The former president’s allies are developing a plan that would immediately deploy the military to the streets against potential demonstrators.
Already looking ahead to the turmoil his re-election could cause, Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly circling an idea to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, deploying the military to act as domestic law enforcement.
According to a Washington Post report on Sunday, the drafting of such plans has largely been “unofficially outsourced” thus far to a coalition of right-wing think tanks working under the title “Project 2025.” It was identified as an immediate priority for the hypothetical resurrected Trump administration, internal communications obtained by the newspaper showed.
In response to questions from the Post, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung provided a statement: “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” he said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
Man, I was hoping that since we're obviously gonna end up with a dystopia, that it would be a cyberpunk one, but here we are, gonna be stuck with a regular boring ass dictatorship.
Evidently yes. I can't even wrap my head around it. I will die before ever fully understanding how any grown and evidently sane adult could ever look at Donald Trump and say to themselves, "yeah, that's the guy I want for my president!" I just can't fathom it. I've had years to think about it but it still simply does not compute.
Not all Americans, but a surprising amount of them. And the "liberal media" with their both-sidering horse race nonsense is not even pretending to try to make the situation any better.
Dailybeast does a "doomscroll" load next article thing. That paragraph is from that. Its on the same page, so the bot likely just fucked up. Here's the article name if y'all want context:
Inside the Mean-Girl Army Going to War for a Celebrity Dietician
And the guy called Cheung is behind that quote? Wake up sweety, you'd go into conc camps, just like asian-looking americans did while the ww2 was going on.
How to have large swathes of the military join the protestors, step 1.
People IMO VASTLY overestimate the popularity of the Republicans among the troops. It probably breaks about the same way as the general populace, and as far as being willing to follow orders to march against protestors, the troops that would do it are probably more worried about their own fellow soldiers turning on them than they are about being reprimanded for saying no.
That might be the point. Deploy the military in a low stakes situation to see who listens. Kick all the defactors out of the military. Then, when you actually need them, you are left with a military full of loyalists.
I think attempting that would instantly prompt an international crisis for no reason other than the fact that the US would instantly be reduced to a sliver of its usual operating military strength.
Forget the military turning on itself, at that point the EU are sending troops over for an intervention.
It's not that easy. You could lose the wrong kind of people, let leaders, have rank imbalance. It's not one big pool of people. I mean what if 70% refuse? We just neuter ourselves?
Good thing they sent a strong message to rioters that the consequences for storming the Capitol to overturn an election is... maybe a couple of years in prison maximum. I'm sure that's enough to dissuade Trump from trying again. He wouldn't want to hurt his supporters, would he? /s (every sentence)
"The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which removed the military from regular civil law enforcement, was enacted in response to the abuses resulting from the extensive use of the army in civil law enforcement during the Civil War and the Reconstruction. The Act allows legislated exceptions."
I mean, I guess, they could try... but then they would be delivering unlawful orders to the military. That likely won't go the way they think it will go.
Because, as we've seen, Trump would totes follow the Rule of Law...then again, who needs silly things like Laws when you become the self-declared Lord Emperor after "fixing" America.
My personal theory is that I'm taking him at his word. He disagrees with military policy of facilitating transfers of personnel in support of reproductive rights.
"abuses... during the Civil War and the Reconstruction", as if there wasn't a bunch of states that not only rebelled, but refused to enforce Federal law after the civil war.
They’re going to meet some metaphorical roadblocks along the military chain of command, and they’ll meet physical roadblocks of well equipped citizens who won’t stand for this.
Not to start a conspiracy but I was wondering if the single GOP member holding up all military promotions was all him taking the fall/ getting ready for only promoting those who will follow suit. Hopefully it can't work like that, but it would make sense
This. And also most civilians have a working self-preservation instinct. They will duck and run the moment shots are being fired. Hell, there are even cops who are like this. Everyone who thinks of himself a Rambo will have those sudden tummy aches the moment shit goes down.
There might be pockets of small arms fire and a few civ x mil casualties, but anything beyond that is pure fantasy. It would quickly become a question of "are you willing to go on a kamikaze guaranteed suicide mission to be heard and die at the hands of the US military, now, today, in protest?"
"They can't stop us all!"
True, but you don't have "us" all. You think my 99 year old grandmother is going to fight the US military? What about my friends 5 year old? What about my father in law who cares for another elderly relative and is their only hope of survival? What about my wife who needs regular medication?
