Senior Democrats in US cities are preparing to defend their communities in the event of Donald Trump’s return to the White House after the former president has repeated threats that he would use presidential powers to seize control of major urban centers.
Trump has proposed deploying the military inside major cities largely run by Democrats to deal with protesters or to crush criminal gangs. He has threatened to dispatch large numbers of federal immigration agents to carry out mass deportations of undocumented people in so-called “sanctuary” cities.
He also aims to obliterate the progressive criminal justice policies of left-leaning prosecutors.
“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order … I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the national guard until safety is restored,” Trump says in the campaign platform for his bid to become the 47th US president, Agenda47.
Trump provoked uproar earlier this week when he called for US armed forces to be deployed against his political rivals – “the enemy within” – on election day next month. But his plans to use national guard troops and military personnel as a means to attack those he sees as his opponents go much wider than that, spanning entire cities with Democratic leadership.
That will take years though. And even once it’s done the majority of the military will be ill trained and ill equipped.
It won’t take them years. It will take 5 minutes and the stroke of a pen. Hell, Heritage foundation probably has the complete order already typed up for trump to sign.
The good news is, historically, loyalists make shit military leaders.
They aren’t going to have an officer corp left is the point. We’ve seen Authoritarian take overs of professional militaries in history. And I admit the Heritage Foundation may have some ideas on how to speed up the timeline. But the biggest sticking point has always been finding the bodies to man the “special” unit and disarming the military at large so it can’t respond to the special unit’s provocation.
What will most likely happen is they will stand up a paramilitary force in parallel with the military, and illegally use funds to arm them. This force will be incompetent for a couple years, causing pain and suffering but without the manpower or training to actually act as an oppressive force. It will also generate a lot of backlash because it’s operation is illegal and it’s likely we’ll see some of them actually get arrested. In fact I would say in the event that it meets armed resistance in this period, trump will bring in a national guard unit. However the national guard unit is going to amplify any crimes being committed by his special force. Not as in make the crimes worse, but as in let the world know they’re happening with credible reports. The national guard will then be sidelined while the trump administration attempts to make a special military unit to support his paramilitary unit. Someone with the training and competence to bail them out. What he’s going to find is the group of soldiers who know how cities run, Civil Affairs, actually leans left (for Americans) and has empathy. (They didn’t go into the job that has you giving people electricity and teddy bears because they were heartless.) So they aren’t going to be much help.
I’ll stop there because this will quickly snowball into a whole ass paper. But you can see the gist of why it takes years and what the cost of a hurry up is. It’s worth remembering the the SA was a militant wing of a political party that beat people up. The SS was mostly made of already existing police officers. It took merging the Wehrmacht training lines with the SA and years of selective pressure, (including propaganda about Russians in the middle of a war.) to get the Wehrmacht to commit war crimes on the Eastern Front, and look the other way while escorting SS death squads around eastern Europe. That’s the fastest we’ve ever see a modern military transform. The Red Army purges for loyalty to Stalin took 2 years and was just a loyalty purge in an army that was already supposed to be loyal to him. Removing the officers in the US military who believe the Constitution is above the president will likely take longer because there is not a culture of post civil war loyalty to party over country.
Too long? You can skip to here -
Their speed up plan likely creates significant barriers to their end goal and will actually make a total military conversion take longer. Historical methods will take several years but use less political capital and generate less backlash while it’s happening. America is 336 Million people. If we use common numbers, that’s 210 million adults (chosen because it’s close enough and easily divisible by 3), 70 million Democrats, 70 million apolitical, and 70 million Republicans. If you start actually oppressing people you can expect the non far right republicans to join the democrats in opposition. You now have ~105 million people in passive resistance. If you want to occupy a population that large (Not taking geography into account) you need 10.5 million soldiers. That’s how impossible this paramilitary project is. They literally cannot provide that many soldiers unless one in three of their hardcore supporters signs up.
While there are likely quite a number of people in the service who would put the constitution first, there’s also a disturbing number of Trump supporters, up and down the ranks,
The Air Force is particularly infested due to a somewhat sleazy church that Cadets at the Academy are sort of forced to go to.
https://religionnews.com/2012/07/12/debate-reignites-over-religion-at-air-force-academy/
That sort of shit has been going on long enough that you have officers in pretty high position who are Christian Dominionists, or these days called Cristian Nationalists. People who want to tear down the constitution and replace it with the Bible.
Still, he won’t have the full support. But he’ll have a lot. Especially with local police stations and such.
Which is where things like the Florida State Guard come in.
The Heritage Foundation is already building out lists of loyalists and where they’re going to work if Trump wins. So yeah, it won’t be instant, but it will be pretty fast.
Oh yeah. I’m not saying there’s no support. I’m saying the military won’t support him. I fully expect people to resign from the military and join whatever shitty special thing they put together.
I’m saying that Trump will pare down the military until the only people left are supporters, which will be a disturbingly high number of people, including officers.
They won’t all quit to join his new paramilitary group, he’ll turn the military itself into his own paramilitary group. Starting with purges, and then promotions for lackies.
Purges take years. If they go the traditional route then it won’t be ready for 2028 and the riots that result from him running for a third term.
Purges can be very fast, especially in today’s climate.
Also, the Heritage foundation has been working on lists for years now.
They had lists in the past too. The heritage foundation are bad people but they are still people, and they cannot change things with a magic wand.
The whole thing is set up to do it really fast. If there are procedures and red tape preventing it, they’ll ignore them.
It’s not the procedures and red tape. It’s the literal finding of bodies, transferring equipment, and mass production of more equipment. I’ll link the other response I made if you want to read the details.