All posts tagged "military"

Trump’s death squads are darkly familiar

Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.

Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea.

The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.

The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on Oct. 27th alone. Blood, it seems, lusts for blood.

And the kill zone has been expanding from the Caribbean waters off Venezuela to the Colombian and Peruvian coasts in the Pacific Ocean.

Many motives might explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and rush of power that comes from giving execution orders, or he (and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he considers the strikes useful distractions from the crime and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also red meat for the vengeful Trumpian rank-and-file who have been ginned up by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately plagues the Republican Party’s white rural base, on elite “betrayal.”

The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As to Trump, he’s brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”

But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.

What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement.

A Short History of the Longest War

Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug-war president.

On June 17, 1971, with the Vietnam War still raging, he announced a “new, all-out offensive” on drugs. Nixon didn’t use the phrase “war on drugs.” Within 48 hours, however, scores of newspapers nationwide had done so, suggesting that White House staffers had fed the militarized phrase to their reporters.

Nixon’s call for a drug offensive was a direct response to an explosive story published a month earlier in the New York Times, headlined “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were addicts, with some units reporting that more than 50 percent of their men were using heroin.

At press conferences, Nixon was now being questioned not just about when and how he planned to end the war in Vietnam, but whether drug users in the military would be sent to rehab or punished. What, one journalist asked, was he “going to do about” the “soldiers who are coming back from Vietnam with an addiction to heroin?”

What he did was launch what we might today think of as Vietnam’s second act, a global expansion of military operations, focused not on communists this time, but on marijuana and heroin.

In 1973, shortly after the last U.S. combat soldier left South Vietnam, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Its first major operation in Mexico looked eerily like Vietnam. Starting in 1975, U.S. agents went deep into northern Mexico, joining local police and military forces to carry out military sweeps and airborne fumigation. One report described it as a terror campaign of extrajudicial murder and torture against rural marijuana and opium producers, mostly poor peasant farmers. The campaign treated all villagers as if they were the “internal enemy.” Under the cover of fighting drugs, Mexican security forces, supplied with intelligence by the DEA and the Central Intelligence Agency, ferociously suppressed peasant and student activists. As historian Adela Cedillo wrote, rather than limiting drug production, that campaign led to its concentration in a few hierarchically structured paramilitary organizations that, in the late 1970s, came to be known as “cartels.”

So, the first fully militarized battlefront in the War on Drugs helped create the cartels that the current iteration of the War on Drugs is now fighting.

Gerald Ford (1974-1977) responded to pressure from Congress — notably from New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel — by committing to a “supply-side” strategy of attacking drug production at its source (as opposed to trying to reduce demand at home). While countries in Southeast Asia, along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, had been major suppliers of heroin to the U.S., Mexicans, long a source of marijuana, had begun to grow poppy to meet the demand from heroin-habituated Vietnam vets. By 1975, it was supplying more than 85 percent of the heroin entering the United States. “Developments in Mexico are not good,” a White House aide told Ford in preparation for a meeting with Rangel.

Ford increased DEA operations in Latin America.

Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) supported the decriminalization of pot for personal use and, in his speeches and remarks, emphasized treatment over punishment. Overseas, however, the DEA continued to expand its operations. (It would soon be running 25 offices in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries.)

Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) reigned in an era when drug policy would take a turn toward the surreal, strengthening the linkages between rightwing politics and illicit drugs.

But let’s backtrack a bit. The convergence of rightwing politics and drugs began at the end of World War Two when, according to historian Alfred McCoy, U.S. intelligence in Italy came to rely on crime boss Lucky Luciano’s growing “international narcotics syndicate,” which would reach from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean Sea and from Istanbul to Havana, to conduct covert anti-communist operations. Then, in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution shut down that island’s lucrative drug trade, traffickers moved elsewhere in Latin America or to the United States, where they, too, joined the anti-communist cause.

The CIA then used those gangster exiles in operations meant to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuban government and undermine the domestic antiwar movement. At the same time, the CIA ran its own airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia, which smuggled opium and heroin as a way to support that agency’s secret war in Laos. And the FBI notoriously used the pretext of drug policing to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” political dissidents, including the Black Panthers. They worked, for example, with local police in Buffalo, New York, to frame African American activist Martin Sostre, who operated a bookstore that had become the center of that city’s Black radical politics, on trumped-up charges of selling heroin.

Nixon’s creation of the DEA drew those threads together, as its agents worked closely with both the FBI in the U.S. and the CIA in Latin America. When, after the war in Vietnam ended in defeat, Congress tried to rein in the CIA, its agents used the DEA’s expansive overseas network to continue their covert operations.

By the time Reagan became president, cocaine production in the Andean region in Latin America was in full swing, with a distinctly curious dynamic in operation: the CIA would work with rightwing, repressive governments involved in coca production even as the DEA was working with those same governments to suppress coca production. That dynamic was caught perfectly as early as 1971 in Bolivia when the CIA helped overthrow a mildly leftist government in the first of a series of what came to be known as “cocaine coups.” Bolivia’s “cocaine colonels” then took as much money as Washington was willing to offer to fight their version of the drug war while facilitating cocaine production for export abroad. President Carter cut off drug-interdiction funding to Bolivia in 1980. Reagan restored it in 1983.

The rise of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet followed the same dynamic. Pinochet partly framed his 1973 CIA-enabled coup against socialist President Salvador Allende as a front in Nixon’s drug war. Working closely with the DEA, the general tortured and killed drug traffickers along with political activists as part of his post-coup wave of repression. Meanwhile, Pinochet’s allies began “to deal drugs with impunity,” with Pinochet’s family making millions exporting cocaine to Europe (with the help of agents from his infamous security forces).

