we have achieved our objective. The Houthis have choked off shipping in one of the most important Waterways of the World, grinding vast swaths of Global Commerce to a halt, and attacking the core principle of Freedom of Navigation upon which International Trade and Commerce depends."

Trump also said, "Our brave Warfighters are right now carrying out aerial attacks on the terrorists’ bases, leaders, and missile defenses to protect American shipping, air, and naval assets, and to restore Navigational Freedom. No terrorist force will stop American commercial and naval vessels from freely sailing the Waterways of the World."

He then continued, "To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!"

In typical Trumpian all caps bellicose bluster he threatens hell raining down like nothing these terrorists have seen before.

“Why now?” one should ask. The Houthi terrorists have been doing this for a year. 

I think this is Trump making sure he can order the U.S. military to conduct an armed attack. This would appear to be a legal action, but aside from the visceral thrill he gets from being the Commander in Chief ordaining that bombs rain from the sky against his enemies, I believe he wants to make certain he can order the military to follow any other order no matter how far it pushes the bounds of legality. He’s already threatened military action against Greenland and has toyed with the idea of sending the military to go after drug gangs in Mexico. 

Incredible as it should not seem to be, considering this is Trump being Trump, he has ordered contingency plans should he decide to invade Panama.

President Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to prepare plans for carrying out his threat to "take back" the Panama Canal, including by military force if needed, two U.S. officials familiar with the situation toldNBC News Thursday.

According to the outlet, the officials said that U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is drawing up potential plans that run the gamut from working more closely with Panama's military to a less likely scenario in which U.S. troops invade the country and take the canal by force. They also said that SOUTHCOM commander Adm. Alvin Holsey has presented draft strategies to be reviewed by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is scheduled to visit Panama next month.

The officials explained that the likelihood of a U.S invasion depended on the level of cooperation shown by the Panamanian military.

Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out use of military force to seize control of the vital U.S.-built waterway, as well as Greenland, an autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

The military may put together a plan, but the overriding question is whether or nor they would initiate it.

The megalomaniacal Trump is testing the waters to see how much he can get away with. I don’t think he particularly cares about the courts or public opinion. I do think he very much cares about the people with the actual guns and the people who fly the fighter jets and bombers. He’s already installed the leaders shown in my illustration, the blond devil in a dress Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Tom Homan to head up the departments with the actual weapons. What he does not know is whether enough of the people under them will follow unconstitutional, illegal, and just plain un-American orders.

Trump can fire fireable leaders of the departments and agencies who do not follow his orders, and he can order those down the chain of command fired or, in the military, court-martialed, if they disobey his orders. For any leader to have a viable armed force, whether civil like ICE or the FBI, or the military, they must have the majority obey all orders. 

What Trump can’t do is what Stalin did to soldiers who tried to retreat: 

On July 28, 1942, Joseph Stalin, premier and dictator of the Soviet Union, issues Order No. 227, what came to be known as the “Not one step backward” order, in light of German advances into Russian territory. The order declared, “Panic makers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot. Not one step backward without orders from higher headquarters! Commanders…who abandon a position without an order from higher headquarters are traitors to the Motherland.” (Read more here)

Our agents and soldiers who refuse illegal orders won’t be cowards. They will be patriots. I want to assume Trump can’t order them shot and have an order like this followed. At least I hope he can’t.

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• halbrown.substack.com

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• dailykos.com/user/HalBrown/history

Please save me time and effort and read my opinions in Substack.

 

These are just the most recent Substacks. It just takes too long to reports them here.

.Holy F*cken Sh!t, Sabrina Haake!!!! My comment to you has become most of my Substact today.

In order to understand my title and my entire Substack today you have to read Sabrina Haake’s “Haake Take” today. Yesterday, my friend Sabrina asked me via email how I came up with ideas for my Substacks. I said that generally as I looked over the news an idea I hoped was an original take or perspective popped into my head. This morning the idea came from what she wrote in her Substack. 

 The oligarch takeover is America's tall ships moment 

 She uses a photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk at Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration for her illustration. She uses them to represent the tall ships. 

 She begins: 

 According to the theory, natives literally couldn’t “see” the ships, because they had no experiential familiarity with them. Quoting from What the Bleep do we know?, a paradigm-shifting take on human perception, native people ignored the huge ships because “their highly filtered perceptions couldn't register what was happening, and they literally failed to see them.” When Captain Cook/Columbus/Magellan sent their men ashore in smaller longboats loaded with guns, the natives registered what they saw and began their futile resistance. 

