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.