Once in office, Reagan began escalating the drug war as he did the Cold War — and the bond between cocaine and rightwing politics tightened. The Medellín cartel donated millions of dollars to Reagan’s campaign against Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. The ties were murky and conspiratorial, part of what McCoy has termed the “covert netherworld,” so it’s easy to fall down the deep-state rabbit hole trying to trace them, but details can be found in reporting by Gary Webb, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Bill Moyers, John Kerry, and CBS’s 60 Minutes, among others.

George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) engaged in a very Trump-like move in making his case to the public that the war on drugs needed to be escalated. He had the DEA go to the poorest part of Washington, D.C., to entrap a low-level African American drug dealer, Keith Jackson, paying him to travel to the White House to sell an undercover agent three ounces of crack cocaine. Bush then held up the drugs on national television to illustrate how easy it was to buy narcotics. A high school senior, Jackson spent eight years in prison so Bush could do a show-and-tell on TV.

The president then ramped up funding for the war on drugs, expanding military and intelligence operations in the Andes and the Caribbean. These were the Miami Vice years, when efforts to suppress cocaine smuggling into Florida only shifted transport routes overland through Central America and Mexico. Bush’s signature contribution to the War on Drugs was Operation Just Cause, in which, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, he dispatched 30,000 Marines to Panama to arrest autocrat Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Noriega had been a CIA asset when Bush was the director of that agency. But with the Cold War over, he had outlived his usefulness.

Bill Clinton (1993-2001) escalated his Republican predecessor’s “tough on drugs” policies. He maintained mandatory minimum sentencing and increased the number of people serving jail time for drug offences.

In his last year in office, Clinton rolled out Plan Colombia which committed billions of dollars more to drug interdiction, but with a twist: privatization. Washington doled out contracts to mercenary corporations to conduct field operations. DynCorp provided pilots, planes, and chemicals for the aerial eradication of drugs (which had horrible environmental consequences) and worked closely with the Colombian military. A cyber start-up, Oakley Networks, now part of Raytheon, also received Plan Colombia money to provide “Internet surveillance software” to Colombia’s National Police, which used the tech to spy on human-rights activists.

Plan Colombia led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and widespread ecological devastation. The result? Estimates vary, but roughly twice as much Colombian land is now believed to be dedicated to growing coca as at the start of Plan Colombia in 2000 and the production of cocaine has doubled.

George W. Bush (2001–2009) again escalated the war on drugs, increasing interdiction funding both domestically and internationally. He also urged Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to launch his own brutal military assault on the drug cartels. By the time Calderón left office, security forces and the cartels combined had killed or disappeared tens of thousands of Mexicans.

Conceptually, Bush linked the post-9/11 Global War on Terror to the Global War on Drugs. “Trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror,” he claimed.

Barack Obama (2009–2017), like President Carter, emphasized treatment over incarceration. Nonetheless, he took no steps to wind down the war on drugs, continuing to fund Plan Colombia and expanding Plan Mérida, which his predecessor had put in place to combat cartels in Central America and Mexico.

In February 2009, the former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — Fernando Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and César Gaviria — released a report entitled “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” which called for an end to the war on drugs, proposing instead decriminalization and the treatment of drug use as a public health issue. The authors were establishment politicians, and Obama could have used their breakthrough report to help build a new public health consensus concerning drug use. But his White House largely ignored the report.

Donald Trump (2017–2021) increased already high-level funding for militarized counter-narcotic operations at the border and abroad, calling for the “death penalty” for drug dealers. He also floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” but to do so “quietly” so “no one would know it was us.”

In Trump’s first term, he offered a now-forgotten (in the U.S. at least) preview of the killing of civilians on boats. On May 11, 2017, DEA agents and their Honduran counterparts traveling by boat along the Patuca River opened fire on a water taxi carrying 16 passengers. Overhead, a DEA agent in a circling helicopter ordered a Honduran soldier to fire his machine gun at the taxi. Four died, including a young boy and two pregnant women, and three others were seriously injured. The incident involved 10 U.S. agents, none of whom suffered any consequences for the massacre.

Joe Biden (2021–2025) supported de-escalation in principle and actually decreased funding for aerial drug fumigation in Colombia. He also issued blanket pardons to thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges. Nonetheless, like the presidents before him, he continued funding the DEA and military operations in Latin America.

Donald Trump (2025-?) has opened a new front in the war against Mexico’s drug cartels in New England. The DEA, working with ICE and the FBI, claims that in August it made 171 “high-level arrests” of “members of the Sinaloa cartel” throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team, though, reports that most of those arrested were involved in “small dollar drug sales,” or were simply addicts, and had no link whatsoever to the Sinaloa cartel.

Trump insists that the “war on drugs” isn’t a metaphor, that it’s a real war, and as such he possesses extraordinary wartime powers – including the authority to bomb Mexico and attack Venezuela.

Considering this history, who’s to argue? Or to think that such a war could end anything but badly — or, for that matter, ever end at all?

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. His most recent book was the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction, "The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America." His previous books include, "Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman," "The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World" and "Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Trump can't grasp the terrifying reality of what he just promised

On Oct. 29, just before meeting China’s President XI Jinping, Donald Trump posted on his social media network Truth Social that “because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”

The US stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992 — that is, detonating nuclear warheads. It regularly tests “delivery vehicles,” the missiles that would be used to carry the nuclear weapon to its intended target. The most recent of these tests took place early on Wednesday, Nov. 5, when an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, on the coast of California. It’s possible that Trump simply does not understand the difference between these two things.

