Showing posts with label Trump dictator. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump dictator. Show all posts

September 29, 2025

When it comes to stopping the Trump dictatorship am I an alarmist or realist? By Hal M. Brown

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM


 Ths morning I read Thom Hartmann’s Substack about impeaching Trump being the last hope: Impeach or Perish: Why Republicans Must Choose Between Trump and the Constitution.

This was the comment I posted:

I doubt that Trump federalizing our (Thom and my) National Guard to put on his show in Portland will prompt a move by Republicans to bring impeachment proceedings. I assume he’s being encouraged to invoke the insurrection act, not just by random politicians like this guy https://www.rawstory.com/don-brown-civil-war/ but by Stephen Miller and others in his inner circle too. I think Trump can declare martial law and get away with this. He can wrap himself in the law. It will take much more to stop him. We can say Republicans taking “enough is enough” action is the only hope for democracy. However these are just our own words of optimism. This hope assumes that Trump isn’t able to harden his dictatorship to the point that he will either ignore Congress or just disolve it.

Thom Hartmann and I both live in Portland, though neither of us lives downtown. We are well aware of what Trump plans to do here. 

Trump has declared war on us. 

His ordering 200 members of our (our!) National Guard to put on a show around ICE headquarters may just be the beginning. 

I can see the showboating Trump and Hegseth deciding that a show of force in the air will reinforce the don’t mess with the monarch message they want to send. How soon before we see our National Guard helecopters in the air over downtown Portland? We know how Trump loves his fighter jet flyovers. I wonder what he’d do if he was told that we (meaning us, Oregon) now have these death dealing airborne weapons (read article):

Yesterday we drove by a nearby Oregon National Guard base. Here are some photos Ann took.

One of their old fighter jets had been in a less pominent location when we drove by on a previous trip. 

Now it has been moved to an easily seen position.

Now that I’d established that I am not an optimist, I don’t know if I can objectively determine whether I am being a dispassionate realist or an alarmist. I try my best to be realistic about any hopes for doing more than slowing down Trump’s ascension to complete dictatorial control. I view him as about to be unaccountable to both the rule of law and public opinion. 

Maybe there is a slim hope that the military will do something to derail his blitzkreig. If they did this it could put us in a third world or banana republic coup d’état territory. 

I am trying to be realistic here. I don’t want to be an alarmist because I do want to be taken seriously. Besides, being an alarmist wears me out.

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

Leave a comment

Previous Substacks

Share Hal Brown's Substack

My comments in RawStory

This is my go-to website for breaking political news.

August 26, 2025

The lessons of history tell us one thing: it CAN happen HERE. By Hal M. Brown

 

I opened RawStory (you can see that it was at 5:28AM on the top of the screenshot) and was struck by the first six words in the title of the article that happened to be on the top of the page. It is shown above with my highlight. 

I glanced at the article (here) but didn’t need to know that the following was what it was about to decide what to write about today:

The Trump administration has been persistent in its efforts to deport Kilmer Abrego Garcia, a migrant previously deported to El Salvador without charge due to an “administrative error,” and on Monday, defiantly violated a federal judge’s order as it pertains to the case, according to new court documents.

The story could have been about any case where Trump and his henchmen demonstrated that a judge’s order which was meant to stop them from doing anything they wanted to do wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. 

Ask yourself this:

It is obvious that Trump is testing just how much he can get away with, whether someone is as famous as John Bolton or as newly famous like Kilmer Abrego Garcia.

Grand juries issue what are called either a true bill or a no true bill when they make their decisions whether or not to charge someone with a crime. When they believe there is enough evidence to proceed with prosecution, they issue a “true bill.” If the grand jury does not find sufficient evidence, they issue a "no true bill," meaning no charges will be filed.

This comes to mind because I was the foreman of a county grand jury 20 years ago. After hearing the evidence presented by the DA and the police officers involved in a case we issued true bills 100% of the time. Just recently, Jeanne Pirro, who was previously a county district attorney in Westchester County, NY, where I lived as a child, tried and failed three times to indict a woman for allegedly assaulting an ICE officer during an arrest of two purported gang members (read article).

Consider:

This is one case where a Trump toady’s overreach in trying to prove to Big Daddy how tough she was won’t result in a serious punishment for someone who doesn’t deserve more than a slap on the wrist since the assault charges were downgraded to a misdemeanor.

I want to emphasize 

since there are likely to be many other cases where people charged with crimes are going to be treated to the harshest possible punishment because, well, because this is the way Trump rolls. 

We know that

is one of Trump’s favorite words. He believes he’s the toughest of the tough. He wants to intimidate, not just his enemies, but also ordinary people or counties. He is driven to terrorize immigrants and criminals, because he’s not only tough, but ruthlessly tough.

There’s the old saying “if you do the cirme, you’ll do the time.” For Trump the crime is saying or even thinking anything - how to put it - nasty about him. As just happened with Chris Christie, not only will he call you a slob, but he will hint that he’ll order you prosecuted. I am sure he’s directed Pam Bondi to try to come up with some reason to sic the Justice Department on Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker. Of course, what he really wants to do is not only send soldiers to California and Ohio to show who the real boss of those states is, but to arrest them… for anything.

