The warrior president and his weapon wielding thugs: will we have Strykers in the streets? Wait for it. By Hal M. Brown
How far will Trump go to cement his dictatorship? I am afraid he's like concrete that is in the process of hardening. Soon he'll be unbreakable.
I woke up at 2:00 and lay awake until 3:00 before I realized that I’d never fall asleep. This was thanks to Rachel Maddow’s show last night.
On Tuesday I wrote “Trump is engaged in two fights against democracy. Both involve agents armed with guns. Are we a nascent police state?” I wrote about how Musk sent his DOGE minions to The US Institute of Peace, which is not a federal agency, to take over their computer servers. When they were denied entry they returned with armed officers. This ended up in court, but the judge while appalled, did not issue a restraining order. (Read more about this here.)
Last night Rachel devoted the first portion of her show to the new US Attorney for Washington, DC, Ed Martin, (who replaced Denise Cheung (article) who resigned rather than follow an order) had made up a load of lying crap to freeze a Citbank account. To say it was troubling is an understatement.
When I was deciding whether I could fall back asleep and write about this at a reasonable hour, which would be five or six for me, I realized that writing this Substack would take some time because I’d have to go to the MSNBC website and find a link to the segment about this. I finally got up and looked at RawStory, and I saw they they’d summarized the segment and included a video. This made writing this much easier.
You should be able to play the YouTube video here.
Here’s an excerpt from RawStory:
“This seemingly boring thing is also the opening chapter of a very scary dystopian novel in which the government is seizing your phone records, obtaining all of your text messages and your emails and your iCloud, and maybe raiding your house and raiding your office,” the host said. “And they are taking or freezing the contents of your bank account when there is no probable cause that you have committed a crime because what there is, is a federal prosecutor's office that will do that stuff anyway, even when their own career prosecutors and a judge tell them there's no crime here, you can't do it."
She ended her show’s opening monologue Wednesday by delivering “two important developments” in the case.
“First of all, number one, they are in trouble in court now because of this case,” Maddow told viewers.
The second, she added, was that the prosecutor’s office has “been stopped from doing the one thing that they were trying to get away with that really does afford the possibility of Trump just opening the floodgates against Democrats, protesters, journalists, government officials, potentially judges."
“They have finally been stopped at least for the moment from doing something that I think, if they were able to do this, might reasonably result in a lot of people actually fleeing this country," Maddow said.
As if this wasn’t disturbing enough, Rachel also covered the story about how Russia has been accused of trying to plant explosives or incindiary devices on cargo planes in Europe which might be “test runs” to target planes headed to the United States. Here’s a BBC article about this:
Rachel also went over how the Pentagon has suspended intelligence operations against Russia and how this would effect stopping what she called their asymetic warfare. She didn’t go into something which occured to me. This is how these attacks were against NATO and that according to their Article Five they were attacks against the United States.
Here’s more from Rachel:
Maddow Blog | On Russia, Trump rejects public attitudes and takes new Kremlin-aligned steps
Excerpt:
The latest national NBC News poll asked American voters which country has their sympathies in the Russian/Ukrainian war, and the results weren’t close: Only 2% of Americans sided with Vladmir Putin’s regime, while 61% chose U.S. allies Kyiv. The same poll, however, asked about Donald Trump’s sympathies, and a 49% plurality said they believe the Republican president is sympathetic to Moscow.
Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who conducted the survey along with a GOP colleague, said, “I cannot recall a moment in history when American public opinion and voters’ views of a president, as to which country they are more aligned with, have been more in conflict with each other.”
Why does it keep seeming like Putin has something on Trump? How often does Trump have to scream about the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA hoax to have one say a version of what Queen Gertrude said in Hamlet?
A sensible person would wonder why a president of the United States is doing this, and so many other things, that are unpopular with a significant percentage of the American people. To put it bluntly and profanely I have an answer. It is because this president who has a driving ambition to be a dictator who is feared by anyone who dares to cross him doesn’t give a shit because he has the guns and isn’t hesitant to have his soldiers brandish them to strike terror into anyone who gets in his way.
Wait, there’s more…
This is a two week old article from The Military Times:
Also:
You can be forgiven if you didn’t know what a Stryker brigade was until you saw the top illustration for this Substack. I didn’t, so I looked it up. The pictures are from this website.
Perhaps ironically the Stryker is based on the GDLS Canada LAV III 8×8 light armoured vehicle. Canada, lest we forget, is the large country to our north which Trump wants to make a state.
Trump’s promising to build his wall (which Mexico would pay for) obviously didn’t work. His letting word out that he was considering putting alligators in the Rio Grande or ordering immigrants to be shot in the legs wasn’t taken seriously. Even separating children from parents and making detainees sleep in cages wasn’t enough of a deterent.
Now we have Strykers!
These vehicles are impressive pieces of military hardware, and not only dangeorus looking but obviously dangerous. Seeing these on the US border will likely give pause to anyone wanting to cross into the United States. This, no doubt, is the intention.
We know that with Trump the cruelty it the point. But he’s already done so much of this without everyone who he wants to be intimidated cowering in fear. I think he hopes these formidable war machines will do this for him.
Perhaps by chance, this Trump trading card depicts him leading a column of what appear to be Strykers.
Meanwhile, north of the border, we have an escalation of gun toting Trump, and now Musk, Gestapo and SS enforcers wearing their SWAT type body armor and gear as they drag your friends and neighbors off to some hellhole prison.
What the holyfuck is going on?
This is not a rhetorical question. What we have now is a takeover of our democratic country, not by outsider invaders, but by an army of soldiers led by a modern day Hitler.
Unless there’s a restore democracy coup within the military, how long will it take for us to see Stryker vehicles on the streets of our cities and towns?
If the Trump Criminal Co. ignores judicial orders the only coup that can save democracy is within the military. Trump controls lots of guns with his Gestapo and personal SS but they don't have Stryker vehicles, fighter jets, helicopter gunships, destroyers, etc. I can see Hegseth being locked out of the Pentagon and true patriotic generals taking command. It could be a soft coup , strictly speaking illegal, but the only thing that could save democracy. It could be a classical coup d'état which would involve the use of force. Trump and his cirminals would be ousted, possibly arrested , and temporary military executive branch would be installed until there could be free and fair elections.
Addendum:
These are just the titles of seven NY Times articles today:
Excerpt:
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Judge Boasberg was a “Radical Lunatic” and should be “IMPEACHED,” because the judge “was not elected President — He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!”
Read these recent Substacks and more here.
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