Observers speculated that Trump’s nuclear test announcement was a response to Russia’s recent test of its Burevestnik missile, which is nuclear-capable — meaning it could carry a nuclear warhead, though it did not during the test — and powered by nuclear energy. Some pointed out that it would be the Department of Energy, rather than the Pentagon, that would carry out a test detonation of a nuclear weapon. Trump’s use of the phrase “on an equal basis,” given that China and Russia are not detonating nuclear weapons, was comforting to some.

Whatever he meant, it’s worth considering how this latest episode of existential terror imposed from above highlights what depths of apocalyptic misbehavior are now considered normal when it comes to how nuclear weapons countries behave toward one another.

The missile Russia tested was designed to deliver a nuclear weapon without being intercepted by missile defense systems, using nuclear power to extend its flight time much longer than non-nuclear powered missiles. The Russian government also claimed to have tested its Poseidon torpedo, also nuclear-capable and nuclear-powered, and designed to be used in coastal waters to create a huge wave of irradiated water that would wash ashore.

Neither of these, nor the ICBM test, amount to a “nuclear test.” But, should the US conduct a test explosion of a nuclear warhead, it would be adding to the environmental burden that has led to nearly half a million deaths, by one scholarly estimate, from the over 1,000 test nuclear detonations the US has carried out. (This is about half of the over 2,000 total tests carried out worldwide between 1945 and 2017.) The health and environmental effects of this testing are ongoing, and the United States hasn’t come close to cleaning up after its earlier nuclear tests.

To take just one example, waste from tests conducted in the Marshall Islands is still sitting in the Runit Dome, a cracking concrete structure on Runit Island in the Enewetak Atoll that is under constant threat from worsening storms as a result of climate change. US nuclear testing has rendered Marshallese ways of life untenable for the long term, with no real prospects for full remediation on the horizon. (ICBM tests launched from Vandenberg are aimed at the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, a less dramatically destructive but still significant burden on a place that has long paid a high price for the maintenance of US nuclear weapons.)

Still, even if Trump is responding to recent nuclear tests that didn’t happen, this is largely in keeping with how nuclear-armed countries tend to justify changes in their nuclear policy as reciprocal responses to unprovoked aggression, no matter what the facts are. What’s more certain, however, is that if the US tests a nuclear weapon, Russia and China are far more likely to begin testing nuclear weapons of their own, as Russia has already threatened. This would lead to more environmental damage, more health consequences across the globe, and more normalization of nuclear explosions as part of the business of doing politics.

It seems as if much of the press has lost sight of the actual stakes here. The Washington Post‘s coverage of Trump’s announcement, for one, skipped over all the reasons a nuclear test might actually be undesirable and instead merely named “far-reaching consequences for relations with adversaries” as the real thing its readers should be worried about. If that is indeed the main concern, conducting multiple missile tests a year that signal the US’s willingness to use ICBMs should be viewed for what it is — a gesture that keeps nuclear war on the mind of governments around the world as a real possibility, a norm of global politics rather than a collective fate that must be avoided at all costs.

The reality is, Americans share the unfortunate situation of everyone else in the world of being first and foremost potential victims of nuclear weaponry, vulnerable to the whims of the leaders they have theoretically empowered to control the country’s thousands of nuclear weapons, nearly all of which are much, much more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear arsenals have been maintained using advanced computer modeling for decades. The fact that nuclear test explosions have entered even the far reaches of possibility, even for an administration which embraces brutal violence with such open enthusiasm, is cause for alarm and collective action against the threat that nuclear weapons pose to human life.

It’s easy to dismiss a “test” as something less than the full terrifying reality of nuclear weapons use. In some cases, this is true. Underground nuclear tests are less immediately hazardous to human and environmental health than atmospheric tests, which the US stopped conducting in 1962. An ICBM test does not involve the detonation of a nuclear weapon.

But the scale and political importance of a nuclear weapon test means any indication of a willingness to use it under any circumstances has political significance. Historians have noted that one of the main reasons the United States ultimately decided to use nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to test whether they would work as expected.

We should not let nuclear testing once again become part of nuclear-armed countries’ business as usual. A nuclear explosion is a nuclear explosion, and the fallout will be all of ours to deal with.

Emma Claire Foley is a Program Associate at Global Zero. She runs the Global Zero Military Incidents Project, which collects and analyzes open-source data to track the risk of conflict involving nuclear-armed states. She received her A.M. in Russian and Eurasian Studies from Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

This direct line leads from 9/11 to Trump

This week, on Veterans Day, as I sometimes do, I thought about the memorable preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions.

This is what he said.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

One day is for remembering people who served our country. The other day is for remembering that time when people “stopped butchering one another.”

To give you an idea: the Battle of the Somme saw more than 1 million men killed or injured. From July to November in 1916, 1 million men died, or their lives, and the lives of everyone they loved, were changed forever.

One million.

According to Vonnegut, Armistice Day was a reprieve. A moment of grace.

That’s something you want to remember. Do we?

Something happened to America after 9/11. The conservatives were in charge. They thought the best way to protect democracy was to militarize it. For the duration of George W Bush’s tenure, he was seen by the press corps as more commander-in-chief than president. A democracy shouldn’t do that. When it does, well, I don’t have to tell you who the current president is.

It’s not like there weren’t signs of what was to come.

In the midterms following the 2001 terrorist attack, Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a Democrat, lost. His GOP opponent, Saxby Chambliss, questioned his patriotism, though Chambliss himself got a medical deferment (bum knee) to avoid the Vietnam draft. Cleland, meanwhile, lost an arm and both legs at Khe Sanh.

