Trump’s Dangerous Dictator Cosplay

Having read extensively about the rise of Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany, at times it seems America is sleepwalking into a dictatorship where brown skinned migrants and even citizens are being demonized and used as an excuse to ignore due process rights and improperly use military personnel against the American public.  Much of this is to thrill the racist MAGA base but the real driving motivation is to stroke the sick and overwhelming ego of the malignant narcissist occupying the White House who has dreams of being a dictator like Vladimir Putin or an absolute monarch.  Yes, "No Kings" protests will take place across  the nation, but far too many Americans seem blind to the threat their freedoms of speech, assembly, and due process are now facing. Unlike during his first regime where there were "grown ups in the room" to restrain him, the Felon is now surrounded by misfits, white nationalists, and sycophants like Stephen Miller, a modern day Josef Goebbels, Pete Hegseth, a drunk with white nationalist ties, and Kristi Noem, a/k/a ICE Barbie, who seeming exult in cruelty towards anyone who doesn't support Der Trumpenfuhrer's policies aimed at causing hate, division and white supremacy. A piece in The New Yorker looks at the Felon's dangerous dictator cosplay that frighteningly could become a reality.  Here are excerpts:

Call it Donald Trump’s Strongman Week. Over the course of just a few days, the [Felon] President has ordered the military into the streets of Los Angeles—over the objections of California’s Democratic governor—to curb protests against his immigration crackdown, appeared with cheering uniformed troops at what amounted to a political rally, and planned to hold a military parade featuring the rare spectacle of tanks rolling through the streets of Washington. Trump’s martial rhetoric accompanying these militarized photo ops has portrayed a nation that is all but on the brink of war—with itself.

That any of this is even happening amounts to the most striking contrast possible with his first term, when Trump craved similar displays of military might but found himself stymied by his own senior officials, who balked, stalled, and, at times, outright disagreed with his demands.

In 2017, the President returned from an impressively bellicose Bastille Day celebration in France determined to host his own version of a military parade. It never took place, largely because the Pentagon’s leadership and Trump’s White House chief of staff, a retired four-star marine general, were adamantly opposed to such a display. In a passionate outburst that I learned about several years later, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Paul Selva, confronted Trump about it directly in the Oval Office. Such a parade, he warned Trump, would be profoundly un-American, “what dictators do.” But Trump, of course, wanted to do it anyway.

The truth is that the parade is the least of it—an empty spectacle that is surely to be quickly forgotten except in the District of Columbia itself, where tens of millions of dollars will have to be spent to repair the damage done by heavy weapons of war ripping up its pavement. The plan for thousands of simultaneous anti-Trump “No Kings” protests around the country on Saturday means that the day is just as likely expected to be remembered as an example of America’s tragic divisions right now as for its display of a Commander-in-Chief’s unchecked power.

It’s on the front lines in Los Angeles, rather than from a reviewing stand in D.C., where Trump seems tempted to take the leap from performative strongmanism to something more approaching the real thing. When protests against increasingly heavy-handed raids by agents of his Department of Homeland Security escalated there last weekend, the President rushed to do what his advisers had stopped him from attempting in his first term—sending in the uniformed military to quell a domestic political disturbance. Nearly five years ago to the day, on June 1, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—Trump appointees all—teamed up to talk him out of invoking the Insurrection Act and mobilizing the military to stop the Black Lives Matter protests that had sprung up across the nation . . . . Trump never stopped regretting that decision, and his quick move to escalate in Los Angeles looked like an exorcism of sorts. The message? This is Trump unfettered, erasing the lingering frustrations from his first term and no longer constrained by any dissenting voices on his own staff.

[T]he deployment in California is political theatre just as irresistible as his parade; he is forever playing Richard Nixon in 1968, the “law and order” candidate who will save America’s cities from left-wing riots. One problem for Trump with this vision is that the citizens of Los Angeles mostly failed to coöperate with his plan and did not actually torch their own downtown . . . . Another hard-to-overlook obstacle for Trump are the federal courts, which will now consider whether Trump had the right to overrule California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, and order the deployments of thousands of the state’s National Guard, along with seven hundred marines.

In a speech on Tuesday night, Newsom denounced Trump’s move as a “brazen abuse of power.” But what’s struck me is the response by Trump and his officials, who are warning not only that they may defy the federal courts regarding California but that this is the new template for them wherever they choose to use it in America. . . . . This is the real escalation—a Trump-led federal government that has now redefined national security to include dissent from its policies by American citizens. The threats that most animate this President are those not from malign foreign actors but from “the enemy from within.” And he told us so himself, even before the 2024 election, whether people paid attention to it or not.

Reality itself is now so conditioned on political identity that, for a large swath of Trump’s supporters, it does not matter what conditions in California actually are: if Trump and his acolytes such as Sanders say that it is a crime-ridden hellscape under invasion by foreign masses and native-born “insurrectionists,” as Trump put it when he appeared at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, then that is what it must be.

On Saturday, Trump may not show up to his parade in full Saddam regalia; he’s more likely to wear a suit and a red MAGA hat than the shades and medal-bedecked uniform of one of those thugs, such as Kim Jong Un, whom he so admires. But I’d say watch out just the same: All this dictator cosplay may, sooner or later, persuade him to try out the real thing. Happy seventy-ninth, Dear Leader!