Thom Hartmann, AlterNet
November 15, 2024
Stephen Miller, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner listen as Donald Trump speaks onstage following early results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County Convention Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he’d merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term’s personally profitable crony capitalism.
While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he’s just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that, when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours), within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.
Taking down the free press in Germany and imprisoning dissidents and journalists took Hitler only three months, about the same as Mussolini and Pinochet.
America’s right-wing oligarchs are apparently ready for the fun to begin: Elon Musk tweeted last week that it’ll soon be time to use the force of law and the Department of Justice to prosecute the people at The Center for Countering Digital Hatewho’ve been relentless in outing Nazis on Xitter. (Musk just lost a lawsuit to them.)
But even though they moved quickly, Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and Duterte didn’t start with journalists; they started with the most marginalized and least powerful people in their nations. For Hitler it was trans people he went after within his first two weeks; for Duterte it was drug addicts.
Pinochet and Mussolini arrested vulnerable working class supporters of their opposition political parties who dared show up in the streets to demonstrate against them.
So, who’s the weakest here in America? While Trump campaigned against trans people (just like Hitler had in 1933), it looks like he has another group in mind for his first genocide.
Trump has his sights on undocumented Black and Hispanic migrants to begin the state-sponsored violence and inure the American public to what will eventually come for many more of us.
Get ready for midnight doorknocks by men with guns starting in January. Particularly if you or anybody in your extended family has a last name that ends with a vowel or a z, or even if you simply have black hair and brown eyes.
Trump and Thomas Homan are on the case.
Homan notoriously ran ICE during the last Trump administration and is often considered, along with Stephen Miller, as the father of Trump’s brutal child-separation policy that traumatized so many thousands of young families and has left about 1,000 youngsters trafficked into pop-up “Christian” adoption services missing to this day.
Alone. Frightened. Not knowing where their parents are or if they’ll ever see them again.
Homan also helped write part of the immigration policies for Project 2025 - and famously bragged to CBS that if he found families with “illegal” members in this country, he’d simply deport the entire family, US citizens or not.
When asked by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Homan barely took a breath before asserting, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
America has done this before, and the results were ugly.
In the 1920s, Republican President Herbert Hoover initiated a nationwide roundup and deportation of people of mostly Mexican ancestry. Police and border agents simply went house-to-house in Hispanic neighborhoods from Arizona to Alaska, often kicking in doors and dragging out people who couldn’t immediately prove their citizenship. As many as 2 million people with Hispanic last names were arrested.
As a result, an estimated 40% to 60% of the people arrested, detained, and deported were actually US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. Because they were deported without proof of citizenship (often because of home births without hospital records), however, they were never able to return to the US.
During WWII, American employers encouraged Mexicans to come to the US to fill jobs vacated by US citizens who’d been drafted and sent off to war.
After the war, President Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback and essentially replicated Hoover’s program; an estimated 300,000 to 1.1 million people were similarly dragged from their homes. Nobody is certain how many were US citizens, but estimates range from 30% to as many as 60%.
Again, because they weren’t able to instantly prove citizenship when the police arrived at their homes, they had no way to get back into the US once they were dumped in Mexico.
If Trump’s leading candidate for Attorney General, Mike Davis, assumes that role he’ll almost certainly back up Holman’s efforts, even if millions of US citizens are seized, imprisoned, and deported. He’s the guy, after all, who just tweeted:
“Fuck unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump.” And “Here’s my current mood: I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)”
The fact that Trump and the people around him are giddy about going after Hispanics and other Black and Brown immigrants from “shithole countries” answers the question everybody is asking about how brutal his second administration could become.
It’s going to be rough. Get ready.
Stephen Miller has already said he’s gleefully going to try to undo the citizenship of naturalized US citizens (presumably not the Norwegians, though) so he can throw them into the concentration camps along with the “illegals”:
And if you you’re a natural born citizen with an Hispanic last name or live anywhere near Hispanics and have black hair and brown eyes, be sure to get your proof of citizenship ready and carry it with you at all times, even when you sleep.
And the rest of us? No dictator in history has ever started a violent inquisition attacking the weakest in society — and they all begin there — without soon extending his terror against every person he thought opposed him or who represented a challenge to his power.
The smug media idiots who’ve been sanewashing Trump for yearswill either roll over (as has already begun) or end up in jail themselves, along with many of us on Substack and in the progressive press.
As JD Vance recently said, implying the thought and speech police will soon be coming for Trump’s critics:
“You cannot lie, take your position of public trust, and lie to the American people for political purposes. It’s disgraceful. And people have to suffer consequences for it.”
Welcome to Trump’s version of hell. And welcome to the resistance.
Since being elected to be the 47th President of the United States last week, Donald Trump has moved quickly to fill his cabinet with both Washington insiders and outsiders, but all unified under an ultra-conservative agenda and a complete loyalty to Trump.