John Kerry was decorated for valor in Vietnam, but later protested the war. By 2004, when he challenged Bush, the GOP acted his campaign was an insult to the divine right of commanders-in-chief. They swiftboated his patriotism.

A Black president shocked those who believe this is a white man’s country. Pre-2008: “We must support the command-in-chief!” Post-2008: “Well …”

Veterans Day should remind us what honor means to some. It doesn’t mean sacrifice in defense of American principles. It means unconditional loyalty, especially by way of militarization, first to a party, then to a single man.

Donald Trump takes a militarized attitude toward everything, such that he can designate Caribbean fishermen as “narco-terrorists” to justify murdering them. His secretary of defense talks as if preparing for civil war. Trump’s national police force, ICE, acts like American citizens are enemy combatants.

There is a straight line from 9/11 to now.

I’m not a historian, but the way I understand it, the attitude we are seeing now from the Trump regime is similar to the attitude of governments in the run up to the First World War. They all thought that they were invincible, that war would “cleanse” their people, that combat sorted the men from the boys.

On Veterans Day, we remember the people who served our country, especially in times of war, but tend to forget the consequences of war.

Vonnegut didn’t. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Second World War on the night allied bombers turned that city into a storm of fire. When the bombs ceased falling, he probably felt what the old men felt when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”

That the silence was the voice of God.

The more we forget that history, the more likely we are to repeat it.

Dark motive behind Trump maneuver revealed in ominous court filing

On Monday, the Trump administration submitted arguments to the Supreme Court claiming that no court — including the Supreme Court — can question Trump’s decision to deploy military troops against US cities.

Trump lawyers wrote that “the President’s determination to call up the National Guard is a core exercise of his power as Commander in Chief over military affairs, based on an explicit delegation from Congress. That determination is not judicially reviewable at all; at minimum, it is entitled to extremely deferential review, under which (Trump’s deployment) should be upheld.”

Claiming Trump called up the National Guard in Chicago “in light of the violent, organized resistance” ICE agents face, Trump attorneys insist his decision is not subject to judicial review, citing a case from 1827 that they apparently have not read.

Martin v. Mott arose from the War of 1812, and held that military subordinates could not second guess a president’s judgment about military threats. Although it is often mis-cited, Martin did not even discuss judicial review, much less hold that no court can ever review a president’s decision.

Americans don’t want this

Most Americans have a strong moral resistance to military intrusion into civilian affairs. An easy majority of Americans today, across party lines, oppose sending military troops into US cities in the absence of a foreign threat.

Our resistance can be traced back to the Revolutionary War. After living under the tyranny of King George III, whose hated armed troops ate their food and slept in quarters they were forced to provide, colonists held a widespread fear of a national standing army, because it threatened individual liberty and the sovereignty of the separate states. Because of that distrust, the founders carefully apportioned responsibility over the “militia” — today’s National Guard — between the federal government and the States.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 15 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to call forth the National Guard “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” That foundational authority in turn supports Title 10 USC 12406, which allows a president to call forth the militia but only under specific, statutorily defined circumstances. It also supports the Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1385, which forbids the use of any part of the federal armed forces to execute laws, except where “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress,” reflecting “the deeply rooted and ancient opposition in this country to the extension of military control over civilians.”

Exaggerated threats

Trump officials, with daily assistance from Fox News, report extreme violence among ICE protestors, significantly more violence than eyewitnesses, or state and local law enforcement officers, have observed.

Trump lawyers claim ICE agents “are facing incessant violent resistance on the streets of Illinois — including ambushes where their vehicles are rammed by trucks and dangerous projectiles are thrown at them, potentially motivated by bounties placed on their heads by violent gangs and transnational cartels. Federal agents faced with such threats and violence — in Chicago and elsewhere— operate, on a daily basis, in a climate of fear for their lives and safety, forced constantly to focus on self-defense and protection instead of executing federal law.”

It is no surprise that eyewitness accounts largely dispute these claims, often with video evidence. Examples of disputed ICE claims include:

In instances where ICE agents alleged their vehicles were rammed by activists, video footage showed the federal agents' vehicles were the aggressors, ramming the other vehicles first.
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino admitted he was not hit by a rock until after he deployed tear gas at a Chicago protest, contradicting earlier claims that it happened in reverse.
DHS claimed a middle-aged, heavy set woman, a WGN news producer, went out of her way to assault an ICE agent; eyewitness said she was simply standing there taking video. She was eventually released without charges.
After DHS claimed a “more than 1,000 percent rise” in assaults on ICE agents, reporting from NPR and a review of federal court filings found no public evidence to support that claim.
Videos circulating online show unprovoked, excessive violence from federal agents against protestors, with several showing agents pointing guns at peaceful observers.

To date, there is no known case addressing what happens when an unhinged president deliberately escalates violence and civil unrest in order to feel powerful/beat his chest/justify siccing the military on US citizens.

'Regular forces'

The Ninth and Seventh Circuit Appellate courts have addressed Trump’s National Guard deployments into US cities. Both appellate courts rejected Trump’s argument that military deployments are not reviewable, noting that the statute’s plain text lists specific predicate conditions before a president can deploy the National Guard, and “nothing in the text … makes the President the sole judge of whether these preconditions exist.”

The Ninth Circuit decision is awaiting full en banc review, while the Seventh Circuit concluded that facts on the ground weren’t what ICE said they were. The Seventh Circuit decision is now before the US Supreme Court, which recently directed the parties to file supplemental brief letters on the meaning of 10 USC 12406(3), which allows a president to call up the National Guard when he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

Trump’s belief that his deployment of military forces is immune from judicial review is ominous, given his demonstrated lust for violence against unarmed people. His sinister plans for Americans who don’t support him, now officially labeled “domestic terrorists,” will depend greatly on whether the Supreme Court checks him with this case.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

The GOP's hero called this the backbone of America. Trump just broke it

The American media refuses to call them out, so I guess the job falls to me: you can cut the racism with a knife, it’s so thick. With the Trump administration, the Confederacy is actively rising again, using the Lost Cause mythology/lie as its basis.

