A DEEPER DIVE into the Chaos
Or, as I now call it, the "Chaos of Peace." The whole world took a deeper dive into chaos this week as the Peace President rapidly expanded his war threats around the globe.
This week Donald J. Trump, the president of the American Empire who never lost a political race, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize by its former recipient, María Corina Machado of Venezuela. Machado lavished the new prize winner with praise over his rapid overthrow of the tyrannical Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s one-time and long-time president, who had managed to turn its abundant and fertile oil fields into a dung heap of rusted and barely functional steel.
Machado claimed that President Trump deserved the coveted Nobel award more than she by far. He did, after all, beat George Bush’s regime-changing record of 100 days to victory with a nearly bloodless war that took less than 100 hours to fly the banners of “Mission Accomplished” over Venezuela. Trump gladly accepted the award the reward for most-rapid regime change as he announced that he was replacing the old socialist regime in Venezuela with a new socialist regime.
Mr. Trump took to social media several hours later to thank her.
“María presented me with her Nobel Peace Prize for the work I have done,” he wrote. “Such a wonderful gesture of mutual respect. Thank you María!…”
Ms. Machado had repeatedly dedicated the prize to Mr. Trump and praised the U.S. military operation nearly two weeks ago that ousted Venezuela’s longtime authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Trump has made clear that he thought he had deserved the prize, saying he had ended several wars and castigating Norway for overlooking him…. [Most of them being wars that he started and, therefore, could easily end with a single command to disengage.]
It is unclear what Ms. Machado gained out of her meeting with Mr. Trump. After ousting Mr. Maduro, he declined to install her in power, saying that “she’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect” needed to lead the country. (DNYUZ)
Machado, who clearly gave the gift hoping the grift would help her secure the Venezuelan presidency from the beneficent hands of its new ruler, may just wind up with no prize, no peace and no presidency.
In an unseemly attempt to muffle the president’s mirth, the Nobel Committee stated publicly that President Trump was just agreeing to store the award in a prominent location at Mar-a-Lago, which has proved to be a Fort-Knox-level storage facility for some of the nation’s top classified secret files, as well as a few choice Epstain Files that the president has chosen to protect from public scrutiny for the sake of the victims who have begged for full disclosure.
Demonstrating the president’s commitment to transparency, the president’s attorney General, Pam Blondi, assured the press this week that her Department of Justice was doing an outstanding job of releasing the secret files, given the reams and reams of redactions that are necessary to keep its secrets contained for the security of said victims. Blondi noted this week that the DoJ has assigned 500 redactors to poring through the files in order to pour black ink over the files in order to blot out all important information.
It was reported earlier that one hacker was able to remove the electronic redactions, proving that the victims behind the blackouts were the friends of Donald Trump who had cavorted with underage girls. The DoJ had not realized that its Adobe digital redactions could be digitally unredacted. Such is the high competence of Team Blondi.
Demonstrating his support to the DoJ’s Democratic Transparency Project, the president of the United States flipped off a Ford factory worker earlier in the week who wrongfully accused him, the president’s press secretary claimed, of protecting pedophiles who had once operated freely within the Mar-a-Lago file fortress. After flipping the presidential bird, the president also told the worker to “duck off” and proudly announced to all other Ford workers that many of them would be replaced this year with AI-enabled robots that would improve their working conditions and help them share in America’s new prosperity because AI is a gift to humanity that the president is working hard to accelerate by adding American tax money to the coffers of billionaires. (Just reporting the news as it is, versus as the same facts were worded by the president in his Ford theater speech.)
Crude government
With his Venezuelan Victory fresh in the news again due to his new award for protecting world peace, the president also happily announced this week that he had already sold his first half-billion dollars worth of Venezuelan crude oil to an unnamed recipient. As further evidence of the transparency of the Trump regime, he also said the money from the redacted sale would all go into an offshore bank account somewhere in Qatar, as is now standard Trump Treasury protocol.
This he would do so that the American and Venezuelan public could be sure that none of the money was going to the president or his cronies but that it would be safeguarded for the Venezuelan people because everyone understands that Big-Bank America certainly cannot be trusted to safeguard the funds from the president, who has been making it clear this week that he also runs the nation’s central bank.