Peoples Dispatch has compiled a list of notable appointments below:
Thomas Homan: “Border Czar”
Homan was the head of ICE during Trump’s first term, and has been selected to lead up Trump’s campaign promise to conduct mass deportations of 15 to 20 million people. Homan pledged at the Republican National Convention that he would “run the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen” and promised to “flood sanctuary cities” with agents to conduct mass arrests, and carry out massive raids targeting workplaces. He was given the “Presidential Rank Award” by Barack Obama in 2015 for his work in “enforcement and removal operations.” Obama himself was dubbed the “Deporter in Chief” by immigration activists for deporting more people than any president who came before him.
Stephen Miller: Deputy chief of staff for policy
Miller is another pick that signals that Trump is serious regarding his campaign promise to carry out the largest mass deportations in US history. Miller is the architect of the cruelest anti-immigrant policies of the first Trump administration, such as family separation, and a key bridge between the Trump administration and the “alt-right” fascist movement. Miller supports deploying military units of the National Guard to hunt down undocumented people, and advocates for the construction of massive camps to detain immigrants rounded up in raids.
Marco Rubio: Secretary of State
Trump’s choice of Florida Senator Marco Rubio for Secretary of State has surprised some who wanted to believe Trump’s campaign promise of “preventing World War III”. Rubio is a notorious warhawk, known for promoting an aggressive foreign policy approach towards countries that do not tip-toe around the US, including Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. Rubio’s appointment could be a test of whether the Trump administration will lean more neoconservative than promised or whether Rubio will be forced to toe a more isolationist foreign policy line.
Rubio, who is of Cuban descent, has a particular hostility towards the socialist state and is a key promoter of harsh sanctions against the island. Rubio has also attacked left-wing social movements within the United States, attempting to use the power of the state to harshly sanction the BDS movement and pro-Palestine and leftist organizations.
Michael Waltz: National Security Adviser
US Army colonel and Florida Representative Michael Waltz is also a notorious warhawk, particularly on China and Iran. During Trump’s first administration, after he almost provoked war with Iran with his assassination of General Qassim Suleimani in 2020, Waltz was one of a small group invited to the White House to receive a briefing on the strike.
Matt Gaetz: Attorney General
Trump loyalist and Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is a prominent figure in the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party, leading the charge to overthrow the more established Republican Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House—who was replaced with Mike Johnson in 2023. Gaetz, like Trump, is no stranger to scandal, being embroiled in a three-year long federal sex trafficking investigation that ended in 2023.
Pete Hegseth: Secretary of Defense
Hegseth is a controversial Fox News host and military veteran, who is known for his advocacy on behalf of former members of the military who have been convicted of war crimes. This includes lobbying in defense of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, who was accused of stabbing a teenaged prisoner of war to death and shooting a teenage girl and elderly man while deployed in Iraq. Since Trump picked Hegseth, his collection of right-wing tattoos has gotten some media attention, which includes a tattoo across his arm of the medieval crusader slogan “Deus Vult,” which translates to “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and signals his political leanings towards the Christian far right.
Kristi Noem: Secretary of Homeland Security
Noem is the current Governor of South Dakota who’s known for her total loyalty to Trump. Noem’s deeply anti-migrant agenda has led her to claim that the “United States of America is in a time of invasion” as a consequence of immigrants “waging war against our nation.” Noem supported the Muslim ban during Trump’s first term because it would restrict refugees from “terrorist hotbed areas.”
John Ratcliffe: CIA Director
Ratcliffe was Trump’s director of national intelligence during his first term. This pick was praised by Republican Representative Mike Turner, who has accused fellow Republican colleagues of repeating Russian propaganda, for helping “counter the serious threats posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.”
Tulsi Gabbard: Director of national intelligence
Trump’s pick of veteran and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as the pick to oversee 18 spy agencies has been welcome news to those more critical of the foreign policy establishment. Gabbard endorsed Trump last month, claiming that Trump would transform the Republican Party “back to the party of the people, and the party of peace.”
Steven Witkoff: Special envoy to the Middle East
Witkoff is a Zionist multi-millionaire real estate investor and close personal friend of Trump’s, with zero prior experience in politics in the Middle East/West Asia region.
Mike Huckabee: Ambassador to Israel
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and ardent Evangelical Christian is likely to continue his long career of defending Israel in his new post. Huckabee once argued that there was “no such thing as a Palestinian” and recently claimed that the US would back an Israeli attempt to annex the West Bank.
Elise Stefanik: United Nations ambassador
The conservative New York representative went viral for her role in orchestrating the downfall of several prominent university presidents, including former Harvard President Claudine Gay, over the accusation that these presidents were not repressing pro-Palestine students enough. Stefanik is viewed as one of the most prominent enemies of the student movement in the US.
Lee Zeldin: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator
Trump’s pick of Zeldin as EPA Administrator signals that Trump is ready to make good on his campaign promise to attack key environmental protections that are one of the few ways the US government attempts to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
The world’s richest person, who in many ways directly bought votes for Trump in key swing states such as Pennsylvania, has been promised a formal role in Trump’s administration alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, through the new commission dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (the acronym referencing an internet meme). DOGE is in many ways designed to help the ultra-rich including Musk slash through government regulations that may place a limit on power and profit.
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