There are so many of us who, despite our extreme ideological opposition to fascism simply wouldn't be effective infantry. Hell even most people who regularly hunt deer and shoot guns daily at the range will fall to military tactics, because hunting a garrison of soldiers in vehicles, with air support and explosives, who shoot back, and have been trained in how to reinforce their positions etc is very different to shooting a static paper target that's not behind cover in a straight line ahead of you at eye level.
I reckon, if I got the jump on an unsuspecting soldier who wasn't expecting it, and I was armed, I'd have a 55% chance of murdering him. Add just one other person watching his back and I'd be dead before I could do more than bruise him.
The 2A Fantasy of fighting back against a tyrannical government requires a well-organized militia. Which means putting Sunday school teachers, middle managers, dentists and retail workers through months of boot camp training. During those months, who's fighting?
Just look at Israel / Palestine. We'd be Palestine. Yes, a few guerilla tactics would kill dozens of soldiers, who'd then retaliate and kill thousands of civilians, while the rest of the world goes, "Oh no."
I'll add on that the first part is also a fantasy.
I've known and worked with a lot of "military leadership" over the decades. If they were as heroic and as dedicated to protecting The Constitution as people pretend they are: They would not have waited on January 6th. They would have decided "the exiting president is engaging in a coup and the vice president is MIA. And the Speaker is under siege. Autobots, roll out"
Instead, they sat on their hands and waited to see how things shake out.
Which is what would happen. Martial law? Cool, "this is what we trained for". Putting down uprisings? MAYBE there would be some light hesitation until one gravy seal got overly excited and shot their load off. At which point, the training kicks in and they expect everyone to say "thank you for your service" for the rest of their lives because they put down the insurgents.
Because soldiers are not inherently evil. But they sure do commit a LOT of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And that is because they are indoctrinated to follow orders and care more about "the man in the foxhole next to you" than anyone else.
And the people who make it a career of indoctrinating those dumbass kids and sending them to fuck up the world? They aren't going to be rocking the boat.
I hate this fucking timeline so much. So many in the media seem to be working toward normalizing this obvious march into fascism, and pivoting to stupid horse race bullshit (the average voter thinks Biden is "too old" and so on).
If donnie "wins" the election (likely only the EC again) then this country is just so fucked. It's over at that point.
It's obvious that 2016 is the branching point of where we deviated from the prime timeline. There it's just too much foreshadowing about Hillary being the first female president, and everything seem to go wrong when we killed that gorilla. He Quantum immortalited it so he only died in this shitty timeline
If he wins, we lose our democracy, it's as simple as that. I don't know that it will be permanent since I think that most of our institutions are strong enough to resist or at least slow-walk the implementation of a truly authoritarian state architecture, but it is going to be very ugly and a lot of Americans are going to suffer.
This is not true at all. There are many very powerful people working very hard to make sure that he's not reelected. That you don't know about it says more about you than it does anyone else. You just aren't paying attention.
Honestly, I think that if Trump is in the General Election as a candidate, it could be civil war regardless of who wins. The hard right loves him, and would revolt if he lost, with cries of election stealing, and the hard left would lose their shit that they had to deal with him for another 4 years if he won.
I'm hoping he gets disqualified, though I could see even that ending badly.
At this point, I'm thinking a cabin in the woods is the best bet.
You guys only got one isolated revolt last time, and remarkably anyone who had a gun illegally didn't fire it, and anyone who had them legally didn't fire until it was the last option. Hopefully it won't get out of hand if he loses again, and I feel a whole lot better that someone stable is in charge for the lead up to a potential transfer of power this time.
All that said, I don't have high hopes. Bo Burnham said it best: how is the best case scenario Joe Biden
I don't think he knows how the military works. I served in the USMC, they're people. We aren't any different. If you ask the military to start terrorizing people, well those are the friends and family of those troops. They won't mindlessly abandon all morals.
I'm pretty sure he tried, but institutions held and the military didn't let him get away with it.
I think Gen. Mark Milley was on-guard against Trump's antics (especially after he got tricked into appearing in uniform with Trump for that upside-down Bible photo-op) and that through the end of Trump's term, Milley stood firmly against use of the military against civilians or for political purposes.
But if Trump really were to be elected again, who will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under his new administration?
lmao. You must be one of those "Joe Biden is a leftist" idiots if you think leftists inherently have any problem with an insurrection. The problem with the January 6th riot was that it was a bunch of Christofascists trying to install a fascist regime, not that they desecrated our holy institutions or some other liberal claptrap.
Edit: NVM, checked comment history, you are just a dumbass fascist.
If he legitimately wins, the country is not worth saving, in my leftist opinion. I hope my beloved country isn't lost enough to let that happen. I'm going to focus on making sure he loses. Then we'll just have to deal with his next coup attempt.