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Raymond Niles's avatar

Excellent analysis, Rob! You essentialize and tie it all together very well. You create cognitive order out of the Trumpian event chaos. Everything Trump is doing has an underlying modus operandi, and that is power, power for him to exercise over our lives.

It is very disturbing to think that it has happened here. But it has. And we must be realistic and knowledgeable about it so that we can fight back.

I feel better armed for that fight!

Incidentally, it seems that the next signpost of dictatorship will be for a complete defiance of the courts. It seems that we are there already. Trump just recently acknowledged that he can bring back Kilmar Garcia from El Salvador with a simple phone call, but he won’t.

It seems that the Supreme Court is choosing to evade/bury their head in the sand. They hope that if they are quiet the problem will just go away. But it seems very unlikely now that Trump will comply with their 9-0 decision to bring him back.

That means that increasingly Trump is just going to ignore the courts. If a lesser court holds him in contempt, he will just laugh and ignore it. Meanwhile, by choosing to stay silent and not denounce Trump for ignoring their orders, Supreme Court is sending a clear message to Trump: He can do what he wants, the judiciary be damned.

He will have become that “unitary executive” - i.e., dictator - across the entirety of government.

On a slightly different note, I think he has revoked some green cards. Next, he will revoke citizenship - first for naturalized citizens and maybe even for birth citizens. And he will throw American citizens into Bukele’s hell hole, and other to-be-announced hell holes around the world.

And eventually, it will be critics of Trump who will be sent to these hell-holes.

He already has co-opted huge financial and legal resources through his tariff and regulatory attacks on business, and his extortion of law firms and the media.

The path really seems clear. Only my inability to envision such things in America makes me feel this won’t happen. But logically and rationally, I know it will. It is where we are headed.

It is time to fight with all we have.

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Russell Shurts's avatar

What I don't understand is why the police, the military or the state governments won't stand up for the rule of law. I always have held law enforcement in high regard. I would think some of them would not be willing to go along with this. In the end, this coup can only be stopped if someone wielding force refuses to follow his orders.

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