Trump this past week, apparently just in time for Veterans Day, erased tributes to Black U.S. soldiers who died fighting fascism — removing displays and plaques honoring African American liberators in Europe and removing similar memorial content at home — not merely to rewrite history but to say that only white men’s stories matter.

First, he claimed that brown-skinned people from south of the border were “murderers and rapists,” openly promoting racist tropes and activating enthusiastic bigots all across America to his side.

He whipped up a white mob who attacked the Capitol building and beat Black Capitol Police officers, screaming the N-word at them, while he watched on TV with apparent glee. He then pardoned all of them.

He reinstalled the statue of notorious Klan member, traitor, and Confederate general Albert Pike, while removing references to the horrors of slavery or early American presidents’ slaveholding from national parks and other federal monuments.

Trump’s white supremacists removed references to Black and female soldiers’ sacrifices from the Arlington Memorial Cemetery website.

Meanwhile, “Whiskey” Pete Hegseth is sweeping out senior‐level military leaders — women and people of color disproportionately — for daring to exist in leadership, and has ended military recognition of Black and women’s history events.

Trump’s henchman Russell Vought is finishing DOGE’s purge of Civil Service protections and DEI programs, with Black men and women especially hit hard.

This isn’t mere bureaucratic housekeeping: it’s the return of a white-male-supremacist architecture taking root in the GOP and the administration with echoes of the old Confederacy and the masked Klan in modern uniforms and executive orders.

But the even larger issue here is not only the racism: it’s the systematic assault on democracy and diversity itself. This is not just about statues or plaques or websites. It’s about the rewriting of our national identity, the redefinition of who counts as American, and the hasty, one-presidential-term reconstruction of a two-tier democracy: one for white men and one for everyone else.

Democracy depends on memory. When we lose sight of who fought, bled, and sacrificed to make this country more just, we lose our understanding of what democracy is supposed to mean. By erasing Black liberators, women leaders, and the long, painful march toward equality, this administration is saying: Only one story matters: the white, male, Confederate one.

That’s not just historical revisionism; it’s political weaponry. It’s a way of teaching future generations that the only people who truly belong in the story of America are white men with power.

This is how authoritarianism takes root, not just through violence, but through erasure. When diversity and equality are scrubbed from public memory, when entire groups of Americans are made invisible, it becomes easier to justify their exclusion in the present.

And once exclusion is normalized, democracy itself begins to die.

This Confederate revival we’re witnessing is not nostalgia: it’s a blueprint. The Lost Cause myth was always about rewriting defeat as heroism, slavery as benevolence, and white dominance as divine order.

That same logic is now being reinstalled at the highest levels of government. It’s an ideology that says equality is a threat and diversity is an invasion. It recasts white resentment as patriotism and paints those demanding fairness as enemies of the state. It’s why Hegseth condemned DEI in front of his generals and admirals and Trump and Fox “News” constantly rail against it.

But democracy, real democracy, cannot coexist with white supremacy. The two are fundamentally opposed.

Democracy requires inclusion, the recognition that every person’s voice and dignity matter. Diversity is not a “side issue” or a “political correctness” distraction; it is — as Ronald Reagan pointed out (ironically) — the very mechanism that keeps democracy alive. Reagan famously said (and Trump now repudiates):

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow.
“Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.
“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

A government that silences or excludes women, Black people, immigrants, and other marginalized voices is no longer democratic and no longer looking or striving toward the future. It is frozen, stale, hierarchical, authoritarian, and fragile.

When the Trump administration erases diversity from its institutions — by firing people of color, ending DEI programs, banning the celebration of women’s history or Black soldiers’ sacrifices — it is not just discriminating. It is redefining the nation’s soul.

It is saying: only white male Americans count. Only they deserve to be remembered. Only they deserve to hold power, control wealth, and lead.

That is a true danger.

It’s an attempt to create a pseudo-democracy that exists in name only, one that maintains the trappings of elections and laws but has hollowed out the moral core of equality beneath them that upholds and sustains our republican system.

If this continues unchecked, we won’t simply be facing a rollback of rights; we’ll be watching the slow, deliberate dismantling of this noble 249-year democratic experiment itself.

And so, we must fight, not just for memory, but for meaning. We must insist that our national story remain whole and honest. We must demand that the sacrifices of every American — Black, brown, white, female, queer, immigrant — are honored, taught, and celebrated.

Because democracy without diversity is tyranny in disguise.

All Americans of conscience and goodwill must demand an end to these purges of women and minorities in memorials, jobs, the military, and civil service.

We must demand that our politicians stand up to Trump and his white supremacist lickspittle’s while insisting on a return to our foundational promise: equality, equal opportunity, and recognition for every person who serves and sacrifices.

Because if we don’t stop them now, the erasures become the new normal and our children will wake up in a country that no longer remembers it ever stood for freedom at all.

Trump just sent an ominous warning with his latest manufactured crisis

For decades, Washington has sold the world a deadly lie: that “regime change” brings freedom, that US bombs and blockades can somehow deliver democracy. But every country that has lived through this euphemism knows the truth — it instead brings death, dismemberment, and despair. Now that the same playbook is being dusted off for Venezuela, the parallels with Iraq and other US interventions are an ominous warning of what could follow.