Moving the money to a bank in the Middle East, the American president oddly assured (and you don’t even have to make this stuff up) would protect the money from US sanctions. (Well, he only said it would protect the money from sanctions; however, as the US is is the long-established leader of all sanctioning nations, one must presume no sanction goes into place without American approval … or demand.)
Besides, Qatar had given the president a very nice $400-million airplane earlier this year, so putting a similar amount of dollars made from Venezuelan oil money in one of the middle-eastern nation’s oily banks was a nice reciprocal gift of a appreciation. It’s how business is properly done.
Not disclosing the buyer of this US oil—now that the US owns all Venezuelan oil—is also how businesses is properly done by the transparent Trump regime because they’ve realized that redacting names ahead of time will make it easier to comply with likely congressional mandates to release files about these offshore oil transactions in a timely manner by legal deadlines.
The president’s elated disclosure of his first foray into major oil sales fresh from his victory on Venezuelan soil, did help prove once and for all that regime-changing wars are never about the oil or the soil. They are about helping the people of the invaded country … always! Protection of the name of the buyer also helps assure that the public will never know if the oil went to one of Trump’s top billionaire campaign supporters, a guy Paul Singer, who recently bought Citgo, the American arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.
As mentioned here earlier in The Daily Doom, Singer bought Citgo for a song, paying dimes on the dollar for the Venezuelan-oil producer when US courts ordered its sale to one of Singer’s companies shortly ahead of Trump’s invasion. The court-ordered sale came because the Venezuela state-owned rig was unable to pay its bonds due to typical commie mismanagement … and possible due to Trump’s embargo on Venezuelan oil. The president keeps his reputation clear of sending billion-dollar windfall deals to his most loyal supporters by keeping their names well-redacted out of his deal disclosures.
As the president’s oil embargo also achieves the collapse of Cuba, the president announced at the start of the week that he has pretty well settled on Marco Rubio to become the new leader of Cuba as his nation-building succeeds (and you don’t have to make this stuff up either, as the president is more than happy to announce his successes before they happen as that increases the number of announced successes considerably). This particular successful regime change is now assured, in the president’s mind, by Cuba’s total dependence on Venezuelan crude for its energy supply, including its electrical energy). Some deft political calculus on the president’s part.
The former Castro regime, which took decades for the US to weaken, is now squeaking badly in extreme need of oil, sounding like its bearings are going to burn out any week now. Because Cuba is soon to be completely without fuel or electricity, the president is confident he will soon have a nation for his Secretary of State to rule as civil war in Cuba accomplishes the next regime change for him.
Putting greenbacks on Greenland
On other war fronts, the US Peace President, emboldened by his Venezuelan Victory, has successfully consolidated the United State’s European NATO allies against the US. This includes long faithful allies Britain plus Canada, now solidly against the US as a hostile state. This he accomplished in a day by instructing his generals to prepare a plan for invading Greenland.
Other NATO allies also proclaimed the US their common enemy and have formed a sub alliance against the United States now by moving troops from their nations onto the great block of ice that is primarily famous for creating the iceberg that sank the Titanic, one of Greenland’s greatest historic achievements.
The president has proclaimed that any land capable of sinking unarmed cruise ships with such stealth (and wealth beneath its surface) with such rapid success is certainly essential for US security. Again, the president’s press secretary spoke up this week to assure the world that the sudden rally of allies against their ally, the US, along with their stationing of troops to fight the US in Greenland if it goes there, does not in any way deter the president’s plans of seizing Greenland, an island that doesn’t have a dot of green on it, but apparently has a vast treasure of rare-earth minerals under its shiny white veneer.
The president again explained that full US ownership of Greenland, even if it has to happen by US military invasion, is essential to protecting Greenland from invasion by Russia and China, which have both disavowed any interest in ever invading Greenland, and which have never shown any inclination of wanting to take Greenland.
