Since Trump 1.0 suffered sustained frontal attacks on his legitimacy via Russiagate, he has operated his second term with a laser-like focus on making sure that he has his hands firmly on every lever of power he can grab, from having toadies in top Administration position to crippling funding cuts to what he sees as competing power centers, above all universities and the science and medical establishment (recall that Trump regards dealing with climate change as another limit on his freedom of operation) to open jackbootery with ICE raids by masked agents, threats to “flood” peaceful cities like Portland with what he intends to look like occupying forces in the form of National Guard deployments.
As we’ll describe soon, Trump looks to be on the verge of launching wars against one or both of Venezuela and Iran. But he looks to have overplayed his hand with the US military with calling generals and flag officers to Quantico to give them not just a bizarre set of anti-DEI and anti-fat directives, but also to have Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and then Trump himself say that they expected the military to operate against US citizens on US soil, harping on the “enemy within”. Recall that the armed services defied Trump in his first term, when he issued lawful orders to pull out Afghanistan that were simply ignored. Admittedly these directives came at the very end of his time in office.
It is also worth keeping in mind that the armed services have served as checks on trigger-happy civilian leaders. In the Biden Administration, Lloyd Austin repeatedly and often successfully opposed Biden and Secretary of State Blinken’s Ukraine escalation plans, one suspects by pointing oyt the limits of US weaponry and Russia’s retaliatory options. But as Larry Johnson pointed out in a talk with Daniel Davis, the last actual resignation of a general over illegal orders, to his knowledge, was under Bush the Senior, as in decades ago. Hegeseth’s and Trump’s addresses received a very stony faced reception, and YouTuber accounts second-hand from those in the room suggest a combination of gobsmackedness at the pathetic display and horror at the demand to operate domestically against Trump-designated demons. The measured Daniel Davis, in a talk with Colonel Macgregor, pointed out it was obvious that Trump’s definition of “radical left” threats could easily include all of Team Dem.
As these events are happening, Trump is implementing another method for quashing domestic dissent ,,,
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