As a US armada gathers off Venezuela, a US special operations aviation unit aboard one of the warships has been flying helicopter patrols along the coast. This is the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) — the “Nightstalkers” — the same unit that, in US-occupied Iraq, worked with the Wolf Brigade, the most feared Interior Ministry death squad.

Western media portray the 160th SOAR as an elite helicopter force for covert missions. But in 2005, an officer in the regiment blogged about joint operations with the Wolf Brigade as they swept Baghdad, detaining civilians. On Nov. 10, 2005, he described a “battalion-sized joint operation” in southern Baghdad and boasted, “As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees, my face stretched into a long wolfish smile.”

Many people seized by the Wolf Brigade and other US-trained Special Police Commandos were never seen again; others turned up in mass graves or morgues, often far from where they’d been taken. Bodies of people detained in Baghdad were found in mass graves near Badra, 70 miles away — but that was well within the combat range of the Nightstalkers’ MH-47 Chinook helicopters.

This was how the Bush-Cheney administration responded to Iraqi resistance to an illegal invasion: catastrophic assaults on Fallujah and Najaf, followed by the training and unleashing of death squads to terrorize civilians and ethnically cleanse Baghdad. The United Nations reported over 34,000 civilians killed in 2006 alone, and epidemiological studies estimate roughly 1 million Iraqis died overall.

Iraq has never fully recovered — and the US never reaped the spoils it sought. The exiles Washington installed to rule Iraq stole at least $150 billion from its oil revenues, but the Iraqi parliament rejected US-backed efforts to grant shares of the oil industry to Western companies. Today, Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, India, the UAE, and Turkey — not the United States.

The neocon dream of “regime change” has a long, bloody history, its methods ranging from coups to full-scale invasions. But “regime change” is a euphemism: the word “change” implies improvement. A more honest term would be “government removal” — or simply the destruction of a country or society.

A coup usually involves less immediate violence than a full-scale invasion, but they pose the same question: Who or what replaces the ousted government? Time after time, US-backed coups and invasions have installed rulers who enrich themselves through embezzlement, corruption, or drug trafficking — while making life worse for ordinary people.

These so-called “military solutions” rarely resolve problems, real or imaginary, as their proponents promise. They more often leave countries plagued by decades of division, instability, and suffering.

Kosovo was carved out of Serbia by an illegal US-led war in 1999, but it is still not recognized by many nations and remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. The main US ally in the war, Hashim Thaçi, now sits in a cell at the Hague, charged with horrific crimes committed under cover of NATO’s bombing.

In Afghanistan, after 20 years of bloody war and occupation, the United States was eventually defeated by the Taliban — the very force it had invaded the country to remove.

In Haiti, the CIA and US Marines toppled the popular democratic government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, plunging the country into an ongoing crisis of corruption, gang rule, and despair that continues to this day.

In 2006, the US militarily supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to install a new government — an intervention that gave rise to Al Shabab, an Islamic resistance group that still controls large swaths of the country. US AFRICOM has conducted 89 airstrikes in Al Shabab-held territory in 2025 alone.

In Honduras, the military removed its president, Mel Zelaya, in a coup in 2009, and the US supported an election to replace him. The US-backed president Juan Orlando Hernandez turned Honduras into a narco-state, fueling mass emigration — until Xiomara Castro, Zelaya’s wife, was elected to lead a new progressive government in 2021.

Libya, a country with vast oil wealth, has never recovered from the US and allied invasion in 2011, which led to years of militia rule, the return of slave markets, the destabilizing of neighboring countries, and a 45 percent reduction in oil exports.

Also in 2011, the US and its allies escalated a protest movement in Syria into an armed rebellion and civil war. That spawned ISIS, which in turn led to the US-led massacres that destroyed Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria in 2017. Turkish-backed, al-Qaeda-linked rebels finally seized the capital in 2024 and formed a transitional government, but Israel, Turkey, and the US still militarily occupy other parts of the country.

The US-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014 brought in a pro-Western leadership that only half the population recognized as a legitimate government. That drove Crimea and Donbas to secede and put Ukraine on a collision course with Russia, setting the stage for the Russian invasion in 2022 and the wider, still-escalating conflict between NATO and Russia.

In 2015, when the Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement assumed power in Yemen after the resignation of a US-backed transitional government, the US joined a Saudi-led air war and blockade that caused a humanitarian crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis — yet did not defeat the Houthis.

That brings us to Venezuela. Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected in 1998, the US has been trying to overthrow the government. There was the failed 2002 coup; crippling unilateral economic sanctions; the farcical recognition of Juan Guaido as a wannabe president; and the 2020 “Bay of Piglets” mercenary fiasco.

But even if “regime change” in Venezuela were achievable, it would still be illegal under the UN Charter. US presidents are not emperors, and leaders of other sovereign nations do not serve “at the emperor’s pleasure” as if Latin America were still a continent of colonial outposts.

In Venezuela today, Trump’s opening shots — attacks on small civilian boats in the Caribbean — have been condemned as flagrantly illegal, even by US senators who routinely support America’s illegal wars.

Yet Trump still claims to be “ending the era of endless wars.” His most loyal supporters insist he means it — and that he was sabotaged in his first term by the “deep state.” This time, he has surrounded himself with loyalists and sacked National Security Council staffers he identified as neocons or warhawks, but he has still not ended America’s wars.

Alongside Trump’s piracy in the Caribbean, he is a full partner in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. He has maintained the global empire of US military bases and deployments, and supercharged the US war machine with a trillion-dollar war chest — draining desperately needed resources out of a looted domestic economy.