Greenlanders should be honored to have our free protection because, as the president explained, a single nation owning Greenland is clearly better able to defend the frost-bit island from an invasion that has never shown any signs of happening than would be the case if that same nation protected it with the help of numerous dedicated NATO allies who fiercely guard European lands. Clearly one nation alone is stronger than that same nation and many others perfectly united in their protection of the icy frontier. (Russia did note, as an aside, that Greenland probably does produce some essential beluga caviar, which the Kremlin craves; and, OK, I am finally making that part up. For the rest, the facts on the ground write their own comedy of errors.)
NATO leaders warned this week an attack by the US on Greenland (Denmark) would effectively turn into the total disbanding of NATO. That would be a big mission accomplished for the president. That is because winning his war over Greenland—now that European troops are stationed there to defend it from US invasion—means the president would have to slaughter numerous Europeans fighting on the other side of the NATO alliance to protect Greenland from a hostile NATO takeover.
In all of these acts of war around the world, the president is lighting long-establish national boundaries on fire. He’s encouraging other nations all over the world to do as he does and question and probe those boundaries, including China and Russia. He’s breaking the longstanding NATO solidarity that has insisted on keeping all national boundaries exactly where they are as a primary way of avoiding wars.
That puts all boundary location back up for grabs. It’s when you trespass that the owners of the land you are trespassing on might start shooting at you. Trespassing where you are not wanted has tended to work that way all over the world for thousands of years. So, expect US examples of national trespassing to set the stage for other nations to start trying the same thing, igniting more wars around the world as a result of US advocacy for “testing the boundaries” if you have the power to do so because, as Steven Miller has said, “might is right.”
This week, Ms Frederiksen [Denmark’s Prime Minister] said: “If the US chooses to attack another NATO country, everything stops, including NATO and the security the alliance has provided since World War II.”
Many people on the right—tired of the wars the neocon Right has started—may say NATO needs to go anyway. However, they should probably note that their primary reason for that has been all of NATO’s nation building and regime change operations. All most all of that was driven by neocons on the Right. In that case, the primary problem with NATO is the US because it is almost always the one pushing for those actions. Stop the US from starting wars, and the NATO problem will diminish greatly or even go away. Trump has merely decided to do the same thing without NATO’s support and against a NATO nation.
The president also attempted a non-hostile bid that offered 100,000 greenbacks to each Greenlander to ditch Denmark and join the US, but they told him where he could stuff it because “we don’t want to be Americans.” Oddly, Canadians said the same thing to the president’s overtures of love.
The president also said he would use his favorite fighting tactic of laying siege by imposing additional tariffs on any European country that stands in the way of his taking over Greenland. The now constant weaponization of the global trade currency now has many nations doing all they can to ditch the dollar.
Trump suffers MAGAbites
The president is also accelerating the disbanding of MAGA, a breakup that has been slowly building during his first successful year in office. The most strident bite this week came from a Republican member of congress who announced that seizing Greenland was the dumbest thing he had ever heard and was such an affront to a long stable alliance that he would be voting for impeachment of the Republican president if the president moved forward with his audacious plans.
The president, who clearly tries his best at every turn to avoid unnecessary conflict, was not reported in the press to have said, as he usually does, that the member of congress is an obvious loser in the next election cycle; but, of course, the press was busy that day covering the presidential bird-flipping at a Ford factory worker, who shall soon be unemployed. Nevertheless, this was the first promised vote for impeachment by a Republican if the president starts a war to take Greenland.
Another Republican senator made it clear that Republicans will band together against the president if he actually starts to move the military into an actionable stance against Greenland:
“If there was any sort of action that looked like the goal was actually landing in Greenland and doing an illegal taking … there’d be sufficient numbers here to pass a war powers resolution and withstand a veto,” Tillis said….
A bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers are in Copenhagen Friday to try to drive home in person the message that military action does not have support on Capitol Hill.
“Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think that’s what you’re hearing with this delegation,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said after meeting with Danish and Greenlandic leaders there….
The pushback amounts to one of the most profound breaches yet seen between GOP lawmakers and the president in Trump’s second term. So far the Republican uneasiness over Trump’s brash foreign policy moves have not resulted in any successful steps to restrain him….
