Dear America,
I am dismayed by how little the press, and the establishment in general are making of Trump's latest usurpation of putative executive power. He is occupying Washington, D.C. with federal troops, be they part-time national guardsmen or full-on army or marine soldiers. It is the equivalent of federal occupation of a city. It is easy to characterize this overreach as just another example of Trump's self-aggrandizement that will blow away in the wind when he gets bored, but that is whistling in the dark. What is happening in D.C. is far more profound and egregious than a peccadillo or a character flaw run amok. In light of Trump's threat to occupy other cities, specifically Democrat-run Chicago most overtly, consider the implications of Trump's self-proclaimed intention to go to congress and demand an extension of the thirty day authority extended by the law he has invoked to justify his current imperious action purportedly to stem crime in our nation's capital. Congress is controlled by his captive poltroons in the Republican Party, and good sycophants that they are, there is more than a small risk that they will permit Trump to run rampant in the city indefinitely. Ask yourself what that portends.
If you were president and your intention was to name yourself dictator for life in America, how would you start the process? You would start like other dictators have started elsewhere in the past: you would declare marshal law, and what would that entail. Federal troops would be dispatched to the largest major cities with orders to neutralize resistance, including local law enforcement agencies. You would justify your arrogation of power by claiming that there was a threat to liberty emerging in the governing bodies of the cities and that the federal troops being deployed were being so to protect the rights of the citizenry. You would characterize what you and your allies were doing as the defense of liberty, not the curtailment of it. The next thing you would do is neutralize your critics, like John Bolton for example; former colleagues who had turned against you, and who were thus trusted by your supporters in the past and potentially still trusted now that they have seen the light of your boundless ambition. But as a predicate for doing so, you would do everything in your power, from naked vituperation to proposed, and if successful, actual impeachment of those who have the power of law behind them institutionally who are potential adversaries in your attempt to seize power. Then, once the threats to your power had been neutralized you would use the power you already had to legislate your hold on power, such as, say, Vladimir Putin did with the elimination of term limits for the presidency. With that never-ending power you would cow your legislature into legislating bars to critical speech and even the use of specific words, like "war," which in today's Russia is euphemized as "special military operation," which transgression against would result in long-term prison sentences. And then, in the next election you would manipulate the results, if they ran against your continued authority, to perpetuate your occupation of high office, much the way Maduro has done in Venezuela: overtly and shamelessly, which you might say is the way Trump does everthing.
Of course it is easy to opine today that this is alarmism and to dismiss it as aversion to Trump's lawful ascension, so far anyway, to power and control of the nation and its ethos. And I have to admit that I am imbued with such an aversion. Trump is to me an aberration in American politics and culture born of excessive conservative, anti-democratic zeal such as led to the coining of the term "woke" because liberal and progressive weren't sufficiently pejorative. Those who coined it lacked the erudition to fixate on something more apt and recognizable as what they were trying to convey, so they just made something up. I've never heard anyone explain it in any terms other than those already in use, so what was the point other than to demonstrate disdain for those who weren't like them. Those people will cheer Trump on because they don't have the foresight to recognize that it is their freedom too that is being stripped away.
So dismiss all this as a grim, dystopian fantasy propounded by some "woke" critic of a great man seeking to force a nation into what he conceives of as propriety. Ignore the prospect of Trump declaring marshal law in the nation once he has done so in enough cities and states. But don't ignore Omar Kyam: "The moving finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line: nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." The moving finger is writing, and it looks like an executive order.
Your friend,
Mike
I am dismayed by how little the press, and the establishment in general are making of Trump's latest usurpation of putative executive power. He is occupying Washington, D.C. with federal troops, be they part-time national guardsmen or full-on army or marine soldiers. It is the equivalent of federal occupation of a city. It is easy to characterize this overreach as just another example of Trump's self-aggrandizement that will blow away in the wind when he gets bored, but that is whistling in the dark. What is happening in D.C. is far more profound and egregious than a peccadillo or a character flaw run amok. In light of Trump's threat to occupy other cities, specifically Democrat-run Chicago most overtly, consider the implications of Trump's self-proclaimed intention to go to congress and demand an extension of the thirty day authority extended by the law he has invoked to justify his current imperious action purportedly to stem crime in our nation's capital. Congress is controlled by his captive poltroons in the Republican Party, and good sycophants that they are, there is more than a small risk that they will permit Trump to run rampant in the city indefinitely. Ask yourself what that portends.
If you were president and your intention was to name yourself dictator for life in America, how would you start the process? You would start like other dictators have started elsewhere in the past: you would declare marshal law, and what would that entail. Federal troops would be dispatched to the largest major cities with orders to neutralize resistance, including local law enforcement agencies. You would justify your arrogation of power by claiming that there was a threat to liberty emerging in the governing bodies of the cities and that the federal troops being deployed were being so to protect the rights of the citizenry. You would characterize what you and your allies were doing as the defense of liberty, not the curtailment of it. The next thing you would do is neutralize your critics, like John Bolton for example; former colleagues who had turned against you, and who were thus trusted by your supporters in the past and potentially still trusted now that they have seen the light of your boundless ambition. But as a predicate for doing so, you would do everything in your power, from naked vituperation to proposed, and if successful, actual impeachment of those who have the power of law behind them institutionally who are potential adversaries in your attempt to seize power. Then, once the threats to your power had been neutralized you would use the power you already had to legislate your hold on power, such as, say, Vladimir Putin did with the elimination of term limits for the presidency. With that never-ending power you would cow your legislature into legislating bars to critical speech and even the use of specific words, like "war," which in today's Russia is euphemized as "special military operation," which transgression against would result in long-term prison sentences. And then, in the next election you would manipulate the results, if they ran against your continued authority, to perpetuate your occupation of high office, much the way Maduro has done in Venezuela: overtly and shamelessly, which you might say is the way Trump does everthing.
Of course it is easy to opine today that this is alarmism and to dismiss it as aversion to Trump's lawful ascension, so far anyway, to power and control of the nation and its ethos. And I have to admit that I am imbued with such an aversion. Trump is to me an aberration in American politics and culture born of excessive conservative, anti-democratic zeal such as led to the coining of the term "woke" because liberal and progressive weren't sufficiently pejorative. Those who coined it lacked the erudition to fixate on something more apt and recognizable as what they were trying to convey, so they just made something up. I've never heard anyone explain it in any terms other than those already in use, so what was the point other than to demonstrate disdain for those who weren't like them. Those people will cheer Trump on because they don't have the foresight to recognize that it is their freedom too that is being stripped away.
So dismiss all this as a grim, dystopian fantasy propounded by some "woke" critic of a great man seeking to force a nation into what he conceives of as propriety. Ignore the prospect of Trump declaring marshal law in the nation once he has done so in enough cities and states. But don't ignore Omar Kyam: "The moving finger writes; and having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line: nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." The moving finger is writing, and it looks like an executive order.
Your friend,
Mike
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