If the GOP or MAGA are having problems, does it even matter in the long run if Trump is planning to implement a police state? By Hal M. Brown

 .

The first two articles on RawStory at 6 this morning (Pacific time) were 'This is an earthquake': Strategist warns town hall furor signals midterm disaster for GOP and 'Back-of-the-napkin stuff': GOP senators feel double-crossed by deal cut by Trump. 

Just down their page, half the articles have either GOP or MAGA in the titles, and all of them are about difficulties Republicans, including Trump and Kristi Noem, are having.

Here are the main stories on HuffPost this morning:

The featured story is “How Trump Caved And Went Home With 'Nothing' In Talks With Chuck Schumer.” It is about how “The dramatic collapse in talks over the weekend doesn't bode well for the tougher job lawmakers are facing of funding the government next month.”

Does any of this matter? 

What if Trump’s move to make ICE into a small army targeting immigrants is just a trial run to see how much he can get away with?

It is an understandment to observe how often we are subjected to seeing pictures of federal agents and sometimes local law enforcement armed like they are about to raid a drug kingpin’s lair on our streets.

By now many Americans, especially those who haven’t seen this happening in person, have become complacent about this. They are so inured to seeing the images that they don’t feel any empathy for the people being terrorized or pang of horror that America has taken the first step to becoming a police state. 

Excerpt:

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 systemsas 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").

If the ICE actions were the first step, we may be seeing the beginning of the second step with the DOJ investigating Barack Obama and Jack Smith. While we haven’t seen Pam Bondi posing with a gun, another player in this dystopian drama, Kristi Noem, has been on numerous occasions:

Noem isn’t as intimidating looking as the ICE agents, but Trump would like nothing better than to see Obama, Smith, and his other enemies arrested by federal agents, who while not in SWAT gear, will be carrying guns too. 

I think he dreams, perhaps literally, of seeing Obama in prison. In between other actual dreams that arouse him (I’ll leave what they are about to your imagination), I wouldn't be surprised if he’s had actual dreams about Obama being in the notorious CECOT prison.

Putting the current news about Trump’s difficulties, and about what is going on the the Republican Party and MAGA in perspective, what does it all matter if Trump has implemented a police state before the next election? He could render Congress irrelevant, so who controlled the House, or even the Senate as well, wouldn’t matter.

The same would apply to the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court. When you have armed soldiers doing your dirty work, whether they are part of the actual military or not, traditional civil authority has evaporated and you have a police state.

The only thing that can stop a police state once it is entrenched is for another more powerful force to resist and destroy it.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It looks like I am permanently suspended from Facebook, so if you are there I appreciate anyone who posts a link to my Substacks on the FB page. Otherwise, this post is public so feel free to share it by clicking below.

Share

Leave a comment

Very much related to this is Thom Hartmann’s Substack today:

Excerpts:

This is now the Trump formula:

— Manufacture a crisis. 
— Declare an “emergency.” 
— Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant. 
— Bypass Congress. 
— Bully or ignore the courts. 
— Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents. 
— Send people to foreign concentration camps. 
— Build concentration camps within the United States. 
— Prosecute lawyers and judges. 
— Assert control over universities. 
— Merge corporate and state interests.
— Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes. 
— Then call it all “law and order.”

This sums up what both Thom and I are trying to say although Thom seems more optimistic that American’s are becoming aware of what is going on:

Increasingly, Americans are realizing that Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump are all reading from the same authoritarian script that Hitler first authored, and if we don’t recognize the pattern soon, we may find ourselves locked in Act III with no exit.

Kristi Noem’s DHS made a stunning ‘confession’ with new Bible-quoting ads: column, RawStory

My comment: This quote, inaccurately attributed to Sinclair Lewis ( see Snopes) from his prescient novel "It Can't Happen Here" certainly applies to this article:

.

I was going to ask whether the democratic ship of state was sinking or had already sunk. Then I read Paul Krugman. By Hal M. Brown

I used Perchance AI last night to make the above illustrations. As I was lying in bed before getting up I thought of the analogy of the Titantic and how its builders intended to build a luxury liner that was unsinkable. Then I though of the line about what the Founding Fathers had given the nation widely attributed to Ben Franklin: “a republic, if you can keep it.”

This is still on a Government website:

How long it stays there remains to be seen.

Then I got out of bed and scanned down my overnight email and saw this (highlighted below):

I clicked on it before I went through my usual perusal of websites to see the morning news and opinion. 

Here’s what I saw:

Krugman starts off slowly writing about Trump’s tarrifs, deportations, and the economy. Then he builds to what I planned to write about. He writes:

Unfortunately, one possible effect of the bad economic news may be to induce MAGA to put the real Project 2025 — the plot to destroy American democracy — on an accelerated schedule.

Or as I think of it, I don’t think we’re in Hungary anymore.

He goes on to explain how Viktor Orban took a gradualist approach to destroying democracy in Hungary. noting that the ruling party “had the luxury of time because until recently the party remained quite popular with the Hungarian public.”

Then he wrote:

It's now clear, by contrast, that Trump and MAGA don’t have the luxury of time. Trump’s approval has already cratered. He inherited an economy with low unemployment and subdued inflation, but is now presiding over a weakening job market and will soon face a burst of inflation, with nobody but himself to blame. He may manage to bully government statisticians into cooking the books and making the numbers look good, but that’s harder than it looks. And even if the official numbers say everything is great, nobody will believe it.

So if Trump and MAGA want to hold on to power, they’ll have to do so in the face of low public approval and poor economic performance. 

What does “quickly and blatantly mean? Krugman concludes as follows:

Indeed, as CNN reported the other day, Republicans are trying in multiple ways to, in effect, rig the midterm elections. Their actions include a plan for an extreme, mid-decade gerrymandering in Texas that could cost Democrats multiple House seats; attempts to interfere in voting procedures, for example by banning states from accepting mail-in ballots after election day and forcing states to require proof of citizenship. Much of this is clearly unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

And what if these actions aren’t enough? Remember, Trump supporters, with his clear encouragement, already tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The important point is that right now Trump has immense power, thanks in large part to the cowardice of many of the institutions that should be holding him in check. But he’s also rapidly bleeding support, in large part because he’s completely failing to deliver on his economic promises.

That combination makes this an extremely dangerous moment. 

These are Krugman's concluding sentences: 

The oppostite of being soft is being hard. What could this look like less than Trump declaring martial law and using the armed forces to overthrow democracy? 

If he tries to do this the only hope for saving democracy that I can see is that patriots in the military say a “hard no.” I will leave it to you to imagine how this woud play out.

It is instructive to compare Trump’s position, not just to Orban’s, but to Hitler’s in the late 1930’s. Orban took the slow route to conquest of just one country. Hitler, who already had an iron grip on Germany, mounted a successful juggernaut to conquer Europe. 

Could Trump accomplish what Hitler did by mounting a blitzkrieg to take over not other free nations, but “just” the United States?

You can read, or reread, my speculation on this in “What did Hitler have that Trump doesn’t.”

Thanks for reading my Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Hal Brown's Substack

I'm a retired psychotherapist who writes about politics.

This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Leave a comment