Since Donald Trump resumed the presidency on January 20 of this year, I have noted that he regards almost anything he dislikes as a national emergency requiring military intervention.
This has been the rationale for ripping migrants from their homes, their cars, their schools, their places of employment, and the very immigration offices and court rooms to which they have dutifully reported as part of the federal government’s requirement for those awaiting their lawful immigration hearings. The unconstitutional kidnappings are justified, says Trump, because we are at war with “illegals.”
Most of those arrested, in fact, are not “illegal.” They are documented migrants who have entered the United States under an entirely lawful process to determine the veracity of their asylum requests.
United States citizens, justifiably horrified by the black ops-style arrests and deportations unfolding in their neighborhoods, also seem to be regarded as enemy combatants in the grotesquely exaggerated “invasion” of immigrants. In fact, United States citizens protesting the entirely unconstitutional displays of brute force are now being treated to streets militarized by their own government, against them. It appears that the Trump regime regards anyone who disagrees with his gross abuses of power as a threat to our national security so substantial that the Marines and the National Guard must be deployed to control them. And Trump really likes to arrest duly elected representatives who rightly demand access to ICE facilities as part of the scope of their congressional oversight mandate.
Then there are the drug- and alcohol-addicted, the homeless, and the mentally ill of Washington, D.C., most of whom are presumed to be United States citizens, who also appear to constitute a national emergency because the president of the United States has arrayed the military against them, as well. The fact that an army of doctors, social workers, and addiction specialists deployed in the streets of our nation’s capital would cost far less than deploying the military and would yield a more productive result is immaterial to Donald John Trump. Given a choice between sensible intervention and a declaration of war, there is no contest in Trumpville: War always wins.
War is such a winner, in fact, that Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are now attempting to rename the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War.”
In Chicago, the pretext for a storm-trooping show of force appears to be, again, what Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her sidekick Tom Homan characterize as an operation to “target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago… because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets,” when in fact we have all seen, over and over again, that most of the individuals being snatched off the streets are not criminals at all, but are law-abiding, hard-working, tax-base contributing refugees who are being sent without benefit of basic due process to concentration camps located in some of our planet’s biggest hellholes. For now, Pritzker is holding the line, based on a court ruling that the president of the United States has no right to subvert the authority of governors in determining whether military presence is needed in their states.
But wait—there’s more war in store:
Claiming that the mayor of Memphis, Tenn., has invited him to fight crime in that fair city—where, by the way, crime is at a 25-year low—Trump has announced that he intends to send the National Guard to frighten the citizens of Memphis as well. Meanwhile, the mayor of Memphis has stated unequivocally that he has not requested assistance from Trump, has absolutely not invited him to address a nonexistent crime wave, and does not want the military thundering through the streets, terrifying the citizens who elected him.
Needless to say, other cities are also being considered for Trump’s special brand of militarized harassment. It appears to be part of what I have come to think of as his “Black and Blue” strategy for governing: If your mayor is Black and your city is blue, expect a terrifying visit from both ICE and at least one of the branches of the armed services.
Trump has also turned his wrath on Portland, Ore., claiming to have seen video of marauding anarchists destroying the city. In this he is correct—there is indeed video of Portland, Ore., engulfed in mob violence.
The video is from the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. The violence was escalated by white counterprotesters flooding the streets to derail the peaceful protests. The violence was further escalated by Donald Trump himself. Some readers may remember that this was his initial foray into random, masked kidnappings into unmarked vans and SUVs.
He liked doing it so much in 2020 that it has become his primary tool of terror and control—just like every other tyrant on Earth.
Currently, there is no mob violence in Portland, and in fact there has been no mob violence in Portland since 2020.
We are also at war with alleged drug smugglers, it seems, and it is not a metaphorical war; it is an actual war. We used to refer to “the war on crime,” “the war on poverty,” and “the war on drugs” as an indication that our government wanted to bring intensive focus to those scourges through good public policy, systemic change, and the robust commitment of resources, but no more. President Trump is not smart enough to understand figurative language; he is a literal kind of a guy.
Thus, the literal war on poverty has begun by deploying the military to savage the homeless; the literal war on crime is being waged from armored vehicles driven by helmeted, flack-jacketed soldiers in the streets of our cities; and the war on drugs now includes bombing random Venezuelan motorboats in international waters, claiming they are piloted by Tren de Aragua drug smugglers, while providing no evidence of criminal activity.
Now, I understand, I really do, the impulse to cheer from the sidelines when the military marches in and removes vagrants and crazies and junkies and drunks. No one enjoys navigating them on the city streets, but for Lord’s sake, they need help, not arrest. I understand the sense of relief that comes from knowing that the military flooding the streets of your fair city will create such an atmosphere of fear and dread that even the worst criminals will elect to behave themselves, but it does not solve the root causes of crime, the first of which is poverty and a lack of real economic opportunity. This of course takes us back to the militarized war on poverty and why that is unlikely to yield much more than a temporary result, either. Only in Trumpworld does the war on poverty become a war on the impoverished themselves.
As for the Venezuelan drug smugglers, all of the claims made by Donald Trump thus far have been unsubstantiated. Trump accuses Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua of being international “narco-terrorists,” when in fact most evidence suggests that they are small-time drug dealers in the Venezuelan neighborhoods they occupy. Trump says they are bringing loads of fentanyl into the country from Venezuela, but most of the fentanyl that enters America comes from Mexico after being manufactured with chemicals from Chinese labs. Most of the cocaine entering America also enters through Mexico.
But we keep blowing up Venezuelan boats in international waters because we have declared war on drugs, and in the absence of actual drugs, just war on random Venezuelans driving random boats. Apart from footage of the boats exploding, there is no photographic evidence of the drugs and no visual or verbal evidence of the boats having been loaded with drugs. There are also international laws governing the treatment of vessels in international waters, and the intentional bombing of a vessel not in United States waters is a violation of those laws. Of course, we already know that the Trump administration has no intention of ever following the law, unless it happens to be a law that they pervert for their own purposes.
If the administration had actual proof that the boats were carrying drugs into the United States, why would they not track the boats (clearly, they can track them, since they obviously had the capacity to track them in order to bomb them) and have the Coast Guard stop them, board them, and secure the cargo to provide evidence of drug smuggling?
Of course, we have an entirely lawless administration running the country now, so the intentional killing of Venezuelans driving boats, without clear evidence of drug running, is hardly surprising.
In order to remove the final barrier to dictatorship—an active citizenry determined to exercise their First Amendment rights—he has now declared war on the protesters themselves. We have already seen that once Donald Trump identifies an enemy, the next step is a forgone conclusion: He sends Pete Hegseth in to finish the job.
It should not take long.
