Tyrant Trump's Worst Crimes, Dangers, and Destructions Are Yet to Come
"Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship."
Ralph Nader
Aug 09, 2025
"Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship."
Ralph Nader
Aug 09, 2025
Common Dreams
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” (See, Bruce Fein’s report: Congressional Surrender and Presidential Overreach).
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” (See, Bruce Fein’s report: Congressional Surrender and Presidential Overreach).
This leaked memo exposes an agenda so awful even Trump wants it kept secret
Thom Hartmann
August 9, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as a member of the media raises their hand, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 1, 2025. REUTERS/Jessica Koscielniak
After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out the DOGE operative known as “Big Balls” in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.
None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object.
In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing.
A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.
And they’re not even hiding it anymore.
This isn’t some vague speculation or dystopian what-if. This isn’t a shadowy plot hatched in secrecy. The document was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.
The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment “for years to come.” It uses phrases like “homeland defense” and paints immigration threats as akin to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for “new ideas” on how DHS and DoD can work together on “national security” threats inside the United States.This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about militarization.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about building a political machine with boots and guns that can intimidate or even subdue any opposition.
And it’s already happening. America is rapidly turning into an authoritarian police state.
Over the past two months, Trump has done what no modern president has dared. He sent 4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines.
These weren’t weekend warriors. These were combat-trained infantry troops deployed to performatively surround federal buildings and “support” immigration enforcement while pro-democracy protestors filled the streets.
Marines. In American cities. In June and July. “Guarding” federal offices and intimidating demonstrators.
And now, we’ve learned that smaller units have been sent to Florida and are prepping for deployment to Texas and Louisiana. The memo wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint. A playbook for turning the world’s most powerful military force inward and turning constitutionally protected First Amendment political dissent into a “national security threat.”
Don’t believe Trump’s PR spin or the media’s pretending this isn’t as illegal and anti-democracy as it is. Don’t let the uniforms fool you into thinking this is routine.
This is not normal.
This is not legal.
This is not American.
This memo, which Pete Hegseth and friends didn’t intend you and I would ever be able to read:Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a “homeland defense mission.”
Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to “increase information sharing” and support “nationwide operational planning.”
Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to al-Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.
And it admits, in its own words, that due to the “sensitive nature” of the meeting it documents, “minimal written policy or background” should be preserved.
Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, put it bluntly:
“This speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.”
I’d add, also not seen since the Civil War, when Americans turned their guns on each other and 700,000 of us died. And outlawed a decade after that war with the Posse Comitatus Act. And after the Kent State massacre, we resolved, “Never again.”
Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent “domestic Forever War,” a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of the United States of America.
And that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of the classic dictator’s playbook.
You gin up fear about migrants and minorities. You call them invaders, terrorists, cartel assassins. You blur the line between protest and insurrection. You say cities are out of control. Then you send in the troops. Not to protect, but to occupy. And you call it “national security.”
This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.
And let’s not forget the power grab embedded in all this. When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he did it against the will of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The state fought back in court. A federal judge ruled in California’s favor, but the administration appealed, and for now, the troops can remain under federal control.
That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, “Your Guard is my army now.”
This moment is a test. Of our Constitution. Of our institutions. Of our will.
Because if we let this stand — if we normalize Marines in our cities, Guard troops on our streets, soldiers surveilling residential communities — then we’ve already surrendered.
What happens when the next protest erupts? What happens when a city pushes back against federal immigration policy? What happens when a journalist, a mayor, or a movement becomes “too disruptive”?
Do we really think they’ll hesitate to send in the troops again?
And what kind of soldier will say no, when DHS and DoD have spent months telling them they’re defending the “homeland” against “enemy cells” within?
The line between foreign combat and domestic suppression is being erased. On purpose. By design.
The Founders of this country were obsessed with avoiding a standing army for precisely this reason.
It’s why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution requiring a “well regulated militia” at the state level and that same Constitution, in Article 1, Section 7 bars Congress from appropriating money for the Army for any period longer than two years. (“The Congress shall have Power To … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”)
They had seen what happened when monarchs used soldiers to police dissent. They knew the threat; not just to liberty, but to the very idea of a democratic republic. They wanted to keep the military on a very, very short leash.
So they built guardrails. Laws. Norms. Civilian command. Posse Comitatus. State control over Guard units. Strict separation between military and police roles.
All of that is being unraveled right now.
You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day.
The military is no longer on the sidelines.
It’s here.
And unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.
We are not at war with ourselves, at least yet. But our democracy is under siege.
And the troops have already landed.
Mexico discounts risk of ‘invasion’ after Trump order to target cartelsThom Hartmann
August 9, 2025
ALTERNET
U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as a member of the media raises their hand, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 1, 2025. REUTERS/Jessica Koscielniak
After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out the DOGE operative known as “Big Balls” in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.
None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object.
In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing.
A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.
And they’re not even hiding it anymore.
This isn’t some vague speculation or dystopian what-if. This isn’t a shadowy plot hatched in secrecy. The document was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.
The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment “for years to come.” It uses phrases like “homeland defense” and paints immigration threats as akin to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for “new ideas” on how DHS and DoD can work together on “national security” threats inside the United States.This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about militarization.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about building a political machine with boots and guns that can intimidate or even subdue any opposition.
And it’s already happening. America is rapidly turning into an authoritarian police state.