 She concludes: 

 I have wondered all my adult life how the Germans let Hitler happen. And now, like the man who couldn’t live without knowing how his wife died until he met her same fate in The Vanishing, I know. People didn’t react because most couldn’t see what was happening. Those who could see Hitler--Germany’s tall ships--didn’t believe what they saw. And those who both saw and believed their own eyes thought there would be a sane stopping point. There wasn’t then, and there won’t be now. 

 I used to live a couple of towns over from Plymouth, Mass. and often we went to the harbor where the replica of the Mayflower is moored. We visited Plimoth Patuxet (previously called Plimoth Plantation). I decided to use a painting of the Mayflower, the colonists, and members of the Wampanoag tribe from a Britannica article as my illustration. Read her Substack. 

Then read my slightly edited comment below: 

 Holy Fucken Shit, Sabrina!!!!!! 

 You nailed it in one analogy, one I haven't heard before. Then you segued into a comparison we all have used. The Native Americans couldn't see the tall ships. Even if they were bristling with 50 cal. machine guns, had cruise missile launchers, and the colonists had Marines with M-16 assault rifles, they would have been invisible. 

 I also grew up wondering about how everyday Germans could let Hitler happen. This may have because of being Jewish or just because my father served on a hospital ship in the war. The playbook for what is happening here, now, and may very well happen in a short period of time isn't Mein Kampf or Project 2025. It is in the history books but we don't need to look at them. It is common sense. 

Trump, his minions, and his enablers have already begun their blitzkrieg to turn us into some yet precisely undetermined kind of combination of a cruel dictatorship, a police state, and an oligarchy. Even Trump doesn't know exactly what it will be except that whatever it turns out to be he intends to be the absolute ruler for as long as he lives. 

 Those of us who understand his psychopathology aren't surprised by anything he does. Speaking of tall ships (and those container ships are tall), the latest order to have the military submit a plan for invading Panama, fits with his need to be a saber rattling ruler who strikes fear into everyone he aims his wrath at. Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump wants to invade Greenland and Panama. He's ready to declare war on NATO. 

 Democracy loving Americans protesting won't stop him. He wants to find an excuse to declare martial law to stop them. Court rulings won't stop him. He wants to defy the court proving they are impotent. Outraged Democrats in Congress and the outrage of media critics feed his cruel narcissistic hunger. 

Another Kent State Massacre won't stop him. He's a sadist. Bloodshed in the streets won't stop him. All this adds up to only one hope - aside from his death - to stop this. 

It is for the military to initiate a coup. Last week I thought it could be a what is referred to as "a soft coup." (From Wikipedia) "This is also known as a silent coup, an illegal overthrow of a government. Unlike a classical coup d'état, it is achieved without the use of force or violence." Now I am leaning towards a classical coup. 

This would entail, among other actions, tanks around the White House and the 82nd Airborne landing troops on the lawn. A general would be the acting president. The new administration would hold free and fair elections when the county was stabilized. 

 Additional thought: 

 Our tall ship moment is a combination of two groups of powerful people. One are the oligarchs who we knew had incredible control over our politics, but we did not know how malevolent they were. The other group are Trump, Musk, & Co. We knew they were malevolent, but weren’t sure they were all that malevolent. From what I can tell the oligarchs, with the possible exception of Musk, don’t call many of the shots. 

The shots may literally become real bullet shots since Trump controls the people with guns. It is still metaphorical, but when Trump and Musk say “shoot here” the oligarchs put on their noise suppressors and pretend nobody is getting hurt. 

Are we becoming a police state? Look at the definition. By Hal M. Brown

 

I'd like to believe I am being an alarmist. I hope I am wrong. If I am, I'll give the biggest mea culpa of my life.

Trump’s ICE Gestapo grabbed up a Columbia University student and sent him off to a detention camp in Louisiana. Then there was this:  ICE Deploys Tear Gas into Home To Take a Migrant; 'They Kept Throwing Things At Us'

Juan Ramón Hernandez-Limon, 28, was startled when ICE agents approached him while he swept his front porch in San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, January 31. The agents did not have an arrest warrant, so Hernandez-Limon retreated into his home, where his wife, their one-year-old daughter, and two other minors were present.

