Seoul survivor: Could martial law happen here?

The short answer is: look who the voters of this country, in all of their alleged collective wisdom, elected as the president of the United States. The even shorter answer is, you bet your fucking ass it could happen here with Hitler’s illegitimate son in the White House.

Donald Trump started rattling what could have been our chains since he first took office in 2017. He struts around fluffing his feathers all proud that he didn’t get us involved in a foreign war in his first term, but he came this close to loosing the 82^nd Airborne Division on George Floyd protests in 2022, stymied only by a united front at the Pentagon, both military and civilian, who threw down a gauntlet in formalized letters to the troops and messages to each other that the U.S. military would not be engaged in politics. Gen. Mark Milley was the ringleader of this quiet protest, but Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made his feeling clearly enough known that Trump fired him and replaced him with a lapdog and then appointed Kash Patel as his chief of staff to keep an eye on him.

Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1792 during the Floyd protests, and that dastardly law passed by an ancient Congress has been mentioned by an increasingly large collection of his puppets since he was elected last month. The Insurrection Act contains this gem of a paragraph which seemingly gives a president an open-ended ability to do whatever the fuck he wants with our active duty soldiers any time he wants to:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

The succeeding paragraph is equally scary:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

It’s followed by two subparagraphs that talk in a rather unfocused way about using the powers of the militia or the armed forces if “the execution of the law” is hindered, or “the course of justice” is “impeded,” or the “equal protection of the law” is obstructed.

You take Donald Trump and put him in the Oval Office with Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth, or in the event he isn’t confirmed, the equally disgustingly fascist Ron DeSantis, and you tell me that rotting meatball of a brain trust wouldn’t endorse any justification Trump came up with as an excuse to put armed soldiers on the streets if so much as a single brown-skinned shoplifter stole a stick of deodorant from a Target store in Sheboygan.

The Insurrection Act does not, as South Korea’s declaration of martial law did, suspend the Constitution, impose limits on the press or threaten punishment for publishing “fake news,” dismiss the legislature, ban strikes by unions and public gatherings, or ban “political activities.” But see if this doesn’t sound familiar, if not likely, to come from the lips of a certain makeup-caked burger-chomper: The South Korean president cited the “destabilizing force” of a foreign nation with which South Korea shares a border and the possibility of that country causing South Korea to “fall to ruin” under pressures brought to bear by “anti-state forces” within South Korea.

Haven’t we heard the phrase “enemies within” about eleventy-thousand times over the last year? How about “enemies of the people,” identified as members of the dastardly media? Stephen Miller has been calling undocumented immigrants “invaders” for eight years.

A poorly written and ill-defined law, passed in contemplation of being enforced more than two centuries ago, can be made to mean whatever the fuck Trump wants it to mean when he is surrounded by lackeys and “yes sir” men and women, backed up by a Supreme Court that seemingly didn’t even need a hearing to issue its lockstep allee-allee-in-come-free ruling removing Donald Trump of the constraints of the rule of law that have been in force since the signing of the Constitution.

The point I’m making is this: You can use the words Insurrection Act or martial law, it’s the same thing when you put the words “Donald Trump” in the same sentence with either.

In South Korea, the reaction to the imposition of martial law was immediate. Thousands took to the streets. Legislators climbed barricades to get into their capitol to cast a unanimous vote lifting the executive order of martial law. The defiance of the people and lawmakers alike was absolute, total, without question.

Raise your hand if you can see Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mitch McConnell and Jim Jordan and Mike Johnson and the rest of them breaking into the nation’s Capitol to do anything other than vote to add a crown and scepter to the trappings of the Trump presidency. Take one step forward if you think that the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho or any other red state will be on the phone to the White House telling Trump to get his troops off their states’ soil.

Donald Trump and every one of his MAGA mouthpieces have already referred repeatedly to immigrants coming across the southern border as an “invasion.” The first paragraph of the Insurrection Act spells out the right of any governor to request the president to order active-duty troops into his or her state to “suppress insurrection” within its borders. You tell me how Republican governors are likely to define what is an “insurrection” in their states. Gregg Abbott might drive past a Home Depot and eyeball a clutch of Latino laborers looking for work as “insurrectionists” and pick up his cell phone and call Trump and ask him to turn out the troops to help him suppress it.

Given the results of the election in November and a look at the list of suck-ups and house pets Trump wants to serve in his Cabinet, the short answer, the long answer, every answer is, we are so fucked.