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, spoke out in a floor speech where he said military action against Greenland would be “an unprecedented act of strategic self-harm” that risks “incinerating” NATO alliances.
Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), meanwhile, said he was “deeply concerned” about the administration’s Greenland message.
“I don’t think it is productive, and I don’t think this is the way to treat an ally,” he said, adding that he “would be opposed to military action in Greenland.”
You would think basic decency would tell you that is not how you treat friends.
It looks like Greenland could soon deliver enough MAGA votes over to Marjorie Taylor Greene to help her form her own MAGA as she now rallies routinely against her former sycophantic love interest. She’ll issue green caps and call it Make America Greene Again.
However, this one threat of impeachment over the president’s military threats against Greenland was not the only breakdown in what has, until this month, been an ironclad grip on the Republican Party:
Thursday was arguably the worst day for the incumbent president since he returned to power almost a year ago.
One of the setbacks came in the GOP-led House, where a Democratic discharge petition to revive and extend Affordable Care Act insurance subsidies passed the chamber on a 230-196 vote. In all, 17 House Republicans sided with the Democratic minority — more than members of either party expected — suggesting bipartisan concern about the health care coverage benefits that Republicans let expire on Jan. 1.
That move against Trump did Marjorie Taylor Greene proud because she had already split with he president over this issue (and over his blocking release of the Eptain Files) after years of giving him rock-solid, lap-dog, sycophantic support.
Trump’s other, more dramatic setback happened in the Senate on Thursday afternoon. My MS NOW colleague Mychael Schnell reported:
In a rare bipartisan rebuke of President Donald Trump on Thursday, the Senate narrowly advanced a war powers resolution aimed at reining in U.S. military actions in Venezuela — an early sign that Trump may not have the congressional backing he anticipated for an extended military presence there.
In a 52-47 vote, senators agreed to begin debate on a war powers resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that, if successful, would ‘direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.’
As the dust settled, many observers were surprised to see that five Senate Republicans had voted with the Democratic minority on the bipartisan legislation.
Senate Democrats, led in large part by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, repeatedly tried to advance war powers resolutions in 2025, only to fall short in the face of GOP opposition. This time, however, as Trump pursues a legally dubious and highly controversial course of action in Venezuela, the effort succeeded.
It used to be that people would dismiss this president’s military threats against other lands as mere rhetoric, intended to add force to his strongman deal making. However, his successful capture of Venezuela’s president in the Hundred Minute War proved he’s dead serious about using the US military against small countries that do not do his bidding and that have abundant mineral rights, as do both the Danish territory of Greenland and Venezuela. Some Republicans are finally starting to feel the need to rein in the militarization of Trump’s natural aggression.
So, MAGA is melting down quickly now from its formerly ironclad enablement of anything the president wanted to decree. We may be starting to remember why we have a congress. Or, at least, congress is starting to remember why we have a congress and not just a king.
Mi Mexico
Because all of that hardly added up to enough new wars for one week, the president also said, just a little over a week ago, he will soon be moving troops onto the ground in Mexico.
“We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview aired Thursday night.
“The cartels are running Mexico, it’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country,” Trump said.
So, we are going to save Mexico from the drug lords because it is the United State’s responsibility, as we all know, to police the world and solve the problems of others on the backs of our own taxpayers. That, the president believes, is why MAGA elected him … to do more of the same but on steroids.
Mexico seems to be under the misconception that it is a sovereign nation and that the US is a friend.
Trump also wants to say I ran Iran
Still short on wars for the week, the president also prepared for an imminent attack on Iran. He incited Iranians to rebel against their Supreme Leader by promising US backing. He said he would make war on their government if Iran’s leadership continued killing protesters. That seemed to fuel protestors in Tehran, who tripped the light fantastic and lit the town on fire.
European officials clearly believed Trump was planning to begin a war with Iran within just twenty-four hours:
US military intervention in Iran could come in the next 24 hours, two European officials said on Wednesday evening, Reuters reported.
An unnamed Israeli official also said it appeared US President Donald Trump had decided to intervene, though the scope and timing remained unclear.
