There's No Drill Here— Trump’s Authoritarian Domestic War Games Have Begun in Los Angeles

Make America Afghanistan Again— Send In The Marines & End The Republic

This is an actual Kristi Noem poster. Let's hope someone reports Musk

Addressing the deployment of troops in Los Angeles, Bernie said in a video statement that “This is not about the protests. This is not about ICE. This is not about immigration. What's going on is all about Trump's never-ending desire for more and more power… Calling out the national guard is the responsibility of the governor of the state, not the president of the United States. And what Trump is doing is simply trying to put more and more power into his own hands in terms of the military. Do not forget, this is a guy whois usurping the powers of Congress, usurping the powers of the judiciary; suing the media; going after law firms, going after universities.He wants more and more power. And I would hope that people, regardless of their political views— you’re conservative, moderate, progressive— whatever you are… Now is the time for us to come together and stand against authoritarianism and for democracy.”

Trump addressed a carefully-selected audience of right-wing Marines in North Carolina a few days ago. They were picked so they could be counted on to cheer for his most outrageous, fascist statements. And they did. I sure don’t want those yahoos in my town eager to pull their triggers and get even for the South’s defeat in 1865. I don’t agree with Gavin Newsom on much, but the corporate Democrat was right when he called Trump out about stoking a second American civil war. “He's not for peacemaking,” said Newsom on Monday, “he's here for civil war on the streets.”

On Wednesday, Luke Broadwater reported that since taking over in January, Señor TACO “has, step by step, expanded domestic use of the military, testing the legal and political limits on involving troops trained to fight foreign wars in roles traditionally carried out by the local police or Border Patrol. There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than serving in Syria and Iraq, a fact the chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, promoted on social media on Wednesday. ‘This is exactly what the American people voted for,’ Parnell wrote. ‘Defense of our people & our homeland.’”

Polls show Parnell is dead wrong. Outside of Trump’s MAGA base (about a third of the voters), the American people do not want Trump’s militarized response.

Broadwater wrote that “The goal, said some former military officials and experts on civilian-military relations, may be to get Americans used to seeing troops in the streets of major cities, opening the door for Trump to use his powers as commander in chief more aggressively to quell unrest and dissent. Trump’s aides and allies see his domestic use of the military as an overdue measure necessary to maintain order. His critics see it as a worrying step toward politicizing the armed forces and creeping authoritarianism. ‘What worries me most are the normalization of political involvement by troops, and novel and expansive interpretations of executive power,’ said Kori Schake, who was a defense official in the George W. Bush administration and now directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute… Adding to concerns is Trump’s tendency to treat the military as an arm of politics, said Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. Speaking to troops at military bases, Trump often uses the occasion to bash his political rivals, liberals and the news media. During a speech at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, Trump led troops to boo journalists. What separates Trump’s actions from those of previous presidents, Vladeck said, is Trump’s expansive definitions of what qualifies as an emergency, occupation or invasion that would justify a legitimate use of the military. He has pledged to use American troops to ‘liberate’ Los Angeles as though it were in the control of a foreign military. ‘It’s not that we haven’t had presidents use the military domestically before,’ Vladeck said. ‘It’s that there has been such a clear factual predicate for turning troops on our own population for deploying troops into our cities. There’s really no history of using those authorities for what really are partisan political purposes, more than they are public safety restoration purposes.’”

Trump has made clear he plans to take similar actions should protests break out in other states. Speaking to reporters, he described the military deployment to Los Angeles as ‘the first, perhaps, of many. I can inform the rest of the country that when they do it, if they do it, they’re going to be met with equal or greater force than we met right here,” he told journalists in the Oval Office Tuesday. He also said that if anyone protests the military parade he has planned for Saturday in Washington, ‘they will be met with very heavy force.’ Trump has said he is also considering invoking the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that gives the president the power to use military force to quell widespread public unrest and to support civilian law enforcement. ‘If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it,’ Trump said on Tuesday. He has repeatedly referred to those protesting deportations as ‘insurrectionists.’… Trump and his allies have long considered using the military in maximalist ways, including through invoking the Insurrection Act.”

It is likely to get much worse. Broadwater concluded by noting that “Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré said he believed Trump’s actions in Los Angeles are ‘a precursor to what he wants to do elsewhere around the country.’ He added: ‘He’s trying to break through by mobilizing the guard in California. And while it’s not illegal, it’s not normal.’ General Honoré said he didn’t see levels of violence at the protests that had overwhelmed the police and ‘crossed the threshold’ where he felt a president would be justified to send in the troops. ‘He has a political objective to this,’ General Honoré said. ‘To set the conditions and see how far he could go.’”

