Donald Trump vs America

President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles isn’t a distraction. It’s a warning.

In the decade he has been in the political spotlight, Trump has shown a desire to turn the US into a police state, with him at the top. His signature policy priority is a mass deportation campaign led by armed federal officers. He rejects any opposition to his orders as illegitimate or illegal, routinely calling for political opponents and reporters to be jailed. And he previously wanted to order police and the military to shoot nonviolent protesters.

In doing so, Trump casts himself as leading a domestic war against internal enemies. His backers have been explicit on this, like now-State Department official Michael Anton’s description of Trump’s 2016 campaign as akin to the passengers of Flight 93 storming the cockpit to stop al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11 or Vice President JD Vance’s call for a de-Ba’athification process like that the US occupying force in Iraq performed after overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Trump’s second term in office is rooted in this desire to wage war on the American people in an effort to bury the 20th century’s liberal order. To do this, he quickly inaugurated a turn toward autocracy with attacks on every element of civil society, from law firms, nonprofits, universities, the press, the civil service, his critics and his political opponents in the Democratic Party. These attacks took the form of threats, extortion and investigations.

Now, in Los Angeles, those threats are now being made from the end of a barrel.

Demonstrators face California National Guard members standing guard outside the Federal Building as they protest in response to federal immigration operations in Los Angeles.

By deploying the military to repress the American people, he threatens to make protests of his policies effectively illegal. Protests are still ongoing, but now face the specter of orders from the president or the Secretary of Defence to suppress them with force. The situation on the ground, as local officials have repeatedly said, does not warrant this reaction. Instead, this effort, which operates under dubious legal and constitutional authority, aims to inflame the situation in order to scare the public, suppress criticism and show that any challenge to Trump’s rule will be met with the threat, or reality, of violence. This is what Trump’s post-constitutional moment looks like.

The trigger for Trump’s war on the American people is

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