Trump’s appointment of Marco Rubio as secretary of state and national security adviser was an incendiary choice for Latin America, given Rubio’s open hostility to Cuba and Venezuela.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made that clear when he met Trump in Malaysia at the ASEAN conference, saying: “There will be no advances in negotiations with the United States if Marco Rubio is part of the team. He opposes our allies in Venezuela, Cuba, and Argentina.”

At Lula’s insistence, Rubio was excluded from talks over US investments in Brazil’s rare earth metals industry, the world’s second largest after China’s.

Cuba bashing may have served Rubio well in domestic politics, but as secretary of state it renders him incapable of responsibly managing US relations with the rest of the world. Trump will have to decide whether to pursue constructive engagement with Latin America or let Rubio corner him into new conflicts with our neighbors. Rubio’s threats of sanctions against countries that welcome Cuban doctors are already alienating governments across the globe.

Trump’s manufactured crisis with Venezuela exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of his foreign policy: his disastrous choice of advisers; his conflicting ambitions to be both a war leader and a peacemaker; his worship of the military; and his surrender to the same war machine that ensnares every American president.

If there is one lesson from the long history of US interventions, it’s that “regime change” doesn’t bring democracy or stability. As the United States threatens Venezuela with the same arrogance that has wrecked so many other countries, this is the moment to end this cycle of imperial US violence once and for all.

Vicious crackdowns are coming for the people Trump claims to help

By Robert Muggah, Princeton

The U.S. military buildup along South America’s northern rim is, Washington insists, aimed at “narco-terrorists.” A growing chorus of analysts aren’t convinced; they suspect what the Trump administration is really after is regime change in Venezuela.

Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader since 2013, is taking no chances. In recent weeks, he responded to the Trump administration’s moves as if invasion were imminent. After a September emergency decree and martial rhetoric about a “republic in arms,” the Venezuelan president says militias and reservists are now mobilized nationwide.

The leftist leader has ordered armed forces, police and militia to deploy across 284 battlefronts — a national defense posture that surges troops on sensitive borders. He has also massed 25,000 soldiers near Colombia, a likely vector for infiltration.

In addition, roughly 4.5 million members of the National Bolivarian Militia, an auxiliary force created in 2005 and made up of civilian volunteers and reservists, have reportedly mobilized. Civilians are being trained by the armed forces in weapons handling and tactics sessions to knit local “people’s defense” committees into the defense architecture.

This placing of Venezuela on a war footing follows months of U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean. And there is no doubt that should it come to it, the U.S. boasts a far larger and more sophisticated military than Venezuela.

But as an expert on Latin American politics, I suspect that might not be enough to remove Maduro from power — or encourage opposition figures in Venezuela on Washington’s behalf. In fact, any direct attempt to do so might only lead to a slow process that risks entrenching Maduro’s position.

Powerful friends

Alongside nationwide domestic mobilization, the Venezuelan leader still has some pretty powerful international friends. Maduro boasts some 5,000 Russian Igla-S, man-portable anti-aircraft missiles positioned at key air-defense points. While unverified, these reports are indicative of the short-range air defense and anti-ship capabilities being supplied by nations friendly to the Maduro regime.

On Oct. 28, a Russian Il-76 heavy cargo plane, operated by a sanctioned carrier tied to Russian military logistics, landed in Caracas after a multi-stop route through the Caucasus and West Africa. If not an outright sign of solidarity, this is a signal that Russia can airlift advisers, parts and munitions at will.

Iran’s long, quiet hand is visible in Venezuela’s drone program. It was reportedly seeded with Mohajer-2 kits and expanded over the years into armed and surveillance platforms assembled at state plants by Tehran-trained technicians.

Cuba, for its part, has for more than a decade embedded intelligence and internal security advisers across Venezuela’s military services, an underdiscussed force multiplier that helps the regime police dissent and maintain loyalty.

Although Russia, Cuba and Iran may help Maduro survive, they are unlikely to save him from any determined American campaign.

Cautious opposition

If Washington is hoping that its military squeeze may encourage Venezuelans to take matters into their own hands, the domestic scene is less favorable. The opposition to Maduro is fragmented and vulnerable after being deprived, fraudulently by most accounts, victory in a 2024 vote and a subsequent year of repression.

The Democratic Unitary Platform remains split between a pressure wing and a participation wing after the disputed vote. The jolt of morale handed to the opposition on Oct. 10, when the de facto 2024 opposition candidate María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize, has yet to move the needle.

There is a low probability, in my opinion, that the opposition can forcibly remove Maduro without a trigger, such as a major split within the security services, sustained mass mobilization with elite defections, or a massive U.S. intervention.

The regime’s domestic security architecture and control of courts, prosecutors and the electoral council make a sudden elite split unlikely. Electoral displacement is also unpromising given that the official opposition is split on tactics, faces daily repression, and Maduro has repeatedly signaled he will not accept a loss — even if he loses.

Street power, backed by sustained international leverage and U.S. military threats, are arguably the opposition’s best asset.

Diaspora politics are febrile. South Florida’s large Venezuelan exile community reads the naval buildup as a potential turning point and lobbies accordingly, even as U.S. immigration and travel policies cut against their interests. The opposition’s mainstream leaders still mouth the catechism that change should come by Venezuelan hands, but more are openly courting external pressure to tilt the balance.

What Washington might do next

The Trump administration has certainly shown willingness to mount pressure on Maduro and encourage his opponents. Since August, the Pentagon has surged forces, destroyers and amphibious ships into the U.S. Southern Command’s patch. Then, on Oct. 24, Washington redirected the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, attacks against suspected drug vessels will likely continue.

