by Ender
Ok. There’s a lot to unpack here. It seems as though malignant ding-dong Trump and his goons MAY have made a pretty big strategic error in their plans to turn the United States into an autocracy starting in late January 2025. As I’ve written before, they assume that through sheer force of will they can corrupt the administration of justice and of the executive and turn America into a Hungary-style managed democracy without any problems.
They seem to think that as long as they have the Insurrection Act in their back pocket that everything else will be unicorns and rainbow farts for their autocratic dreams. That may be so….but I have some quibbles.
The ironic thing is just as liberals seem to think that someone is to swoop in and save us from Trump if they just tweet harder, so, too, do MAGA fascists believe that invocation of the Insurrection Act is some sort of fascist fairy dust. This, despite the U.S. Military being loathed to get involved any political issues fights and the United States being a diverse, decentralized country with a huge population and a long tradition of democracy.
So….lulz?
Yes, there is a lot of low hanging fruit for Trump in the first few days of his tyrannically second administration. He can arrest a lot of people he doesn’t like — or drive them out of the country. He can fire 100,000 civil servants, turn Voice of America into his propaganda organ, pull the US out of NATO and our troops out of Korea and Japan.
BUT…..none of this will happen in a vacuum.
And, as such, if there is some sort of massive revolt against dingus Trump for these tyrannical moves by the population…the Insurrection Act can only do so much. There is a key thing that Trump is missing — he has no paramilitary group to “forcefully suggest” to people that they shut up and go along with the America First agenda….and if they don’t, they end up in a camp.
There are two things to consider at this point.
One is, clearly while Trump is weaponizing the existing ICE infrastructure to round up 10 million(!) undocumented people in the US….he could probably use that same weaponization to turn ICE agents into something akin to the SA. So, I could see Trump passing a HUGE FUCKING BILL that would enlarge the ranks of ICE Agents to an astonishing level. They would serve the purpose of the Nazi SA in the first 100 days of Hitler’s consolidation of power in early 1933.
Or, Trump could go the more direct route and somehow organize an actual MAGA SA made up of consolidated group of Patriot Front, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who would be his goons as the US lurched towards a Nazi-style autocracy.
BUT….This, too, would NOT happen in a vacuum. There would be some lag time between when all hell broke loose in the US because Trump went full tyrant and the time where he would have a 500,000 goons on the streets to knock heads. That would give anti-fascist forces a window of opportunity. Things like a Woman’s Strike or a General Strike with specific anti-fascist demands might be enough to convince the U.S. Military to at least stand down, if not actively join anti-fascist forces. In a sense, we would all be antifa at that point.
Remember, however, all of this would be happening in the context of mass chaos in the United States. There would be no assurance that any Blue Glorious Revolution would work — it could endup like what happened in Turkey and only make the autocrat more powerful by failing. And even if it was successful, it’s very possible that it would only cause a Secession Crisis as Red States — probably starting with Texas — would leave the Union rather than accept any sort of reforms that they knew would hurt the fascist MAGA agenda.
I don’t think the fucking nattering nabobs of negativism on Twitter realize how bad things will get if Trump is re-elected. We would be going to the show, folks. This would be it.
America would either turn into a Russian-style autocratic state or we would somehow found a Third Republic.