Trump wants to be seen as so tough that even his hero Hannibal Lector would be scared of him.

To Trump, being tough also means that nobody tells him what to do. Internationally, it includes leaders of other countries. At home this obviously includes judges. Yeah, he’d really like to have his soldiers arrest them too.

Defying judicial orders is just the beginning. His defiance will include Congress if the Democrats somehow manage to win control of both houses in 2026. He might even have his soldiers evict mmeber of Congress from U.S. Capitol buildings so the greatest real estate genius of all time can find a better use for it.

Trump is biding his time until he can issue the ultimate executive order where, in some way, shape, or form, he will make himself president for life. 

The lessons of history tell us one thing:

This was the top story on The Washington Post website at 8:45AM here in Oregon:

Excerpt:

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled to dismiss an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Justice Department against all 15 federal district judges in Maryland, finding that the federal bench in that state legally adopted a standing order pausing all deportations for two business days so judges could evaluate migrants’ claims amid the Trump administration’s breakneck schedule of removals.

“In casting its wide net, the Executive ensnared an entire judicial body—a vital part of this coordinate branch of government—and its principal officers in novel and potentially calamitous litigation,” U.S. District Judge Thomas T. Cullen, who sits in Virginia and was specially assigned to preside over the dispute, wrote in an opinion dismissing the litigation. Cullen was nominated to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2020.

Obviously this is a major setback in Trump’s quest smooth out the bumps in his road to becoming the dictator he aspires to be. I am sure he is readying a fleet of giant Army bulldozers to remove such impediments.

Read this: Frog in boiling water’: Nicolle Wallace warns US creeping toward crisis under Trump, or better yet watch the video:

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

This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Leave a comment

Previous Substacks

My RawStory comments

.

June 10, 2025

While anxiously waiting for Trump's next move on his dictatorial juggernaut I found two small things to be pleased about. By Hal M. Brown

 

..

I was looking at my friend Sabrina Haake’s Facebook page.  She writes the Substack The Haake Take.

This is what I saw:

I wrote the following comment:

Last night watching Stephanie Ruhle's MSNBC show with her talking to Jon Meacham about LA and Trump, and at the end of a long segment she (I'm paraphrasing) said we should get alarmed yet and he (again parphrasing) said it is acceptable to be alarmed. On Lawrence O'Donnell's long first segment about this, I was pleased that for the entire time he had this photo on the screen. Trump is known to watch the show and I suspect this was done just to piss him off. I'd seen the photo on the lower left but not this one. (click image to enlarge) I still haven't decided what to write my Substack about - this is hardly a big story but I am tempted to share it if I can't think of something else. Here's an article about the tripping video going viral. (The photo I posted with my comment is on the top of this page.)

I wonder whether there was any debate among staff at Lawrence’s show about which photo to feature. The photo of Trump’s face is one of the least flattering I’ve seen recently, but the one from the back shows how badly he tripped. Lawrence showed a video of Trump walking up the stairs to Air Force One and said that this was the video Trump did not want you to see.

Back to Jon Meacham and what he said to Stephanie Rhule.

I’ve referred to the impact Walker Chronkite had on LBJ and the country when he editorialized about the Vietnam War and how this is considered by historians to have been a seminal event leading to the United State’s withdrawing from Vietnam.

Excerpt:

It may be hard to believe in the current era of declining media credibility and amid President Donald Trump's bitter condemnations of "fake news," but mainstream journalists once were trusted figures in society who could sway public opinion in a major way.

A historic example occurred 50 years ago this week: the stunning commentary of CBS anchor Walker Cronkite on Feb. 27, 1968, in which he dissected the U.S. role in Vietnam, stepped away from objectivity, and came to a very negative conclusion. He crystallized public opposition to the Vietnam War and dealt a setback to the credibility of the U.S. government.

Today we don’t have any one person with the influence and credibility of Walter Chronicle. If I could chose one it just might be Jon Meacham.

Of course, back in the Chronkite days we didn’t have cable news. There were three networks. Of the three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, in the 1960s and 70s, CBS News was widely considered to be the best in the business (reference).

For those too young to remember here’s an article:

Note that the above article is from CNN and entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner (who was married to Jane Fonda for 10 years) didn’t launch the first 24 hour news network until 1980.

With all the horrible news at least I was pleased to see how Lawrence O’Donnell may have sent a message to Trump that would piss him off, and I was glad that Jon Meacham gave permission, of a sort, to Stephanie Ruhle and her audience not only to be alarmed, but basically said that they should be alarmed.

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

This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

Leave a comment

Read all my Substacks.

Most recent (click to enlarge image):

Recommended reading:

What's the difference between a king, a dictator, and a tyrant? I suggest the next national protest be renamed No Dictators, or better yet, No Tyrants.

  This story has been given a lot of coverage.  Here’s the HUPPOST story about it. This should elicit a “well, duh, this ought to be obvio...