The interaction was followed by a six-hour operation that involved local, state, and federal agents equipped with military-style vehicles. While waiting outside Hernandez-Limon's home, the agents obtained the arrest warrant they needed and proceeded to break windows and doors, deploying tear gas into his home, according to a new report by Univision.

Hernandez-Limon's wife spoke anonymously to a network reporter to discuss the incident. She said the family was trying to exit the household but was afraid of being struck by the objects the agents were throwing into their home.

These are just two examples. There have been others and there will be more. Consider the defintion of a police state from Wikipedia:

A police state describes a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are typically one-party states and dominant-party states, but police-state-level control may emerge in multi-party systems as well.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

I subscribe to The Contrarian, the Substack started by Jennifer Rubin when she left The Washington Post and lawyer Norm Eisen who made the news yesterday. In this conversation, Rubin talked with the founder of Indivisible, Ezra Levin. They are talking as if we aren’t living in a police state. This is my comment with a link to a Substack I posted two days ago.

All this seems to me seems to be a la-de-dah happy talk and refusal to admit that we have rapidly gone beyond being a nascent police state to being a police state just gaining unstoppable momentum. Geeze, folks, read the news. The people with the guns have taken over. They just grabbed up a student in NY and sent him of to a detenton camp in Louisiana. ICE terrified a family throwing flash bang grenades into their house. What's next, declaring Indivisible an enemy of the state? Only the other group with guns can save us. This is the US military. I try to lay how this could be done here: https://halbrown.substack.com/p/thinking-the-unthinkable-about-fighting

Basically what I have been saying is that the only people who can save democracy from the people with guns in the enforcement arm of the police state is the people with more, and better, guns. This is, of course, the military.

Are the generals and admirals going to sit idly by when we turn into a police state? I addressed another issue yesterday, the seeming alignment we now have with Russia. Between these two will the top leadership of the amrmed forces do what was once unthinkable. Will they do the only thing that can end a police state which may very well be trying to reshape the world order? 

There has been a great deal written about a coup effected by Donald Trump and his minions. This doesn’t meet the defintion of a coup, i.e., “a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government.” If we had a military coup it could meet this defintion if it was violent. It wouldn’t have to result in bloodshed. It could be what is called a soft coup (see Wikipedia).

Whether the power of the military is actually used (picture tanks around the White House) or not, the threat that they could do this would enable them to effect a soft coup. That would certainly be far more preferable than a hard coup.

I don’t know how far Trump has to go excercising the power of the police state before the media and public start ignoring many less alarming issues, or at least putting them in perspective. For example, the effects of tarrifs, DOGE with Musk’s street gang taking over Social Security with access to all your data and being able to cut or stop benefits. Then there’s the recent DEI absolute nonsense about Georgetown Law School: 

Ed Martin ‒ appointed by Donald Trump as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, despite not having any prosecutorial experience ‒ emailed Georgetown Law School Dean William Treanor on Monday to whine about Republicans’ favorite bogeyman: diversity, equity and inclusion. Article.

Even abandoning Ukraine and the cruelty of cutting life saving USAID programs will be lead-up chapters in the book of how Trump and his enablers turned us into a police state.

I am afraid that before long we will look back at all of these matters as smoke and mirrors. We will see how they diverted attention from from how Trump made ordinary citizens live in fear having Gestapo thugs bust down our door in the middle of the night, or shoot flash bang grenades into our homes on an idyllic spring weekend.

I hope I am wrong about all of these dire predictions. 

Maybe public outcry about this will stop the excesses of the police state. Rather than a “hard police state” we’ll have what might be called a “soft police state.”

We may have to live with all the other noxious aspects of Trumpism until the midterm elections. Then, if the Democrats take over Congress, some of the policies can be thwarted. That is unless Trump dares to ignore the law. Two years after that, if we have a Democratic president, we can see a return to Democracy.

(About the photo. I took this on our cranberry farm property in Massachusetts. This was when local police departments decided they needed AR-15 rifles and needed to learn to shoot them. Previously they only had shotguns in their patrol cars.)

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When I read news like this I imagine seeing Trump literally as Putin's hand puppet. By Hal M. Brown

 .

It's as if his KGB ringed finger is protruding from his mouth.

