U.S. democracy remains in great danger. For the moment, President Donald Trump has yielded to public opinion and agreed to pull active-duty Army troops out of our nation’s capital.
Was this a trial run?
But what if his decision to deploy soldiers against American civilians was a dress rehearsal, a trial run for “dominating the streets” if he loses the election in November?
From the onset of the protests, Trump has followed the classic playbook of a would-be dictator, not a democratic leader. Trump barely acknowledged the legitimacy of the protests against police brutality and discrimination toward minorities.
Without offering any proof, the President blamed the rioting and looting on “Antifa and the Radical Left.” As that playbook would have it, Trump quickly announced that he was labeling Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization.”
The Antifa
However, that was mere propaganda and yet another sign of Trump’s cavalier attitude toward the law. In fact, Antifa is a rather nebulous movement, not an organization.
Furthermore, U.S. law allows the President only to designate foreign organizations, not domestic ones, as “terrorist.”
Nonetheless, U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, the nation’s top legal officer, quickly parroted his boss, referring darkly to “domestic terrorists.”
In effect, Barr and Trump were using an old, despicable tactic: Scaring the public with warnings about shadowy “leftist agitators” to justify a crackdown on civil liberties.
Trump as Nero, not as President
Trump also exaggerated the extent of the danger. The rioting and looting were horrible, but U.S. cities did not fall into chaos.
Trump scared many governors with his demands for violent suppression of the protests and his threats to send in the National Guard or Army units, with or without the governors’ approval, to “fix their problem.”
Not the Antifa, but white suprematists
Meanwhile, local officials had very different theories about the causes of the rioting. In Minneapolis, the mayor and police suspected that white supremacists might have acted as provocateurs.
Bill
Article URL : https://www.salon.com/2020/06/12/come-november-a-us-coup-detat_partner/