Donald Trump has a bad case of premature despotism.
He’s so eager to be a king he can’t contain himself.
His decision to send in the National Guard to put down the “threat” of a few dozen protestors in Los Angeles was as pathetic as it was repugnant. His executive order granting the secretary of Defense power to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary to augment and support the protection of Federal functions and property in any number determined appropriate in his discretion (sic)” revealed not just his contempt for the fundamental freedom of Americans but also his desperate overeagerness to prove he could be—and that he is already—an authoritarian strongman just like the thugs he most admires.
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This elderly fascist, fluffed up to full autocrat with the encouragement of his new deputy president, Stephen Miller, has thereby left yet another ugly stain on our country’s history.
While presidents have in the past used their powers to federalize the national guard in order to address national emergencies—from Hurricane Katrina to incendiary racial tension in the Alabama of George Wallace in the 1960s—there was always an underlying urgency to the action that is clearly missing in the case of President Donald Trump’s intervention in California. No past president has been as actively searching as Trump has for a pretext to use the United States military against Americans who disagree with him.
The gossamer thinness of the pretext for unprecedented action in this case reveals all you need to know about what is really going on here.
Since his first term, Trump has been a man in search of a Reichstag to burn down. The problem he encountered in 2020, for example, when he sought to deploy U.S. troops against Black Lives Matter demonstrations (racism always lurks at or near the heart of everything Trump does), was that he was foiled because his Secretary of Defense at the time, Mark Esper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, opposed the action. This left him with a severe case of totalitarian blue balls.
Turning right-wing militias and a rag tag army of MAGA incels and losers against the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 provided temporary release, but he ran for president again in part because he was jonesing for more. (It also reveals the brain-exploding hypocrisy of Trump’s comments on Friday that he would not stand for public threats against law enforcement.)
To ensure that he would not be frustrated again, he surrounded himself this time around with people who would be sure to help him satisfy his needs. To help impose the law Trump-style, he put in place guys like White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Tom Homan, a man who perfectly combines the light touch of Luca Brasi with the respect for civil rights of Heinrich Himmler. Working in close concert with him is ICE Barbie, Kristi Noem. With aides like these and Miller when it comes to enforcement of the law as Trump sees it and, let’s face it, his apparent hatred for many of us here in the United States, Trump made sure he would not be cop blocked.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was picked to serve a similar role when it came to Trump’s impulse to use the military to wage a war against his opponents, rekindle memories of his now sadly atrophied masculinity or rage, rage against the dying of the light. Hegseth’s swift announcement last night via social media that he was ready to send Marines to Los Angeles demonstrated precisely why Trump chose the least qualified man in America to sit in the big E-ring office on the fifth floor at the Pentagon. (Because anyone actually qualified for the job would have opposed Trump’s desire to take a big step toward martial law in this country.)
While Trump’s decision to deploy troops to suppress a few disorganized, noisy but largely peaceful demonstrators was certainly overkill, it is the underlying objective behind the action that makes it profoundly disturbing. This is an administration that was built from the ground up to impose the will of one man on the country by whatever means necessary. Indeed, Trump’s abuse of his powers manifest in this action are consistent with a broad pattern of related offenses against our laws and values—all have had the objective of silencing his critics, seeking retribution against his opponents, and imposing his will on the American people.
Using the military to crush opponents in California, ignoring the law to deny funds to universities or scientists or entire states whose views do not conform to his, barring people from entering the country who may have posted content critical of him, seeking to intimidate media organizations or museums or libraries to deny a voice to those he simply does not like, these are all part of not just a pattern but a plan. (Not Project 2025 but something far more sinister.) So too is using the Homans and Noems and Millers of this world to send immigrants without due process to hellish foreign prisons and threatening to do the same to legal residents and U.S. citizens. So too is actively supporting autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban and backing anti-democratic movements worldwide.
It is just early summer in America, and fascism is already in full bloom.
That is why it is vitally important to see Friday night’s outrageous action by the president not as an isolated incident but as a warning sign of much worse to come. If it and the campaign against our fundamental rights as Americans go unchecked, if people nationwide do not continue to take to the streets and use every legal means at their disposal to resist this overt and ugly push toward dictatorship, it could also signal the end of the United States as we have known it.
We need to face the facts.
The problem is not that there are too many Americans protesting in the streets. The problem is that there are not enough. ICE is a much greater threat to this country than illegal immigrants. The current administration is by far the greatest threat this country faces. The problem is not at our borders. It is in the White House.
