He won’t need a coup or any nukes. He just does whatever he wants and nobody stops him. He can deploy his new ICE force to intimidate anyone who protests with anything stronger than “serious concerns.”
And yet he just backed down in a big way today because the Supreme Court told him no.
The ones who are scared of inflatable frog costumes and wine moms in Bluey pajamas, and got run out of North Carolina in less than a week because tens of thousands showed up to protest them?
Trump is not as omnipotent nor the American people as easily cowed as you imagine.
People in Iran have hated the regime for decades. They’ve been rebelling for a long time, the economic crisis just brought it back into the open again. There have been riots and rebellions against the regime in iran for years and years. It isn’t like the public were happy with the regime before a few months ago.
Also if juries start refusing to convict people in jury trials who fight against fascism, then that is going to cause a lot of problems for fascists. The right to a jury trial by your peers is built into our constitution for a reason.
Not like this. But the regime is mostly being smart about it.
Getting back to the thread.:
U.S. immigration courts never have jury trials.
In regular federal courts, prosecutors have long overcharged in order to get defendants to give up their right to trial, leaving the sixth amendment in tatters. Under any halfway reasonable definition of fascism, that fig leaf will be totally gone for political prosecutions of citizens, just as it already is for migrants.
He’s not omnipotent. For you to say that I am calling him that is attempting to weaken my position by using reductio ad absurdum.
My position is, look at what he has done in one year and don’t underestimate what he is willing to do in the future if no one stops him. And so far, no one has.
When I started the first clusterfuck thread when he was elected the first time, people told me to simmer down, chill out, and I was accused of being Chicken Little.
“Oh it’s not going to be that bad, it can’t be that bad. Congress will keep him in check. The Supreme Court will keep him in check. This is the United States of America! We have laws, and no one is above the law!”
Oh, really?
Did we ever think it would get to where it is now? Thousands of people fired from government jobs, public health turned upside down, a big chunk of the White House bulldozed? A government army rounding up people off the street and throwing him into prisons with no due process? Did we ever think that would happen?
As I imagine?
I’m not imagining any of this. I’m not imagining that the Republicans in Congress have turned all of their authority over to him and have not objected in any effective way. I’m not imagining that he has the Supreme Court pretty much in his pocket. Okay they’re pushing back a little. But we are the frogs in the pot of water and it has gotten a lot hotter than we ever thought it would.
FFS, there are dozens of threads on this very board talking about these events. They are happening in front of us and all around us. So what is it you think I am imagining?
It would be a huge mistake to underestimate trump and what he is capable of. Especially with a personally loyal armed force behind him.
Destroying things is easy. Just fire everyone who does the real work, shutter buildings and sell off assets for pennies on the dollar.
But actually creating a military force loyal to him requires the ability to build, and that’s much, much harder. Even to build something weak, stupid and incompetent. Building something that’s actually professional and effective is an order of magnitude harder than that. And it’s a fundamental truth: Incompetent people don’t know how to build competent organizations. Whatever ICE finally becomes, it won’t be an elite group of bad-asses.
Of course it won’t! 
It will be the “patriots” that tried to take over the Capitol on January 6th. It will be a moderately organized, mostly chaotic armed mob, but this time they will have serious weapons and the authority of the president behind them.
I don’t get the point of minimizing the potential seriousness of this development.
“It can’t happen here,” right?
There was once a dictator who had a disagreement between his private army, and the state army. He chose the state army, and murdered the leaders of his private army. And that man’s name was Adolf Hitler. And now you know the rest of the story. Good day!
May history repeat itsself.
Nitpick: Everyone says this, but it isn’t. “A jury of your peers” is not a concept in US law, at all, because the US doesn’t even have the concept of “peers”.
I’m not minimizing it, but I’m not maximizing it, either. My point is, sure, they’re an armed mob with ostensible legal authority, but when and if an actual group of bad-asses have finally had enough of them, the conflict will be short. I’ve always said, this will ultimately come down to a question of where the loyalty of the US military lies. Will they take illegal orders from Trump or his successors, or will they stand by their oath to the Constitution?
There’s a lot of established competence in the US military, and it will take a long time for Trump to completely destroy that.
Except that he murdered them using another, more disciplined private army, which went on to become more powerful than the first private army ever was. So be careful what you wish for.
It’s murderous armies all the way down!
In other words, something along the lines of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or Brownshirts):
At the moment (disclaimer: I suck at predictions), their impact on a national scale doesn’t seem to approach the SA’s, probably because their focus is on harassing, roughing up and “disappearing” those who don’t look sufficiently 'Murrican. They also don’t have the simmering public antipathy toward their targets that the SA enjoyed, at least not in the larger cities: from whistles to blocking garages to commandeering parking lots and forming human fences, a considerable segment of the public appears to be backing their neighbors rather than cheering the thugs.
Which doesn’t mean that ICE couldn’t be turned into a genuine paramilitary force at some time, and that certainly wouldn’t astonish me. But it would likely require a fair amount of training and discipline, during which more than a few of the “chaotic armed mob” who just wanted to bust heads would be dropped or go over the hill.
People have flaky memories and tend to quickly forget what isn’t reinforced. Why do you think Trump is still repeating 2020 election lies? Prior to the 2020 election, Trump had goons in Portland, dress in black, abduction people from the street. There was outrage at the time, but it died down quickly enough. He had a rag-tag army on Jan 6, and the DC National Guard, but couldn’t make it work. Yes, that created Impeachment proceedings, but by the end of the following week, the worst had been forgotten by most.
In both instances there were too many adults in charge of things which is what kept Trump from succeeding (at least, in Trump’s mind). That’s different, now. All of the adults have either been fired, quit, or demoted to positions where they can’t do anything to stop him. Sure, the organizational structures are filled with incompetence and will soon fall apart left to themselves. So, whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. Prior to this fall’s election.
Yes, American Democracy is in the most peril it has ever faced. Not in 1862, not in 1968, not in 2021. Trump has hired people to identify who needs to be gone and has had them ‘make it so.’ While the American Spirit is strong, particularly for those who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, you can find traitors if you look hard enough (and pay enough). All those cops who quit their police forces because they found out they could face criminal penalties for their brutality need a place to work, after all.
Fair enough, but it does say this:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt6-4-1/ALDE_00013124/
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
It does mention an impartial jury, which is important. They can’t stack the jury with government loyalists.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
There’s a lot of people on this board who owe adaher an apology.
I’m thinking of asahi. He and I were doing a Chicken Little doubles act at the beginning of trump 1.0. Of course, he had a bad habit of posting drunk, and he didn’t do himself any favors with that…
Thank you to those who are taking me seriously on this subject.
He’s the one who said that Hillary Clinton was the sort of Democrat that Republicans could support, right?
I mean, he said lots of things. I’m sure some of them were right. But he wasn’t great overall at assessing the political situation.
Because he won’t need the National Guard and their silly rules when he has his own massive army of masked armed ICE goons not beholden to anyone else.
Hence the massive numbers of goons being recruited.
This. How is this not glaringly obvious to everyone?
The thing about hiring massive numbers of goons based on loyalty and ideology is that it weeds out those who are, you know, capable. ICE is currently being staffed by a bunch of Basic Training washouts, 4Fs, and mall cops, and it shows.
You’re not gonna be able to fight and win a civil war with the Keystone Kops.