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

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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.

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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:

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Trump is a Two Hit Wonder: MAGA and America First.

 

Trump has written two songs. They were such big hits they got him elected president twice. Trump spins his Make America Great Again and his America First songs like a DJ who returns to the same two songs ten times an hour during the same gig. One would think that his audience would tire of this. Nope. Not yet at least.

I had a friend in college, AJ Weberman, with whom I am still in occasional contact). He is one of the several old friends and new friends who has a page on Wikipedia. (His is here.)

Back in college, when he was just called Alan, my roommate Paul and a few others used to sit in a booth in the Student Union restaurant between classes and on weekends. Alan would always be working on a detailed analysis of meanings of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s songs. He’d be writing on a legal pad coming up with connections and interpretations that he was certain Dylan wanted to convey to those smart enough to figure them out. To others who took them at face value, Alan’s explanations would seem obscure. In later years he wrote about the life and works of Bob Dylan, including a pamphlet titled Dylanology in 1969 and he created a word concordance of Dylan's lyrics. He also wrote the Dylan to English Dictionary, published in 2005.

The meaning of Trump’s two songs are not obscure, bit it is worth spelling them out.

The Meaning of Make America Great Again

Trump never actually defined what he meant by “again.” Most critics say that he wanted to evoke the days prior to the Civil War and to the subsequent Jim Crow era before the (more or less) success of the Civil Rights movement. 

When he ran for the second time, of course “again’ meant what it was like during his first term and better.. Part of his attempt to make America even greater has been to transform the country into a police state as will happen if the Big Beuatiful Bill is passed. $45 billion will be devoted to immigration enforcement ridding the country of “undesirables.” This is his version of “great.” Of course “great” also means that he is the absolute ruler, a king with a red hat as a crown.

The Meaning of America First

I thought of writing this when I looked at the Accuweather worldwide temperature map this morning. The temperature maps are shown on top of this page with the MAGA Trump wolf AI image added. This all hatched into today’s Substack. This is how my mind often works as I free associate to my initial ideas for a Substack. (I hope it is why some of you read my Substacks with all the digressions that I try to pull together for those who make it to the end of the page.)

Trump doesn’t want the United States to be an equal partner in the worldwide community of democratic nations. He doesn’t even want to be a leader, a first among equals. He wants every other country to bow down before him and when he says jump he wants them to say “how high” with the “your majesty” implied.

As contradictory as this seems to be, he is an isolationist maldome (click for Wiki defintion). This is the male version of a dominatrix). Trump wants to keep the country out of international entanglements and conflicts when it suits him, and he wants to involve the country when he can play the big, bad, wolf. He wants to be the ferocious big bad wolf in a MAGA hat who is so feared nobody dares to stand in his way when he sets out to get what he wants. His mantra is “dare to defy me and I’ll devour you.”

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This is one of the most depressing articles I've ever read. The only hope I see is if that enough of these voters didn't really want Trump to be a ruthless dictator. By Hal M. Brown

 

Since you're reading this you're one of the people Trump voters see as a smug privileged snob.

You don’t even have to read “How Donald Trump Has Remade America’s Political Landscape in today’s New York Times (subscription)” to get the gist of it. You can just look at the graphics. Here are four more of them:

There are graphics showing that even in primarily Black or Hispanic communities Trump has made more gains than Democrats.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.

The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

Trump has managed to divided the country into as us against them, or as the “them” would put it, “them against us.”

Those reading this are members of the more highly educated and more affluent “us.” I think you more likely than not can read the NY Times article because you have a subscription. The other “us” would read the previous sentences and say “see, that’s what we mean, these people are a bunch of smug privileged snobs.” 

We have to admit that the so-called party of the working class is no longer the Democratic Party. It is now the Trump Republican Party. For decades since the decidely upper-upper class FDR was president for three terms, Democrats won elections because the working class believed that the candidates from the professional class and upper class, even upper-upper class, would make their lives better. They believed that they really cared about them. Jimmy Carter pulled off being seen as being just a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia even though his peanut farm was between 2000 and 3000 acres.

The cruel irony of this is that these candidates really did care about people less affluent than them. 

Then along came Donald J. Trump. While he was not only a member of the upper class, he was an in-your-face member of the upper-upper class. 

He took his cruel Apprentice “you’re fired” persona and turned it into his brand. Millions of people ate it up. None of the people who got the “you’re fired” treatment were villains. In fact they were even horrible potential job candidates like many of the performers on The Gong Show who got the gong.

By way of comparison, Gong Show star and creator Chuck Barris (who once lied about being a CIA assassin) actually was the creator of the show while 13 time Emmy Award winner Mark Burnett deserves credit for the successful casting of Trump as a business genius on “The Apprentice.” 

Trump isn’t an Einstein level genius like he thinks he is. He is a genius at some things like marketing and unabashed lying. In other areas he is as dumb as a post.

His most recent dumb as a post example is a demonstration of his segmented intelligence. This was in his comments about stealth aircraft. They were made at his weird trophy wife West Point commencement address (from below reference):

However, one avenue of free-associative speculation Trump meandered along while speaking about military investment seemed to confirm that one of his much-derided beliefs remains intact: the president seems to genuinely believe that so-called “stealth” fighter jets—military aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by radar—are actually invisible.

“We are buying you new airplanes, brand new beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump said, speaking to a proposed record increase in defense spending.

“I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sort of wondering.

“We shape a wing this way, they don’t see it. But the other way they see it? I’m not so sure, but that’s what they tell me!

Trump’s supporters don’t give a shit about any of this. While I doubt that if we could give them all IQ tests we would find that they aren’t what you could label “dumb” meaning having significantly below average scores. However if they answered honestly I think they would score fairly high on this gullibility test.

I took the test:

Trump sold himself as a man of the common man. He appealed not only to the gullibility of a large enough segment of the population to win, but hid his true intention to become a ruthlessly cruel dictator throughout the campaign. He made his bigotry clear, but he never said “vote for me and I will destroy democracy” for everyone including most of you in my adoring audience.

If enough people decide that this isn’t what they want their country to be there’s a chance there will be enough blowback to lead to an active resistance that will derail his blitzkrieg to Trumpify America. It took the Allies four years to undo what the Nazis did following their blitzkrieg to take over Europe. Alas, it may take this long for democracy loving Americans to undo what Trump is doing.

Addendum (nothing to do with the above):

Trump’s supporters don’t care that he is a grandiose narcissist who needs to hang pictures like this in the White House. 

I just wonder what foreign leaders think about him when they see it. They don’t even have to be there in person as many stories are being published about it including this one in The Irish Star.

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