Trump wants blood.

The spectacle is the point. The helicopters. The uniforms. The rumble of armored personnel carriers down the boulevards of Los Angeles. The former president of the United States — now reinstalled in the White House through a judicial (Citizens United) and electoral (Musk’s money and X) sleight-of-hand that would make Orbán proud — is sending U.S. Marines into an American city.

Marines who are trained in killing people. Quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. Not crowd control, not defending the Constitutional right to protest, not arresting and Mirandizing: just shedding blood. Blowing things up and killing people is what this most lethal fighting force in the world does so well. And Trump just sent them into our civilian streets.

At the same time, Donald Trump is presiding over the most openly corrupt regime in the history of this country.

He’s looting the treasury in broad daylight, giving away a $4 trillion tax cut to his billionaire donors and golf buddies, repealing clean air and water protections while wildfires torch the West and hurricanes batter the South, and inviting domestic terrorists into the halls of power. His family and cronies are raking in billions from foreign governments — from Saudi royals to Russian oligarchs to Chinese front companies — with not even a fig leaf of legality.

Meanwhile, he’s gutted the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, turned DHS into a political police force, and is laying off scientists from NOAA and NASA because they keep insisting that the Earth is, in fact, burning from the poisons his fossil fuel billionaire friends sell.

And now, as his approval ratings begin to wobble and questions mount about his finances, his backroom deals, and his erratic behavior, he reaches for the oldest play in the authoritarian playbook: provoke unrest and then send in the troops.

As LA Mayor Karen Bass said:

This is not new. Nixon tried it. Hitler perfected it. Mussolini reveled in it. Trump is following a script so old and worn that it should’ve been burned for kindling by now, but here we are again.

In the early 1970s, as opposition to the Vietnam War reached a boiling point, Richard Nixon didn’t try to calm the waters: he deliberately stirred them. He referred to student protesters as “communists” and “bums,” cheered on violent pro-government mobs like the one that beat peaceful demonstrators during the Hard Hat Riot in New York, and did everything he could to push the country into a cultural war fever.

Nixon’s goal was simple: make protest look like rebellion, make rebellion look like terrorism, and make himself look like the only one who could restore “law and order.”

He succeeded, for a while, and it even got him re-elected in 1972. But the price was Watergate, war crimes, and a generation’s trust in government flushed down the drain.

Now Trump, with Stephen Miller whispering fascist bedtime stories in his ear and Steve Bannon howling about civil war from the sidelines, is picking up where Nixon left off. But this time the stakes are even higher, and the intentions are even clearer.

Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles under the absurd claim of needing to “protect the public” from leftist “urban insurgents” is not about law enforcement. It’s about spectacle. It's about optics. It’s about setting the stage for something much darker.

Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Erdoğan in Turkey, Trump is using public protests as both scapegoat and smokescreen. The plan is to provoke confrontation, paint it as insurrection, and then invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, a 200-year-old law that allows a president to deploy the military domestically and override governors and mayors.

Once that happens, the road to full dictatorship is wide open.

Because the Insurrection Act suspends Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that prevents the U.S. military from being used as a domestic police force. With a stroke of a pen, Trump can militarize every protest, shut down dissent, seize media infrastructure, or even delay — or “postpone” — elections on grounds........

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