Some might call my title hysteric, but how else are you supposed to interpret Trump speaking to American generals today and saying, “The ones that are run by radical left Democrats — what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. They’re very unsafe places and we’re gonna straighten them out one by one. This is gonna be a major part for some people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s war from within.”
What happened today is the kind of chilling authoritarianism that would be a lot more chilling if adults were doing it instead of president bone spurs and the dumbest man to ever appear on American television. If President/Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney surrounded by competent viziers like Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove were up there giving this speech, I would probably not be writing titles like “Study: Don’t Give Up Hope.” As I have written many times this year, this is fascism, but we are extremely lucky that it’s the most incompetent and harebrained fascism that mankind has ever seen.
I trollishly put sleepy in the title to evoke Trump’s nickname for Joe Biden, because Trump was very Biden-y today. I asked whether Trump knows what’s going on yesterday after Trump shared then deleted an AI generated video of himself announcing he’s giving everyone “medbeds,” among other weekend confusions, and today he gave additional credence to my mounting Brandon accusations. This is pretty similar cadence and incoherence to Biden at the debate last year, all while he told our enemies about one of our most closely-guarded secrets you simply do not even talk about. To put in perspective what Trump did here with the “nuclear” quip, Jonathan and Diana Toebbe were sentenced to 19 and 21 years in prison in 2022 for selling secrets related to our nuclear submarines.
Trump explicitly declared war against Democratic cities in front of generals today while telling China and Russia where our dead man’s switches are, while his widely alleged alcoholic Defense Secretary lectured them on staying in shape and yelled at “fat” generals while I assumed his liver banged on his sides begging to be freed from this hell. It’s very telling that every time these guys try to put on a fascist spectacle, it just looks like a special episode of Fox & Friends. Pete Hegseth was in full Fox News mode in front of dear leader today, who put him in this position explicitly because he likes him on the teevee. At the end of his speech, Hegseth gave away the game on the scripted safe space these people live in, pausing for applause and getting none in front of an audience whose entire ethos is to be apolitical, which you would know if you were an actual soldier with real military accomplishments, or even just a sentient human who lives in broader society at least somewhat tethered to objective reality.
And after 40 minutes of cringe-Thunderous applause from the generals!
These people are pathetic. Do not cower in front of them. The tools of the state they wield are scary, but we have plenty of reporting and polling at this point demonstrating how unnerved much of our military is by this attempt to turn them into Trump’s Praetorian Guard. It is far from a certainty that they will follow his inevitable orders to shoot American citizens. And let’s be clear, that’s very obviously where this is headed. Rachel Maddow obtained video of the Deputy Attorney General of the United States ordering ICE agents to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. Trump wants these generals to swear an oath to him, not the constitution. We are simply just watching Stephen Miller move pawns around on the chessboard all day while Grandpa Fox News shares AI videos of himself.
Trump opens with a threat to the generals:
“I’ve never walked into a room so silent … Have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud … If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future. but you just feel nice and loose.”
Even if you are going full illogical doomer and assuming there will never be elections again (if this was the case, why would the GOP go through the trouble of stealing seats in Texas?), fascism still needs public support to survive. There are examples across the world where the armed services side with protesters over the regime, and it’s in part due to the government’s unpopularity. Even if you strip all the idealistic notions from these revolutionary events, there’s a very simple self-serving motive for the troops at the base of this dynamic that has repeated itself throughout history.
Unpopular regimes who kidnap and torture and weaponize the armed services against their people inevitably have uprisings against them, and the armed services at that point have to ask themselves whether they would rather side with popular will and become heroes like the military in Egypt in 2013 by forcing the regime out of power (Egypt since has shown the danger with this dynamic comes in whether or not military rule ever gets suspended afterwards), or the troops can stay loyal to the unpopular regime and spend the coming years fighting guerilla tactics across the country. A lot of folks have naturally assumed the latter is inevitable, but that viewpoint is more informed by movies and TV shows than any kind of known political science. A Military Times poll of active-duty troops in 2020 found that “almost 74 percent of those surveyed disagreed with Trump’s suggestion that active-duty military personnel should be used to respond to civil unrest in American cities, including the ongoing racial equality protests. Only about 22 percent supported the president’s idea.”
The spectacle today was a demonstration of the regime’s fundamental weakness. They are so weak they have to drag generals from across the world and in front of TV cameras so their TV show host can lecture people who have fought in wars about what the word “warfighter” means. Pete Hegseth is the fakest tough guy that mankind has ever produced, an abusive alcoholic–per his own mother–whose greatest achievements before Trump fell in love with his TV shtick were nearly killing someone with an ax and kick-flipping a skateboard into his balls on live TV. This is slapstick fascism.
So seriously, do not give up hope. Trump sent the National Guard into Los Angeles, and they slept on the ground and milled around and did nothing and this whole spectacle destroyed troop morale. He has sent his goons to Chicago and then realized it was more trouble than he thought and diverted some to Memphis, and now local Chicago police are investigating his goons over an attack on a journalist. What these people want is not inevitable, and while the elite capitulation to Trump this year has been dismaying, we are not condemned to the fascist fate that Gilded America so desperately wants. The Trump administration is overflowing with incompetent idiots, and no competent fascist would antagonize the generals while taking away veterans’ benefits and exposing their friends to our enemies in unencrypted chats the Russians and Chinese are certainly monitoring in real time. What we saw today was the mark of weakness, not strength.
