I had assumed that the reason he spent so much time amping up stories of invasions, claiming FEMA was abandoning Americans, or that residents of Ohio eat cats was tactical. He wanted to flood the zone with shit and he only cared about winding up his base, not appearing credible or coherent because he could buy the loyalty of “normal” Republicans with tax cuts.
But then he went to Aurora Colorado.
He claimed Aurora was being crushed by an invasion, and stated that he would use a dormant law which allows him to assume near-dictatorial powers in the event of war or invasion to: declare people an enemy by their ethnicity or race; lock them up, expel them from the country or simply kill them; and prevent anyone from trying to stop it.
The last time this law was used was in World War II when American citizens were rounded up and locked in camps for the mere crime of being Asian.
Aurora has a Republican mayor, a Republican Chief of Police, as with Springfield they say that Trump is lying. They say his proposed invasion, for it would be an invasion, is wrong. But he does not care. He “saw it on television” or sees it online, and that is the only truth he believes.
If Trump was lying he would have hedged his bets, or made vague claims that couldn’t be disproven. In short he would have been more tactical. But he wasn’t. He was all in on the idea that we are at war with Venezuelans and that only violence, far more than “one rough hour” will stop them. He even promised police immunity to make it happen. He intends to go to war and he doesn’t care if the enemy is real or not. In fact, he can’t really tell.
That is the choice we are facing. This is not about tarriffs or taxes, or even gender in sports. This is about whether we want a president who is so addled by his feed that he will unleash violence to make his nightmares real. Once this is unleashed it will not stop with Aurora, or Springfield, or Detroit. Once he can declare people enemies at will, he will do it. He has said that. He will send in troops, immunize them from blame, and he won’t care who gets hurt, because online, and in the Supreme Court, he is King above the law.
He won’t be held back by a compliant senate or the even more dangerous men who hang around him. Mike Flynn, Stephen Miller, these men have dreamed of dictatorship far too long to care about others.
The question for all of us is, why should we go along with it? No tax cut or deregulation will save you or your business from the havoc that violence will bring. And there is no guarantee that once the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers or the Nationalist Front are released and protected from consequences that they will stop with some other city, some other group. Sooner or later we will all be attacked. What good are tax cuts if there is a war in your town?
Why would anyone we vote to unleash that hell?
If you love Trump’s policies you’ll get it from the Senate. Even a Dem majority will support Israel, protect business, and keep taxes pretty low. Harris and Walz are centrists and whatever plans they have will be held back by the Senate and the courts who will keep them from naming a cabinet let alone imposing their will.
So the choice isn’t between extremes. It is between divided, and stable government, or the nightmares of one man, and the red guards who hide behind him, wiaiting to make their fears into your reality.
I had thought, I had hoped that this was all a clever trick. Just Trump conning the marks to get ahead with no real plan to unleash the hell he describes.
I was wrong.
I cannot let that happen.
What about you?