Now That Trump's President... (not any more!)

Trump's threatening martial law now. he's acting like a cop, escalating the situation. getting his knee ready for some necks.

this isn't going to go well for him.

oh and Anonymous are teasing that they've got dirt on Trump they're gonna drop, seems like maybe tonight.

probably not anything too serious, but we can cross our fingers and hope

  On 6/2/2020 at 12:12 AM, ignatius said:

can't imagine being a governor and having to be on a conference call w/this idiot. 

Seriously. 
I always felt for Andrew Cuomo having to walk a fine line of critical, thankful, frustrated and not-too-offensive over the whole covid situation. He needed ventilators he didn’t have and trump was basically holding them hostage so that governors who needed them the most had to play a game of “say the wrong thing and you don’t get our help”. 
I couldn’t do it. 

  On 6/2/2020 at 1:44 AM, auxien said:

oh and Anonymous are teasing that they've got dirt on Trump they're gonna drop, seems like maybe tonight.

probably not anything too serious, but we can cross our fingers and hope

fingers crossed it's pee tape related

  On 6/2/2020 at 2:19 AM, ignatius said:

fingers crossed it's pee tape related

I think it it'll be Epstein stuff which TBH would be more damning than a pee tape - he'd totally spin that as a bragging right or some shit

Epstein reveals would make some of his supporters actually break off and push the truly zealous QAnon folks into some kind of string-theory level mental gymnastics - the deep state is actually us in a matrix controlled by an AI computer that started off in the basement of a lab in Berkeley CA

  On 6/2/2020 at 12:12 AM, ignatius said:

can't imagine being a governor and having to be on a conference call w/this idiot. 

it's always been absurd - IIRC pentagon staff and combat veterans have literally fielded his questions about Hollywood action scenes he conflated with real military operations - but considering the gravity of this it'd be excruciating

oh course GOP governors are doing all they can to get resources beyond the national guard 

  Quote

A Twitter account claiming to belong to a national “antifa” organization and pushing violent rhetoric related to ongoing protests has been linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, according to a Twitter spokesperson.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-washington-protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n1221456

dolan pls

I truly hope our military top brass have enough sense not to carry out his Twitter directives. But I'm not optimistic.

In his case it seems there's no limit to how disdainful a human being can possibly become.

  On 6/2/2020 at 5:43 AM, timbre monke said:

I truly hope our military top brass have enough sense not to carry out his Twitter directives. But I'm not optimistic.

In his case it seems there's no limit to how disdainful a human being can possibly become.

he probably has a few allies in there too. i bet there will be big discussions amongst the military types how to follow the orders but "only a little" to appease trump.  unless there is someone w/real balls.. but those people usually get fired by trump. 

we could have some kind of showdown between them. who knows what it'll come to??? we're in batshit times. 

my understanding is that he can't legally enact martial law anyway, only states can do that within their own borders, tho i think they can request federal assistance if so. 

edit: this is partly incorrect, see below posts

  On 6/2/2020 at 5:52 AM, auxien said:

my understanding is that he can't legally enact martial law anyway, only states can do that within their own borders, tho i think they can request federal assistance if so. 

yeah.. i think maybe he can send some troops into DC but i don't even know if that's possible. 

  On 6/2/2020 at 5:50 AM, ignatius said:

he probably has a few allies in there too. i bet there will be big discussions amongst the military types how to follow the orders but "only a little" to appease trump.  unless there is someone w/real balls.. but those people usually get fired by trump. 

we could have some kind of showdown between them. who knows what it'll come to??? we're in batshit times. 

Indeed we are. And the fact that I technically still work for the DoD makes me wonder whether I should remain at my job, should the worst case scenario happen.

Yet we're all expected to go about our daily business like good, law-abiding citizens...even though I feel like shit is yet to truly hit the fan.

Well:


“In order to deploy U.S. active-duty personnel to conduct law enforcement on American soil, the president must invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. It has been used several times in U.S. history, including by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.”

  On 6/2/2020 at 5:58 AM, ignatius said:

Well:


“In order to deploy U.S. active-duty personnel to conduct law enforcement on American soil, the president must invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act. It has been used several times in U.S. history, including by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.”

https://www.justsecurity.org/70482/the-president-the-military-and-minneapolis-what-you-need-to-know/

so not gonna quote everything, but the intent seems to be what i was thinking, where a state asks for federal help in keeping law/peace, but there are a couple of loopholes the president might be able to use.

American Autocracy and the End of Meaning - Trump, Putin, and the Corruption of Language (Masha Gessen, Lithub)

  On 6/2/2020 at 5:50 AM, ignatius said:

he probably has a few allies in there too. i bet there will be big discussions amongst the military types how to follow the orders but "only a little" to appease trump.  unless there is someone w/real balls.. but those people usually get fired by trump. 

we could have some kind of showdown between them. who knows what it'll come to??? we're in batshit times. 

It's going to be dicey, not so much because the military's upper ranks are Trump loyalists so much as they are concerned about keeping nukes secure and vital infrastructures protected. National Guard is federalized so this is a double-edge sword. So I think the tragic aspect is the US military will ultimately side with the people long after the damage is done and well beyond the oppurtunity to flush Trump and authoritarian leaders (sympathetic governors, agences like ICE, CBP, CIA, etc.) who support him out of power.