A marionette is a puppet controlled from above by someone pulling its strings. A hand puppet is a type of puppet that is controlled by the hand that occupies the interior of the puppet. (Wikipedia)

I am not a cartoonist so I couldnt draw the illustration for today’s Substack. Of course, cartoonists often depict Trump being manipulated by Putin as both kinds of puppets.

Trump’s threats against NATO, alienating Europe, his claiming Russia didn’t invade Ukraine, how he’s treating Zelensky and pausing aid to Ukraine were without a doubt delighting Putin. Then we had not allowing Ukraine to use Starlink, Add to this Hegseth ordering our cyber command to stand down on Russia. Taking DEI to extremes, he’s forcing the military to lose talented personnel. He’s banning members from serving in the US armed forces and gutting the military’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Now we have this news:

The climate change move could be seen as a small thing compared to the other actions, but it is yet something else which will please Putin. 

Imagine what the generals and admirals leading our armed forces think of all of this.

I have absolutely no doubt that Trump wants to rule the country unrestrained by the annoying constraints of the Constitution. No matter what one wants to call someone who does this, a king, emperor, dictator, or overlord, it all amounts to their being the absolute ruler. He is well on his way to achieving this goal. 

Can he be stopped?

This is what I wrote yesterday:

I see our only hope being for the military to decide to intervene to save our democracy. This could come if Trump declared a national emergency and martial law to put down protests using violence if protesters refused orders to disperse. It should not be open to debate that Amercians have the right to peacefully protest, that pesky First Amendment, but it would be easy to rationalize a lethal attack against civilians. We could easily have another Kent State Massacre.

I see two ways the military could save us. One I call effecting a soft coup. This would involve barring Hegseth and whoever he’s elevated to power from entering the Pentagon. The patriotic generals would announce that they would no longer obey illegal and unconstitutional orders. The other alternative would be a hard coup. It would begin with tanks around the White House and soldiers removing its occupants. A general would take over as acting president. It would be announced that free elections would be held once the country was stabilized. By then I want to believe the majority of voters would decide they wanted the country to be a democracy and not a dictatorship.

Putin wants to see the United States descend into chaos. He wants it beset by internal warfare, whether peaceful or violent. In his dreams he’d like to realign the world’s powers so the United States joins Russia, North Korea, and possibly China. I am not sure about the latter since they depend so much on us for trade.

There’s no way I can see Putin wanting to see our top military leaders running the country. I certainly can see him wanting Trump ruin the United States, but for all those West Point, Air Force, and Naval Academy graduates to be actually running not only the military, but the country as well, that would be a bridge way too far.

It is very possible that Putin still hasn’t figured out what he wants from Trump aside from helping him win in Ukraine and for him to destabilize NATO and Europe, as well as weaken the country as a military threat. The notion of new world order, an actual alliance with the United States is probably just a fantasy. He knows how that worked out for Hitler and his Third Reich. He knows what happened to the Holy Roman Empire when their reach exceeded their grasp. 

Of course Putin wishes he could restore the old Soviet Union, but likewise he knows this would be unrealistic because, with or without the United States as a member of NATO, attacking any member of the alliance would trigger Article Fivefor the only time since the September 11 attack. I can’t see any way that Putin wants to be engaged in World War III. Putin is a realist. If he can’t have a five course meal he knows he may have to settle for Ukraine, or parts of Ukraine, as a tasty appetizer.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Putin, who we know talks to Trump from time to time, if not on a regular basis, really has his hand up his butt as far as it can go and is able to order him to do his bidding. Putin says “jump” and Trump asks “how high?” 

Putin wants what is in his own interest when it comes to the United States. To this end he has to understand American society and American politics at least as well as our most brilliant historians and other academics. I am not saying he doesn’t think he does, but does he really?

Maybe Putin is controlling Trump and is both brilliant and is narcissistic in believing he knows exactly what he is doing. He’s also reportedly extremely superstitious, has an obsession with the occult may believe in reincarnation. (Article)Maybe the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination) or his Magic Eightball is telling him what to do.

This all boils down to one of two possibilities. Trump listens to Putin but doesn’t take orders from him or he is truly a Putin puppet. Either way, unless our military saves us, our democracy is well and truly fucked. We have a mentally unstable president who wants to be king or we have a Russian dictator who believes in the occult as defacto president.

If you subscribe to my Substack you will recieve an email every time I post. Respectful comments are always welcome even if you disagree with me. I generally reply to comments.

I post on BlueSky though the day, You can read my posts here.