Trump crushed every democratic safeguard — except one

Trump wants blood.

The spectacle is the point. The helicopters. The uniforms. The rumble of armored personnel carriers down the boulevards of Los Angeles. The former president of the United States — now reinstalled in the White House through judicial (Citizens United) and electoral (Musk’s money and X) sleight-of-hand that would make Orbán proud — sent U.S. Marines into an American city.

Marines who are trained in killing people. Quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. Not crowd control, not defending the constitutional right to protest, not arresting and Mirandizing: just shedding blood. Blowing things up and killing people is what this most lethal fighting force in the world does so well. And Trump just sent them into our civilian streets.

At the same time, Donald Trump is presiding over the most openly corrupt regime in the history of this country.

He’s looting the treasury in broad daylight, giving away a $4 trillion tax cut to his billionaire donors and golf buddies, repealing clean air and water protections while wildfires torch the west and hurricanes batter the south, and inviting domestic terrorists into the halls of power. His family and cronies are raking in billions from foreign governments — from Saudi royals to Russian oligarchs to Chinese front companies — with not even a fig leaf of legality.

Meanwhile, he’s gutted the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, turned the Department of Homeland Security into a political police force, and is laying off scientists from NOAA and NASA because they keep insisting that the Earth is, in fact, burning from the poisons his fossil fuel billionaire friends sell.

And now, as his approval ratings begin to wobble and questions mount about his finances, his backroom deals, and his erratic behavior, he reaches for the oldest play in the authoritarian playbook: provoke unrest then send in the troops.

As LA Mayor Karen Bass said:

“These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of safety in our city.”

This is not new. Nixon tried it. Hitler perfected it. Mussolini reveled in it. Trump is following a script so old and worn that it should’ve been burned for kindling by now, but here we are again.

In the early 1970s, as opposition to the Vietnam War reached a boiling point, Richard Nixon didn’t try to calm the waters: he deliberately stirred them. He referred to student protesters as “communists” and “bums,” cheered on violent pro-government mobs like the one that beat peaceful demonstrators during the Hard Hat Riot in New York, and did everything he could to push the country into a cultural war fever.

Nixon’s goal was simple: make protest look like rebellion, make rebellion look like terrorism, and make himself look like the only one who could restore “law and order.”

He succeeded, for a while, and it even got him re-elected in 1972. But the price was Watergate, war crimes, and a generation’s trust in government flushed down the drain.

Now Trump, with Stephen Miller whispering fascist bedtime stories in his ear and Steve Bannon howling about civil war from the sidelines, is picking up where Nixon left off. But this time the stakes are even higher, and the intentions are even clearer.

Trump’s deployment of Marines to Los Angeles under the absurd claim of needing to “protect the public” from leftist “urban insurgents” is not about law enforcement. It’s about spectacle. It's about optics. It’s about setting the stage for something much darker.

Like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Recep Tayipp Erdoğan in Turkey, Trump is using public protests as both scapegoat and smokescreen. The plan is to provoke confrontation, paint it as insurrection, and then invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, a 200-year-old law that allows a president to deploy the military domestically and override governors and mayors.

Once that happens, the road to full dictatorship is wide open.

The Insurrection Act suspends Posse Comitatus, the 1878 law that prevents the U.S. military from being used as a domestic police force. With a stroke of a pen, Trump can militarize every protest, shut down dissent, seize media infrastructure, or even delay — or “postpone” — elections on grounds of public disorder.

Think that’s far-fetched?

Trump has already floated the idea of suspending elections. He joked in 2020 about “12 more years.” His allies in Congress and right-wing media are openly calling for him to stay in office “as long as necessary.” A majority of Republican voters now say they’d support postponing elections “in an emergency.” And who defines the emergency? Trump does.

The recent calls for the military to intervene aren’t about securing streets; they’re about testing the waters. If there’s not enough public backlash to sending Marines into Los Angeles, what’s next? Troops in Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Atlanta? Your town?

This is how democracies die: not with a bang, but with a series of flags, uniforms, and carefully orchestrated TV shots showing a president “taking control.”

• And while all this is happening, where’s the coverage of the $4 trillion tax giveaway to the morbidly rich?
• Where’s the outrage over the billions flowing into Trump’s money bins from foreign governments in violation of the Emoluments Clause?
• Where’s the investigation into the domestic terrorism unit Trump dismantled while neo-Nazis train in camps in Michigan and Florida?
• Where’s the climate report that was buried?
• Where are the Epstein files?
• Where’s the fury over his push to gut Medicaid and privatize our social safety net?

The answer: they’re all buried beneath a pile of riot gear and tear gas canisters.

This is the playbook. Distract, divide, and dominate.

Hitler provoked street clashes with pro-democracy protestors, his brown shirts starting street brawls, then used the Reichstag fire as the excuse to seize emergency powers. Mussolini’s Blackshirts beat and murdered union organizers to manufacture a crisis, then demanded — and got — martial law. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines used student protests to declare martial law and cancel elections: I was working in that country the week he fled to Hawaii. Erdoğan used unrest in Gezi Park to round up journalists, rewrite the Turkish constitution, and jail his political rivals.

It’s not just history. It’s prophecy.

Trump has studied these men, either directly or through his cadre of enablers and strategists. Bannon once said he admired Lenin because he wanted to “destroy the state.” Miller has been pushing for suspension of habeas corpus. Trump himself tried to deploy the military in 2020 during the George Floyd protests but was held back — barely — by Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Esper’s gone now. In his place? Loyalists.

So what do we do?

We do the one thing that autocrats have never figured out how to fully suppress: we show up.

We take to the streets, not in violent defiance but in peaceful, defiant unity. We reclaim the tools of democracy — voice, presence, solidarity — and we make it clear that we see what he’s doing and we are not going to let it stand.

That’s why this coming Saturday matters more than ever.

No Kings Day isn’t just a rally. It’s a declaration. That we will not be ruled by strongmen. That we do not recognize the Trump family as royalty. That we believe in the power of the people and the promise of our republic.

That no matter how much bloodshed Trump tries to provoke, he will not succeed.

Because when you stand in a crowd of thousands, arm-in-arm with your neighbors, flags flying not in fear but in resistance, you remind the would-be tyrant of something he desperately wants to forget: we outnumber him.

We always have. We just need to show up.

Tag, we’re it.