Already looking ahead to the turmoil his re-election could cause, Donald Trump and his allies are reportedly circling an idea to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, deploying the military to act as domestic law enforcement.
According to a Washington Post report on Sunday, the drafting of such plans has largely been “unofficially outsourced” thus far to a coalition of right-wing think tanks working under the title “Project 2025.” It was identified as an immediate priority for the hypothetical resurrected Trump administration, internal communications obtained by the newspaper showed.
In response to questions from the Post, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung provided a statement: “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” he said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
The first part maybe, but the second - no.
There might be pockets of small arms fire and a few civ x mil casualties, but anything beyond that is pure fantasy. It would quickly become a question of “are you willing to go on a kamikaze guaranteed suicide mission to be heard and die at the hands of the US military, now, today, in protest?”
“They can’t stop us all!”
True, but you don’t have “us” all. You think my 99 year old grandmother is going to fight the US military? What about my friends 5 year old? What about my father in law who cares for another elderly relative and is their only hope of survival? What about my wife who needs regular medication?
There are so many of us who, despite our extreme ideological opposition to fascism simply wouldn’t be effective infantry. Hell even most people who regularly hunt deer and shoot guns daily at the range will fall to military tactics, because hunting a garrison of soldiers in vehicles, with air support and explosives, who shoot back, and have been trained in how to reinforce their positions etc is very different to shooting a static paper target that’s not behind cover in a straight line ahead of you at eye level.
I reckon, if I got the jump on an unsuspecting soldier who wasn’t expecting it, and I was armed, I’d have a 55% chance of murdering him. Add just one other person watching his back and I’d be dead before I could do more than bruise him.
The 2A Fantasy of fighting back against a tyrannical government requires a well-organized militia. Which means putting Sunday school teachers, middle managers, dentists and retail workers through months of boot camp training. During those months, who’s fighting?
Just look at Israel / Palestine. We’d be Palestine. Yes, a few guerilla tactics would kill dozens of soldiers, who’d then retaliate and kill thousands of civilians, while the rest of the world goes, “Oh no.”
I’ll add on that the first part is also a fantasy.
I’ve known and worked with a lot of “military leadership” over the decades. If they were as heroic and as dedicated to protecting The Constitution as people pretend they are: They would not have waited on January 6th. They would have decided “the exiting president is engaging in a coup and the vice president is MIA. And the Speaker is under siege. Autobots, roll out”
Instead, they sat on their hands and waited to see how things shake out.
Which is what would happen. Martial law? Cool, “this is what we trained for”. Putting down uprisings? MAYBE there would be some light hesitation until one gravy seal got overly excited and shot their load off. At which point, the training kicks in and they expect everyone to say “thank you for your service” for the rest of their lives because they put down the insurgents.
Because soldiers are not inherently evil. But they sure do commit a LOT of war crimes and crimes against humanity. And that is because they are indoctrinated to follow orders and care more about “the man in the foxhole next to you” than anyone else.
And the people who make it a career of indoctrinating those dumbass kids and sending them to fuck up the world? They aren’t going to be rocking the boat.