In fact, Israel was so certain that Trump intended to start a war with Iran this past week that none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted publicly that Israel had been weakened by Iran’s retaliation over the president’s previous bombing of Iran nuclear sites to such an extent it might not be able to defend itself from war: (That is the kind of admission we have never heard an Israeli Prime Minister make.)
Netanyahu’s message was blunt: Israel has expended enormous interceptor resources during last year’s direct exchanges with Iran, and Jerusalem does not believe the Islamic Republic’s regime would collapse quickly in response to limited strikes. That sober assessment, shared quietly among Israeli defense planners, was a decisive factor in Trump’s surprise decision to postpone an attack many observers expected between Wednesday and Thursday night….
The Netanyahu–Trump conversation, which took place Wednesday, underscored a shared Israeli concern echoed by military analysts such as Ron Ben-Yishai: limited strikes on Iran may satisfy political optics but fail strategically. Israeli leaders fear such an approach would invite massive retaliation without delivering decisive results, leaving Israel to absorb the bulk of the missile fire while Iran’s regime remains intact.
In short, Israel is preparing for the possibility of a long war, but is deeply skeptical of being dragged into a short one that changes nothing.
Several comments emerged inside Israel about it not having enough missiles left for Iron Dome to outlast anything but a very short conflict. Israel said it was not shunning a war but that it needed time to build back up in order to be ready for the war. Perhaps Israel thought Trump’s first attack on Iran was a very limited engagement that changed nothing but cost them a lot of defense ordinance.
Apparently Trump’s war threats and actions toward readiness are running out ahead of even talking with allies in the region that would be most directly impacted by such a war. Such conversations between executives are normally part of the planning that goes on in secret before any major attack in an allies back yard.
The delay stunned allies after days of hawkish rhetoric from Washington. Trump abruptly declared that Iran had halted the killing of protesters, an assertion that reportedly ran counter to U.S. intelligence assessments. Behind the scenes, administration officials briefed Gulf partners that Trump’s immediate objective was not regime change, but pressure: forcing Tehran to visibly ease its internal crackdown.
Well, if it was all bluff to get Iran to stop killing protesters, it was a strong enough bluff to stun Netanyahu into his own evasive actions because the Prime Minister’s plane bolted away from Israel in a defensive move to keep the PM out of harm’s way. Israel said that was just a planned routine drill of such protective actions; but, then, that is what they could be expected to say whether it was a drill or not. You never want to tell the people of your country the president is leaving to get out of harm’s way.
Israel also issued emergency instructions to all of its hospitals to be ready for a rapid shift to emergency operations
US planning for war with Iran reached “advanced stages” according to an anonymous official. You can’t trust that anonymous officials even exist, but then you can’t trust that the president is not pushing hard for an attack either. Trump appears to be itching to start wars everywhere at once so badly that …
Several Middle Eastern allies of the United States have urged the Trump administration to hold off on strikes against Iran for the government’s deadly crackdown on protesters, according to an Arab diplomat familiar with the matter.
Top officials from Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have raised concerns in the last 48 hours that a U.S. military intervention would shake the global economy and destabilize an already volatile region.
It may have all been bluff, but Venezuela and the former strike on Iran say it likely was not. They, at least, say one would be a fool to assume so. In fact, we also read that …
The United States is withdrawing some personnel from key bases in the region as a precaution amid heightened regional tensions, Reuters reported earlier on Wednesday, citing an unnamed US official.
Certainly a good bluff involves more than words. Taking actions that look like preparation for an attack are part of establishing a solid bluff. You know, like lining up the navy in the waters around Caracas, Venezuela,… or like Putin was believed to be bluffing when he lined up hundreds of tanks outside Ukraine. Those were just bluffs or training exercises, too.
Our allies either believed it or were in on the bluff:
Britain is also withdrawing some personnel from an airbase in Qatar ahead of possible strikes by the United States, the … newspaper reported on Wednesday, mirroring the US….
Polish citizens should leave Iran immediately, the Polish foreign ministry said on Wednesday….
