I’ll be candid: I have a lot of fear about the authoritarian regime of Donald Trump and the secret police force he wields at his will.
This is nothing new in the history of the modern world. Examples abound, from authoritarian use of the Carabineros in the 1970s under Chile’s dictator, Pinochet; to the SAVAK secret police under the Shah of Iran until 1979; to be replaced by the current morality police, and the Faraja state police under the direct control of the Iranian Supreme Leader; and then, of course, Hitler’s Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany.
And now, under the thumb of Herr Trump, and from the twisted minds of Stephen Miller (pictured) and Frau Blucher, AKA Kristi Noem, we have ICE unleashed on our immigrant population, wielding terror, crazed cruelty and the building of concentration camps. Meanwhile, Trump opponents and those out of favor with the evolving MAGA dictatorship are threatened with absurd lawsuits and imprisonment – from former President Obama to Hillary Clinton – in a mad merry- go-round of unbridled vengeance for perceived disloyalty to the wannabe fuhrer.
To aid in this demented enterprise is Trump’s giant budget bill, which siphons off billions of tax dollars to effectively provide “… more cops to ICE than the FBI and more jails than the federal Bureau of prisons…” according to Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Clinton. All to continue building Trump’s secret police state.
Setting the stage for all of this was the Supreme Court’s ruling, about a year ago, that gifted the President with immunity from any (of his) “actions” taken while in office, and emanating from the blueprint for Project 2025, which Trump, on social media, blithely claims to have never even heard of.
Also in league with all these machinations is the Republican Congressional campaign to rewrite Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution – what the progressive organization Common Cause (commoncause.org) describes as, “an extremist plot to rewrite our Constitution and take away our fundamental rights and freedoms.” All of which is of a piece with the notorious Project 2025 to dismantle civil rights, gut public schools and rob hardworking Americans of their Social Security benefits.
Add to this the redistricting fights – commonly called gerrymandering – currently going on in Texas, while Florida, Missouri and Ohio are waiting in the wings, all an anti-democratic effort to sew up the House for Republicans in the 2026 midterm race.
And Trump is hellbent on using the military, along with a radically-expanding pool of ICE agents under his direct control, to facilitate his efforts, with no concern for unconstitutional precedent. Remember the time he asked Gen. Mark Milley why the military couldn’t just shoot demonstrators in the legs?
All of which reveals the concerted efforts of Trump and his henchmen and women to deconstruct democracy and supplant it with a king who’ll rule by dictate, and if we the public don’t like it, as far as the malignant Republican lackeys are concerned, we can all go merrily to hell.
If this isn’t a replay of Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s, it’s a close second, what with concentration camps and mass arrest of immigrants and others, inhumane incarceration in makeshift and private prisons, or forced deportations to non-native countries.
And that, friends, seems to be the direction in which we’re headed.
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