This is getting very, very serious

Today, Donald Trump signed an executive order commanding Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to set up new “specialized units” within the National Guard, including ready reaction forces that will be available to move with 24 hours’ notice. These units will not be deployed against America’s enemies overseas but against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. Trump commanded specially trained National Guard units to be “available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law.”

Boy, is that broad. Guess who gets to determine what is a threat to “public safety and order” and a “civil disturbance?” Donald Trump. He already did it on an ad hoc basis when he ordered the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Now he wants permanently established special units to be trained to deal with U.S. citizens he doesn’t like, in cities led by his political opponents. He’s threatening Chicago, Baltimore, and New York with deployments as he did in L.A. and Washington. He’s prepared to declare a “law enforcement emergency” anyplace he wants to. I can tell you that he will not declare an “emergency” in the cities and states that actually have the highest crime rates, like Memphis, Tennessee, Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana, all in red states.

Donald Trump just put his signature on a piece of paper establishing an American Sturmabteilung, a domestic military force similar to the Nazi SA, Hitler’s brownshirt storm troopers. Hitler put his armed terror troops in the streets to quell disturbances and to deal with groups that supported his political opponents, in the days when he still had political opponents.

Hitler did something else that Donald Trump is doing. He had a specialized Reich Ministry of Justice that he used against his political opponents and parts of German society that were insufficiently loyal to him. He strongarmed law firms and lawyers and appointed judges who passed Nazi loyalty tests so they would rule the way he wanted.

Does any of that sound familiar? Ask John Bolton what he thinks about Donald Trump’s Department of Justice and its Federal Bureau of Investigation after what happened at his home and office on Friday. Ask some of the big New York law firms that have caved to Trump’s pressure and agreed to pay a bribe into the federal treasury so that they will not be barred from federal buildings, forbidden to work on cases involving the federal government, and have the security clearances stripped from their top-tier attorneys. Ask some of the organizations and people that have been sued in the Federal District Court in the Northern District of Texas overseen by a single judge, Joseph Kacsmaryk, one of “Trump’s judges,” as they are known, who has never ruled in a way that his master didn’t approve of.

Trump said he was going to be a dictator on day one. He did that, and he kept going. How can we tell what he plans for the future? Listen to what he said today: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

When you find it necessary to deny that you’re a dictator, you are a dictator.

Every day Donald Trump comes up with another authoritarian horror. He said he wants to put Adam Schiff “in jail,” and what do you know but Schiff finds himself the target of a formal DOJ investigation. He has even had to start a legal defense fund. Yesterday, Trump threatened the broadcasting licenses of ABC and NBC, saying “they should pay up BIG for having the privilege of using the most valuable airwaves anywhere at anytime!!!” Maybe the executives who run the broadcast networks should call up Intel and Nvidia and AMD and see what it’s like to have the federal government basically take an equity position in your corporation. You know where the national government owns the media companies, don’t you? Putin’s Russia. It wouldn’t surprise me if Putin didn’t own a personal stake in Russian broadcasters. He owns parts of every other major industry in Russia. Why not the news?

We can’t just stand by while Donald Trump floods the streets of every blue state city run by a Democratic mayor and city council on the phony basis that what he wants to do is reduce crime. He doesn’t give a shit about crime. He wants to terrorize the citizenry. He wants to terrorize his critics like Bolton and Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Tonight, he fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on the phony charge that she engaged in mortgage fraud. He wants to strongarm the rest of the Fed governors into lowering interest rates to where he wants them. He just threatened to go after Chris Christie of New Jersey after he went after Trump for the Epstein scandal on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday. Trump said Christie is guilty in “Bridgegate.”

Bridgegate happened 12 years ago.

Nobody is safe. We need a plan. Trump is actively coordinating a military invasion of our major cities. What are we going to do? Governor Pritzker of Illinois has announced that he will file a lawsuit the first day that a National Guard soldier appears in Chicago. That’s good, but it’s not enough. Pritzker and other Democratic leaders in Illinois should lead a march that will block the movement of National Guard soldiers from wherever they enter Chicago. Leaders in New York and Baltimore should start preparing right now, today. Trump will order the National Guard to be armed, to carry guns to threaten American citizens. He has already done it in Washington.

The most effective moment of protest when soldiers were used against U.S. citizens was when a protester put a flower in the barrel of a rifle held by a soldier protecting the Pentagon during the anti-war “March on the Pentagon” in 1967. The photograph “went viral” to use today’s term to describe its effect at the time. It was a picture not only of resistance but absurdity. “Flower power” was born. A peaceful protest gave rise to other peaceful anti war protests like the Moratorium. It was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam.

We don’t use armed American soldiers against American civilians. That way lies fascism and dictatorship. If we don’t want a fascist dictatorship, we must loudly say so and stand up against Trump’s absurd attempts to cow us with into submission using armed soldiers in our streets.

This is our country. We are not afraid. We will not submit.