General Honoré is retired. So are many other officers who feel the way he does. Trump picked General Dan Caine as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff just a couple months ago. He’s the highest ranking military officer in the service. On Wednesday along with the drunken sociopath Trump appointed Defense Secretary, Caine was called on to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee. If Señor Trumpanzee was paying attention, he didn’t like what he heard. Caine, reported Abigail Hauslohner, “broke with Trump’s assessment of the threat posed by Russia and the ongoing protests and violence in Los Angeles. Caine’s comments during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing were restrained but significant, coming from the nation’s top military officer who Democrats and moderate Republicans had feared might show little appetite for going against a president prone to pushing falsehoods in pursuit of his political agenda”

When pressed by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) to say if he believes the demonstrations and violence in Los Angeles are a sign the United States is ‘being invaded by a foreign nation,’ as Trump told an audience of soldiers Tuesday in North Carolina, Caine said he doesn’t.

“At this point in time, I don’t see any foreign, state-sponsored folks invading,” the general replied, before adding, “but I’ll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time.”

When Schatz asked if there has been a “rebellion” against the government, another politically charged term the president and his administration have employed since unrest flared in Southern California, Caine declined to affirm that either. “I think there’s definitely some frustrated folks out there,” he offered.

Trump’s second term in office has been remarkable, in part, for the frequency with which false and misleading statements by the president go unchecked by a majority of Republicans on Capitol Hill, and Caine’s responses Wednesday offered a stark contrast with the man seated beside him, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

As the president’s top military adviser, the Joint Chiefs chairman is expected to provide honest and unflinching advice to the commander in chief, the defense secretary and to Congress, even when that assessment conflicts with the political messaging of the administration in power. During his confirmation hearing, Caine, a surprise selection for the job after Trump abruptly fired the general’s predecessor, Gen. Charles Brown Jr., in February, promised to earn lawmakers’ trust.

Hegseth tried to paper over what Caine had said.

“It’s quite easy to point out that there has been an invasion of 21 million illegals in our country under the previous administration,” he told Schatz. “So this administration was elected to get a hold of that.”

… “You are deploying the American military to police the American people,” Sen. Patty Murray (Washington), the full Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat, said to Hegseth of the scene in Los Angeles. “Sending the National Guard into California without the governor’s request. Sending the Marines— not after foreign threats, but after American protesters.”

If Caine toed a delicate line Wednesday, Hegseth — who caught the president’s eye during his tenure as a right-wing commentator on Fox News — adhered to White House talking points as he responded to Democrats’ queries and doubled down on Trump’s claims. He also left open the possibility that the deployment of troops to respond to protests in Los Angeles “could expand to other places.”

The president’s deployment order is partly about “getting ahead of a problem, so that if in other places, if there are other riots in places where law enforcement officers are threatened, we would have the capability to surge National Guard there if necessary,” Hegseth said.

It might not be long before he sends the Marines in to storm the Kennedy Center if this kind of behavior continues. But it’s no coincidence that the L.A. crackdown began with ICE raids designed to provoke unrest, or that Marines— whose very purpose is to kill with precision— were sent into a blue state domestic civilian environment. This isn’t about “law and order.” It’s a baited trap. Trump’s enablers, including Hegseth, are hoping to spark enough chaos to justify the next escalation— federalized policing across blue cities, or even a pretext to invoke emergency powers nationwide. And the silence of Republican lawmakers is deafening. What Caine’s testimony made plain— through military understatement and careful hedging— is that there is no foreign invasion, there is no rebellion. Just a regime fabricating threats and branding dissent as sedition. If this is not fascism, it’s the dress rehearsal, a revealing snapshot of the final, fraying threads of institutional resistance to an authoritarian president who is increasingly using military force— not to protect Americans, but to punish them. In Caine’s careful words, there was the echo of every principled officer who remembers that their oath is to the Constitution, not to the ego of a wannabe caudillo. And in Hegseth, there was the hollow-eyed zeal of a propagandist given power— barking out culture war slogans to justify the creeping normalization of martial force against civilians.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote that Trump’s military adventure in L.A. is “An attempt to end politics as we know it, to deploy force to suppress dissent. Not eventually, but right now… LA isn’t a city in chaos, wracked by devastating riots requiring military intervention… When heavily armed ICE agents arrested workers who may or may not have been legal residents but were definitely not threats by any stretch of the imagination, they set off demonstrations— which was clearly their intention. But while there were, inevitably, some relatively minor acts of violence, the demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful— and nothing local law enforcement couldn’t handle. The chief of the Los Angeles Police Department issued a statement practically pleading with the Feds to stay out of the situation: ‘The Los Angeles Police Department, alongside our mutual aid partners, have decades of experience managing large-scale public demonstrations, and we remain confident in our ability to do so professionally and effectively.’ Of course, Trump ignored that plea… Trump sent in some Marines, too, which would be completely crazy if the goal was to defuse tension and prevent violence. After all, the mission of the Marines, what they’re trained to do, is to deliver deadly violence. It's easy to see how this could spin out of control. Which is, of course, what Trump is hoping for.”