No More Kings
During these early months of Trump II: The Revenge, we've all been subjected to an overwhelming flood of outrages – unconstitutional power grabs, international emergencies, economic chaos, an assault on higher education, a wave of white nationalist race-baiting, bigoted culture warrior nonsense and so, so much more.
The effort to overwhelm us, of course, has been intentional. In yet another sign that the Trump team is both deeply unoriginal and yet wildly ignorant of history, Republicans bragged that the start of this new administration would be marked by a massive "shock and awe" campaign like the one that kicked off the invasion of Iraq two decades ago. (Brilliant model, you History Knowers. I have no notes.)
Even though it seemed impossible, this campaign of intentional chaos shifted into an even higher gear this past week.
To give you a personal sense of how fast it moved, on Friday I was invited to be on Jon Stewart's podcast to discuss the then-breaking news story of Elon Musk and Donald Trump's very messy breakup, in which Musk claimed Trump was in the Epstein Files and Trump threatened to retaliate against Musk's businesses. (See my last post if you've already forgotten all this.)
That huge moment, though, was almost immediately eclipsed by events in Los Angeles, as the Trump administration went looking for a fight there. By the time we taped this on Wednesday, the conversation became one focused mostly on the administration's abuse of emergency declarations to enable such actions.
The podcast came out early Thursday morning on the east coast, but by the time that YouTube version was up in the afternoon, the conversation we'd had just a day before already felt dated.
As you surely know by now, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem gave a press conference at a federal building in Los Angeles. And as Bergen-Belsen Barbie was spreading her usual lies, Senator Alex Padilla – not only a senator from that state, but the ranking member of the Judiciary subcommittee that oversees immigration issues – identified himself and tried to answer a question. In response, the hired goons at the event manhandled the senator, threw him to the ground and placed him in handcuffs.
Make no mistake – this is a five-alarm fire for our democracy and needs to be treated as such.
We should all be reaching out to our representatives in Congress, to urge Democratic House members to bring articles of impeachment against Noem for her outrageous abuses of power (as well as her wasteful spending on gross photo ops and propaganda for the president) and to insist Democratic Senators stop cooperating with Their Friends Across the Aisle, gladly voting for their bills and confirming their nominees, and start grinding the institution to a halt.
The assault on Senator Padilla – and, even more so, the arrest of Representative McIver before that – represent a dangerous escalation in the Trump regime's rush to dictatorship. They've now shown they will gladly arrest or assault public officials of the opposition party for simply trying to do their jobs and protect their constituents. We are far, far off the rails here. This is a huge crisis.
And yet there was a moment right before the assault on Senator Padilla that was even more disturbing. These are the comments that pushed him to identify himself as a senator and interrupt her:
The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.
That really gives away the endgame here. These raids aren't about catching dangerous criminals or even enforcing immigration laws with deportations of undocumented laborers looking for work in a Home Depot parking lot. They're about punishing the political opponents of Donald Trump.
And note the language, another throwback to the Iraq War. They're aiming to "liberate this city" from the "leadership" of the governor and mayor who were duly elected by the people of California and Los Angeles respectively.
This is the same kind of "regime change" talk that conservatives so confidently threw around two decades ago in the Middle East, except now the target isn't a bloodthirsty dictator like Saddam Hussein but a centrist governor who does cringy podcasts.
And, make no mistake, they're not stopping with Los Angeles and California. They've already made moves to repeat the same process in five more blue-state cities, where they will once again cause chaos and then use their own fuckery as an excuse for a crackdown and, I'm sure, more regime change efforts.
But here's where we come in. Just as the neocons of the Bush administration confidently believed that they would be "greeted as liberators" only to learn that wasn't actually the case, the Americans whom Noem and the others are promising to "liberate" are capable of speaking up and pushing back.
The polling on Trump's invasion of Los Angeles and his mishandling of immigration has recently taken a nosedive, moving from one of the few places where he still had a net positive rating to yet another topic on which he's deeply unpopular.
And this Saturday – as Trump is throwing himself a sad little I'm a Special Boy Parade in Washington D.C. – there will be a chance for everyone to show up and speak up at the No Kings Day rallies across the nation. There are more than a thousand in all, so check here to find the one closest to you.
Trump, like all aspiring dictators, wants us all to cower in fear and refuse to fight. He's disgustingly warned that anyone protesting his pity party parade will be "met with very big force" in an effort to scare people away, but the No Kings rallies will be separate events in separate settings.
And in any case, the most important time to protest is when the powers that be insist you cannot protest. As always, a good motto for this era is "fuck you, make me."
This is the United States of America. We have no kings, we want no tyrants.