State governors can't wield national guard forces against each other because governors can only call up guard for their own internal jurisdictions. IIRC when the Cali national guard (the 40th Infantry division) deployed in the LA Riots it was from Bush's order ultimately. 

Unlike many countries the US has a de-politicized military. While over decades the U.S. has become more militaristic and right-wing patriotism = military and police backing has been normalized this country still has a legal separation of civilian and military rank and file and a the POTUS is commander in chief. We don't have appointed officers like they do in many Middle Eastern countries. Military leaders like generals are very political active in many Asian countries, especially in SE Asia and South Asia. This has for 200 years prevented a coup from the military, the issue now is a coup from an unchecked executive.

Mattis was an imperialist and hawk but he was also concerned with the union and his resigning was pretty much an indication he wanted no part in Trump's overall cabinet. He couldn't yeild power as a civilian Sec. of Defense so one Trump refused to heed his advice on foreign policy his role in pushing for stability was useless. He was pretty much the last non-loyalist. God knows how many are still in the White House holding their tongues and serving the country over Trump but I think a few are there but now they probably can only tip-off other agencies. 

The closest equivalents I can think of post civil war:

The Coal Wars, specifically Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 - this pitted Union strikers and their militias with local law enforcement, hired guns and ultimately lead to the US army intervened. While the US army technically didn't come in to fight one side but rather end the fighting they forced the Union militias to surrender, so essentially the strikers and not the oppressive local police were punished. It pretty much killed the momentum of the Union movement in the US which never yielded a labor party equivalent despite a very, very large and diverse support from working-class citizens.

1930s Bonus_Army protest and subsequent massacre. The protesting veterans were supported by the most decorated USMC officer of the time, Smedley Butler. He was also notorious for alleging a corporate plot to overthrow FDR. It's never been fully proven but it's very plausible - US corporations opposed any kind of policy that was anti-fascist as they did business with Franco and Hitler until 1939. FDR was the most socialist and pro-Union president of the last century and he was strongly opposed for that stance. FDR even deployed troops to defend workers who were striking and being threatened by local police forces backing factory owners.

The massacre was lead by a younger Patton. While a tactical genius Patton was notoriously right-wing, so much so he openly expressed admiration for the German army over the Soviets. If he hadn't been so disgusted by the Holocaust and appalled by Hitler's incompetence he would have pretty much been a Nazi apologist. In fact on record he said the Nazis were more akin to Dems and the GOP in Germany. 

////

Compare the US to other scenarios, including the Civil War itself, and it's a unique scenerio. There's no equal split of arms and forces in the government that will pit against each other. It will be local fighting and a US military struggling to restore order. Compare it to a democracy like Spain in the 1930s, which saw specific Spanish military units siding immediately with Franco and the Nationalists, leading to Republicans the military that didn't support the coup having to fight defecting military units. Here that won't happen, instead the question is whether the US military and national guard will start forcing state police and local police - themselves fairly well armed - to relinquish control. It's going to be ugly - at some point officers and soldiers will start going AWOL and defecting. More concerning all of the 3% and right-wing nuts in the military are going to either issue orders to oppress civillians and Trump's state enemies or defect with equipment and join right-wing militias. I know the latter will happen at least on some level at some point. Funny enough I think this unrest has actually made some right-wing gun nuts back off of Trump a little bit and force them into a more neutral or at least different focused "mission" as the actual beginning of government oppression they always hypothetically feared is actually taking place.

Back to the original question of military officer loyalty we're not going to have public opposition voiced by generals - for one it's against their duties and more pragmatically they would simply be dismissed / fired by Trump. Presidents have done this in the past and the best to read up on is that of Douglas McArthur. So their silence could go either way from commander to commander. 

  On 6/2/2020 at 10:14 PM, joshuatxuk said:

Back to the original question of military officer loyalty we're not going to have public opposition voiced by generals - for one it's against their duties and more pragmatically they would simply be dismissed / fired by Trump. 

very true, but then again, I suppose it would depend on what trump asks them to do exactly. and since he is not grounded in reality and has no fucking clue what to do in any situation, I would hazard a guess that after the twitter shouting subsides, he would ask for their help, but defer to them to decide how to respond. in which case they would try and push for de-escalation and not rolling up in tanks with guns blazing, as commando don seems to think would happen...

  On 6/2/2020 at 11:51 PM, zero said:

very true, but then again, I suppose it would depend on what trump asks them to do exactly. and since he is not grounded in reality and has no fucking clue what to do in any situation, I would hazard a guess that after the twitter shouting subsides, he would ask for their help, but defer to them to decide how to respond. in which case they would try and push for de-escalation and not rolling up in tanks with guns blazing, as commando don seems to think would happen...

yeah I should specify at the moment / as things stand now - Trump hasn't gotten his way with designating Antifa as a DHS listed terror group yet, evoked the insurrection act, etc. I dont think any will speak out too early. the way that carrier COVID-19 shitstorm went down was a warning of how quickly Trump will step in. same with his efforts to pardon war criminals his base rally behind.

Umberto Eco on Donald Trump: 14 Ways of Looking at a Fascist (Lithub, 2016)