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Is Donald Trump willing to go so far as to become a dictator
and throw out centuries of American Constitutional democracy.
Those fears could well be overblown but you never know with the Orange One |
Yesterday,
I cheered all those spontaneous protests against President Trump's executive order regarding Muslims entering the country and all that.
In addition to being immoral and possibly unconstitutional, I complained about how poorly thought out and stupid the implementation of it was.
That's still more than possible. Chances are, it's the simple reality. Trump and his minions are just stupid.
However I have a much darker and scarier theory.
Before I explain it to you, I get it the dark theory I'll describe could be quite farfetched. I'm also stringing together a bunch of facts to put the theory together. These facts could be unrelated or tenuously related, I'm not 100 percent sure.
Plus, it's possible I've been watching too many gloomy conspiratorial movies.
But, and this is a BIG but, everything I'm seeing is straight from the white supremecist and authoritarian handbook followed by megalomaniac wannabe dictators. Everything that's been going on in the past few days could be a grand plan. And a very dangerous one at that.
Given the white supremicists and wannabe dictators suddenly running the country, what I'm about to lay out feels frighteningly plausible. So here goes:
The sudden Trump executive order to block people coming from certain Muslim countries and to block Syrian refugees, among other things, caused chaos at the nation's airports as many people found themselves suddenly detained.
Even the State Department and Congressional leaders, including top Republicans, were blindsided.
The conventional wisdom, one that I adhere to, or at least wish for, was that everything was poorly thought out and executed, so it made a bigger logistical mess than you would have expected from a competent president.
But is Trump trying to create a white supremist dictatorship out of the United States? Or, slightly more likely, is Trump a dumb patsy being used by the likes of his Svengali, Steve Bannon and his crew of potential neo Nazis doing this?
The airport chaos with the Trump executive order naturally created a LOT of news media attention, and a lot of protest, which created even more media attention.
Was this situation intended?
Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Jones wonders about this.
Like me, Jones admits the confusion and chaos could well have been just incompetence. But he says there might be something else to it, and I find his argument intriguing.
He noted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not want to apply the ban to people with lawful permanent residence, Trump and his chief poobah, Steve Bannon, overruled them. To the unfamiliar, these are people who have green cards we're talking about
Jones writes:
"The decision to apply the executive order to green card holders, including THOSE IN TRANSIT, is almost insane. (Jones' emphasis.) Whatever else he is, Steve Bannon is a smart guy, and he had to know this would produce turmoil at airports around the country and widespread condemnation from the press. Why would he do this?"
Jones posits that Bannon really wanted turmoil and condemnation and bad press, and the airport chaos was intentional to create this flurry of media attention. He totally wanted all this publicity. He wanted the ACLU and refugee advocates to freak out.
They did. The executive orders brought out thousands of protesters, and condemnation from the main stream media. The executive order pissed off a lot of people, including radical Islamists.
Maybe Bannon actually hoped for some terrorist attack so that he could point to the protesters and the media as un-American, and thus gain loyalty from Americans frightened by the terrorist attack.
It seems like the ground work is already being laid. There was a
terrorist attack against a mosque in Quebec last night that killed at least six people. Note that this happened in
Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has very publicly supported refugees as the United States "Muslim ban" went into effect.
Note also how
Bannon vilified the media as the opposition and said the press should "keep its mouth shut" about Trump. The president's counselor,
Kellyanne Conway, wondered on Sunday why pundits at major media companies hadn't been fired for crticizing Trump.
See, they're trying to cow the press into being their PR department, rather than report what happened.
Bannon could also use the Quebec terrorist attack to vilify sane national leaders like Trudeau.
Then there's
Trump's decision to bring Bannon into the Joint Chiefs of Staff and demoting the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This is a big departure from past presidential practices of both parties who tried to keep politics out of the critical military decisions by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, the decisions made will be more political, hewed toward Bannon's white supremecist views, and away from the traditional strategic military thinking the panel had always done in the past.
There's also
signs a constitutional crisis might already be brewing. There are reports the Trump administration is ignoring this weekend's court orders that would allow some refugees and green card holders into the country, instead of detaining them.
The President is subject to the law just like everybody else, and if President Trump is ignoring court orders, is he trying to be our white supremacist dictator instead of the head of a Constitutional democracy?
That's the dark scenario.
The more this goes on, the more demonstrators hit the streets. Huge crowds of protesters showed up spontaneously in cities like New York, Washington DC, Boston and many others on Sunday decrying Trump's unconstitutional moves.
Democratic lawmakers have been howling, too. But with few exceptions, Republicans have remained silent. Are these Republicans complicit in Trump's possible moves to become Dictator for Life? Or maybe just OK with it, because what the hell, Trump fits their agenda and to hell with democracy.
I'm not the only one coming up with theories like this. When I was almost finished writing this, I found an
analysis, much more detailed than mine, that covers exactly the same ground I did.
The article, and my thoughts, could be paranoia, but maybe not. It's so hard to tell at this point.
Even if I'm wrong, Trump is terribly damaging the United States morally and economically, and destroying our standing in the world.
Like I said, my fears might be overblown, but let's all remain vigilant and active anyway. The nation you save might be your own.