Over the past two months, Trump has done what no modern president has dared. He sent 4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines.
These weren’t weekend warriors. These were combat-trained infantry troops deployed to performatively surround federal buildings and “support” immigration enforcement while pro-democracy protestors filled the streets.
Marines. In American cities. In June and July. “Guarding” federal offices and intimidating demonstrators.
And now, we’ve learned that smaller units have been sent to Florida and are prepping for deployment to Texas and Louisiana. The memo wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint. A playbook for turning the world’s most powerful military force inward and turning constitutionally protected First Amendment political dissent into a “national security threat.”
Don’t believe Trump’s PR spin or the media’s pretending this isn’t as illegal and anti-democracy as it is. Don’t let the uniforms fool you into thinking this is routine.
This is not normal.
This is not legal.
This is not American.
This memo, which Pete Hegseth and friends didn’t intend you and I would ever be able to read:Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a “homeland defense mission.”
Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to “increase information sharing” and support “nationwide operational planning.”
Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to al-Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.
And it admits, in its own words, that due to the “sensitive nature” of the meeting it documents, “minimal written policy or background” should be preserved.
Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.
Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, put it bluntly:
“This speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.”
I’d add, also not seen since the Civil War, when Americans turned their guns on each other and 700,000 of us died. And outlawed a decade after that war with the Posse Comitatus Act. And after the Kent State massacre, we resolved, “Never again.”
Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent “domestic Forever War,” a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of the United States of America.
And that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of the classic dictator’s playbook.
You gin up fear about migrants and minorities. You call them invaders, terrorists, cartel assassins. You blur the line between protest and insurrection. You say cities are out of control. Then you send in the troops. Not to protect, but to occupy. And you call it “national security.”
This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.
And let’s not forget the power grab embedded in all this. When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he did it against the will of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The state fought back in court. A federal judge ruled in California’s favor, but the administration appealed, and for now, the troops can remain under federal control.
That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, “Your Guard is my army now.”
This moment is a test. Of our Constitution. Of our institutions. Of our will.
Because if we let this stand — if we normalize Marines in our cities, Guard troops on our streets, soldiers surveilling residential communities — then we’ve already surrendered.
What happens when the next protest erupts? What happens when a city pushes back against federal immigration policy? What happens when a journalist, a mayor, or a movement becomes “too disruptive”?
Do we really think they’ll hesitate to send in the troops again?
And what kind of soldier will say no, when DHS and DoD have spent months telling them they’re defending the “homeland” against “enemy cells” within?
The line between foreign combat and domestic suppression is being erased. On purpose. By design.
The Founders of this country were obsessed with avoiding a standing army for precisely this reason.
It’s why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution requiring a “well regulated militia” at the state level and that same Constitution, in Article 1, Section 7 bars Congress from appropriating money for the Army for any period longer than two years. (“The Congress shall have Power To … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”)
They had seen what happened when monarchs used soldiers to police dissent. They knew the threat; not just to liberty, but to the very idea of a democratic republic. They wanted to keep the military on a very, very short leash.
So they built guardrails. Laws. Norms. Civilian command. Posse Comitatus. State control over Guard units. Strict separation between military and police roles.
All of that is being unraveled right now.
You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day.
The military is no longer on the sidelines.
It’s here.
And unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.
We are not at war with ourselves, at least yet. But our democracy is under siege.
And the troops have already landed.
By AFP
August 9, 2025
Cargo trucks queue next to the border wall before crossing into Tijuana, Mexico - Copyright AFP John Falchetto
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Friday that there would be “no invasion of Mexico” following reports that President Donald Trump had ordered the US military to target Latin American drug cartels.
“There will be no invasion of Mexico,” Sheinbaum said after The New York Times reported that Trump had secretly signed a directive to use military force against cartels that his administration has declared terrorist organizations.
“We were informed that this executive order was coming and that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel or any institution in our territory,” Sheinbaum told her regular morning conference.
The Mexican foreign ministry said later that Mexico “would not accept the participation of US military forces on our territory.”
The remarks followed a statement released by the US embassy in Mexico, which said both countries would use “every tool at our disposal to protect our peoples” from drug trafficking groups.
US ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said on X that the countries “face a common enemy: the violent criminal cartels.”
The Pentagon referred questions on the issue to the White House, which did not immediately confirm the order.
The Times said Trump’s order provided an official basis for military operations at sea or on foreign soil against the cartels.
In February, his administration designated eight drug trafficking groups as terrorist organizations. Six are Mexican, one is Venezuelan and the eighth originates in El Salvador.
Two weeks ago, his administration added another Venezuelan gang, the Cartel of the Suns, which has shipped hundreds of tons of narcotics into the United States over two decades.
On Thursday, the US Justice Department doubled to $50 million its bounty on Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, whom it accuses of leading the Cartel of the Suns.
Venezuela has dismissed the allegations, with Foreign Minister Yvan Gil calling it “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen.”
Sheinbaum has made strenuous efforts to show Trump she is acting against her country’s cartels, whom he accuses of flooding the United States with drugs, particularly fentanyl.
“We are cooperating, we are collaborating, but there will be no invasion. That is absolutely ruled out,” she said.
She said that in “every call” with US officials, Mexico insisted that this “is not permitted.”
The 63-year-old has been dubbed the “Trump whisperer” for repeatedly securing reprieves from his threats of stiff tariffs over the smuggling of drugs and migrants across their shared border.
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