The US urged its citizens to leave Iran, and advised them to consider departing by land to Turkey or Armenia, according to a notice released on Tuesday by the US virtual embassy in Tehran.
“US citizens should leave Iran now. Consider departing Iran by land to Turkiye or Armenia, if safe to do so,” the notice said….
Personnel were instructed specifically to depart the US military’s Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar by Wednesday evening, according to Reuters, amid warnings from Washington that it could intervene to protect protesters in Iran….
Al Udeid is the Middle East’s largest US base, housing around 10,000 troops….
Earlier on Wednesday, a senior Iranian official told Reuters that Iran warned regional countries that it would strike US military bases in those countries in case of a US attack….
Trump also warned Iran against retaliating against the US, saying that if it did so, the US would respond at levels “never seen before.”
An effective bluff? It certainly all sounded and looked like war would break out as quickly as 24 hours. However, Trump said in the past week or so that he uses his unpredictability to coerce nations into doing what he wants them to do. That unpredictability by a mercurial president was made real by starting an actual war in Venezuela, decapitating the regime, and seizing and selling its oil, and then threatening to do the same to many nations surrounding Venezuela.
Is it safer and smarter for US citizens to believe the president is just bluffing or safer and smarter to believe right now that this president is willing to start wars all over the globe to expand his personal power … and, so, needs to have his war powers reined in before he does start more wars (since many of those powers were created by congress voting long ago to abrogate its constitutional war powers over to any president of the United States?
Trump has the whole world believing he has a hair trigger because Venezuela proved he will act rapidly on his threats as did the last brief attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. How far down the road of lighting military fires all over the world do we want to go before we push our members of congress to rein this activity in?
Leavitt added that President Trump is keeping all options on the table and hasn’t ruled out military strikes if Iran continues to kill its own people.
Trump had promised to save the people of Tehran as he said there would be “very strong action” taken against the Ayatollah for the blood spilled.
Sounds like all the usual regime-change/police-the-world/put-US-troops-in-harms-way-to-solve-other-nations’-political-problems garbage that MAGA once said it was going to put a stop to by electing Trump.
The Epstain faded last week
If the president of the United States of Armerica proved nothing else this week, it is that using American arms to change the press news cycle away from the topics you are tired of—a long-favored ploy of many a US president—really does work well because, outside of Blondi boasting about her Republican Redactors, there was not a second left in the week for news about the Epstain Files.
Trump is nothing if not the King of Distractions.
It was practically a stain-free week … other than the American bloodstains inside of an SUV where a mom was shot in the head for almost running into an ICE agent after using her vehicle to intentionally blockade the road with a smug smile to prevent ICE’s advance.
It was here on the homefront of conflict that news media this week finally actually stated the impossible—that Team Trump is starting to scramble for a different approach because it turns out that shooting renegade moms in the head is not a good look for the government when it leaves her little boy crying without a mom for the rest of his life over a day gone bad.
Ice Barbie did her best, all the same, to defend her team of poorly trained cockroaches that scurried out of the nation’s rotting woodwork to attain the opportunity to attack migrants with immunity when jobs were posted with notices that said “no law-enforcement experience necessary.” (Again, you don’t have to make it up. The job announcements for the rapid-hire positions might as well have said, “Have gun, will travel.”)
Here on the Homefront the Peace President also announced that he is seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act in Minnesota to quell the ICE riots that are starting to set fire to the landscape. Ironically, the last time American conservatives seriously feared and prepped for the Insurrection Act was when President Obama was supposedly preparing abandoned Wallmart stores to become detention centers for the very same armed Americans who now hired by ICE, who were going to be captured under Operation Jade Helm. That never actually happened, but now those same groups are capturing people, often mistakenly including US citizens, to take them to Alligator Alcatraz, which makes the rumored Walmart concentration camps look like family-friendly resorts.
