"In the nine months since Donald Trump's return to the White House, the overall goals of his agenda have become clear enough: weaken the United States abroad to create an environment friendly to dictators, while using the U.S. government and armed forces to establish a dictatorship at home. Will it work? The success of Trump's plan depends on how we see it, or rather, whether we choose not to see it."
"In the worst case, Americans choose not to notice, look away as their neighbors and coworkers are swept up in immigration raids and their cities become militarized, and then pretend that they had no other choice but to abandon democracy. Pretexts will be found. They already are, most obviously in the drumbeat of lies about urban crime and as we have seen in the aftermath of the murder of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk the selective exploitation of political violence."
"The military deployments are obviously illegal and designed to intimidate. Even if the current Supreme Court's maximal deference to Trump means lawsuits will have minimal impact, what soldiers are being ordered to do plainly violates the long and rightly valued precedent that the military is not to be used for law enforcement. Deploying troops for that purpose traduces the rationale for maintaining armed forces, which is to defend a country from attack."
The agenda aims to weaken the United States internationally to favor dictators while using federal power and the armed forces to build authoritarian control domestically. Success depends on public inaction and willingness to accept pretexts such as exaggerated claims of urban crime and selective portrayals of political violence. Large-scale immigration raids and the militarization of cities serve as instruments of intimidation. Deploying National Guard troops and Marines for domestic policing violates established precedent against using the military for law enforcement and undermines the core purpose of armed forces as defense against external attack.
Read at english.elpais.com
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