According to the theory, Obama was moving military forces throughout the great Republic as the military to start hostile operations inside US urban areas, intended to kill or seize the Right Resistance in a campaign that never actually happened and that did turn out in the end to be nothing more than training for foreign urban conflict, as Obama had said. That is as far as it ever went because no members of the Right Resistance, as I’ll call Proud Boys and others, were ever retained in Wallmart detention centers or shot by the US military under Obama, nor was the Insurrection Act ever deployed by Obama; but the current US president says now may finally be the time to take this particular power of the president off the shelf and put it into action in order to help Make America Great Again.
The need to battle the fires of internal insurrection by trying to turn the nation into a police state is clear proof of a peaceful president, meriting his coveted Nobel prize.
Under the Insurrection Act, he would issue a proclamation. And then he would have the authority, at least unless the courts held that he didn’t, to deploy either active duty troops or to federalize the National Guard and deploy National Guard forces.
And under the Insurrection Act, he can, at least in theory, use them to conduct law enforcement activities. So the Insurrection Act is generally considered to be an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, and that’s the law that normally prohibits federal armed forces from engaging in civilian law enforcement….
The president has the authority to federalize National Guard forces and remove them from state command-and-control when authorized by statute…. If he invoked the Insurrection Act, he would take command-and-control of the National Guard.
That, of course, is the very thing the far more notorious Obama never did. Just the facts, not a justification of anything else Obama did do; but that was a major conspiracy theory that never played out. It just quietly bit the dust and people conveniently forgot they spent a couple of years advocating it, even though Biden never completed the supposed plan either, though he did perpetuate Trump’s national business lockdowns and turn the nation into an Orwellian state beyond anything we had ever seen.
Now Trump sounds like he wants to get back at the courts who just told him he never had the right to deploy the National Guard for ICE enforcement in the manner he did. This he says he will do by deploying the Insurrection Act that would give him that right, if the courts don’t also shoot down his basis for deploying the act.
Critics argue, that the deployment of these ICE agents to Minneapolis and the protests it sparked … was all just a test case to justify invoking the Insurrection Act and potentially deploying the military to Democratic-led cities in this election year.
Like Obama, President Trump …
actually has said that he thinks that U.S. cities should be training grounds for the U.S. armed forces.
The only difference is he plans to use them for law enforcement the US, whereas Obama was training them for urban environments in other nations. So, it kind of looks like the Peace President is doing more to resurrect and fulfill the Jade Helm conspiracy theory than Biden did, only he won’t just moving be moving US troops around in drills. What could be a greater America to live in than one so fractured that the peace must be maintained by military force in our major cities?
If you look at the last nine presidencies combined, not including the first Trump administration, presidents have deployed troops to quell civil unrest or enforce the law only twice. President Trump has deployed troops or requested or attempted deployment of troops seven times in his first year in office.
It is an act intended to be reserved for times of exceptional civil disobedience. Even then, it was not intended as a form extrajudicial execution. Yet, one of Trump’s political allies warned this week that “disobeying the feds means you can get killed.” That is by disobeying them, not by bringing physical violence against them. Certainly, driving a car at an ICE agent can be interpreted as an act of physical violence that requires lethal self defense, though it did not appear the woman in Minneapolis intended to drive over the officer since she turned the car hard to the right; but this Republican Trump supporter is arguing that simply not following orders can get you shot in the head.
Trump ally Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) made a stunning declaration when he told Newsmax that only by obeying commands from federal agents do you “get to keep your life.”
It’s hard to believe any Republicans would ever have argued it would be OK for Obama to shoot Proud Boys in the head if they didn’t follow his agents orders. The Trump administration even declared the illegality of taking videos of ICE in action. Will some now be arguing it’s OK to shoot people in the head if they don’t put their cell phones down when ordered not to record ICE actions? After all, that is what disobeying can now get you.
Perhaps Representative Hunt didn’t mean for his comment to sound that extreme. Maybe he would walk that back or qualify it a little now, but it seems to me rolling out of the military and weaponizing agents with very little police training before they are put on the line is creating a violently charged situation that makes the country every day look more like the police state that the Right once feared Obama would bring about. How much further do we want to let these inclinations go? How much further can they go before the nation is involved in brush fires of civil war all over the country?
All in all, not bad for a single week’s worth of peacemaking! No wonder the president finally earned his Nobel Peace Prize.