The campaign has already resulted in at least 13 strikes and 57 killed in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific. And President Donald Trump has been consistent in linking the targeted cartels to Venezuela’s government and Maduro directly. Should the U.S. wish to escalate further, precision strikes on Venezuelan territory are not out of the question. With an aircraft carrier nearby and F-35s staged in Puerto Rico, the Pentagon has options.

Meanwhile, covert actions will accompany any overt military posturing. The White House has openly declared that the CIA has authority to operate inside Venezuela. A U.S. Homeland Security agent reportedly tried to recruit Maduro’s chief pilot to fly the president into U.S. custody, a plot that fizzled but hints at the psychological ops now in play. Venezuela, meanwhile, has condemned “military provocation” by the CIA and others.

It is worth recalling past attempts to unseat Maduro, including a 2018 drone attack at a Caracas parade and a failed freelance operation in 2020 that ended with deaths and dozens captured, including two former U.S. soldiers. The U.S. has denied any connection to both incidents.

In any event, such operations seldom topple strongmen – but they do seed paranoia and crackdowns as regimes chase ghosts.

Possible endgames

If Washington’s real objective is regime change, the plausible outcomes are sobering. To be sure, a quick collapse of Maduro’s government is unlikely. A short, sharp campaign that dismantles the regime’s coercive tools could trigger elite defection. Yet Cuba-hardened internal security, patronage over the generals and years of sanctions-induced siege mentality make a palace coup improbable on a timetable that suits Washington.

In my view, a slow squeeze is likelier.

A hybrid strategy involving maritime and air pressure, covert agitation and inducements, targeted strikes to degrade regime capacity, and political, legal and cyber warfare to isolate Caracas and split the officer corps is realistic. But that path risks entrenching the regime’s hard-liners and worsening a humanitarian crisis even as it degrades Maduro’s capacity.

Analysts warn that the regime change logic, once engaged, is hard to calibrate, especially if strikes kill civilians or hit national symbols.

A boomerang is always possible. Military action will very likely rally nationalist sentiment in Venezuela, fracture hemispheric consensus and drag the U.S. into a longer confrontation with messy spillovers, from uncontrolled migration to maritime security threats.

It is worth recalling that approximately 7.9 million migrants and refugees have already left Venezuela, with over 6.7 million residing in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Even the successful decapitation of Maduro’s regime would not guarantee a successor able to govern the country.

At least three signposts matter in determining what happens next.

The first is airlift cadence: More Russian cargo flights into Caracas point to accelerated military and technical aid. A second is the expansion of U.S. targets — a strike on a military installation or a presidential bunker would cross a political Rubicon, even if framed as a counter-narcotics operation. The third is opposition mobilization. If there are credible signs of Venezuelan demonstrations, protests and action, this will shape Washington’s appetite for escalation.

But even if the White House clings to its current counter-drugs and counterterrorism narrative, all evidence points to the trajectory as an incremental regime change push with less than certain outcomes.

Republicans admit Dems wrongly snubbed from Trump’s secret Venezuela briefing: senator

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration snubbed Senate Democrats this week with a secret GOP-only Venezuela briefing on Wednesday in what a lawmaker is calling "an effort to hide the facts from the American people."

Democrats are now calling on Republicans to come forward, demanding that someone be held accountable for barring Democrats from the exclusive meeting.

"I have no explanation why it was a Republican-only briefing, but it's an effort to conceal and hide the facts from the American people," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-NY) told Raw Story. "If the law and facts were on their side, they would be disclosing all this information to us and to the American people. And Americans should be asking why have they engaged in a policy of concealment and deception?"

"We need an all-Senate briefing on the executions that they are mounting day after day that apparently have no justifications," he added.

President Donald Trump has implied there could be ground strikes in Venezuela. It's unclear what will happen next — but Democrats are upset by the move to exclude them from the important conversation.

"Apparently that was a series of missteps, which many of my colleagues have complained about,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) said.

Reed confirmed that several of his Republican colleagues have apologized.

"It was in very poor judgment. I think it involved not a deliberate attempt, but they made no effort to reach out, which is what you have to do on these national security issues, and I think, you know, it goes to the mindset of this administration is that, you know, they don't have to deal with Congress unless there's an emergency and that's usually trying to rally the Republicans to the president," Reed said.

"A lot of my Republican colleagues really sort of felt that this was a mistake, that there should be a full briefing with all members," Reed added.

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said he was invited and later shared his concerns that Democrats were not invited to the briefing.

"I've already shared with my Democrat[ic] colleagues that I got a call from the White House this morning saying, 'We understand that you were concerned about this,' and I said, 'Yup, because intel and Armed Services, we do things on a bipartisan basis, when it comes to intel, we want to keep it that way.' And they said it was not the briefing it was intended for Armed Services or intel on it," Rounds said.

Rounds claimed the White House is aware and plans to address what happened.

"How they address it, I don't know, but they're aware of it," Rounds said. "And I talked to a number of my Democrat[ic] colleagues and told them this was not the Armed Services briefing that a number of us had requested but the information I hope is the same because it was a very good briefing and it explained a lot of stuff and I'm hoping that they are very quick to allow for an Armed Services briefing to be conducted."

Some Republicans did not mind excluding Democrats.

"I think it's appropriate to have two separate meetings and maybe we have one together. So I don't see any problem with it. I don't think it was anything nefarious. And they should be entitled to a briefing, and if they don't get one, I'll be one of the first ones to say the same people should be in the room and give them a briefing," Thom Tillis (R-NC) said.

Some of the information eased his concerns, Tillis added.

"I do think there are some things that are rightfully classified that we should work to declassify if we can," Tillis said. "We're going to continue to look at it because you have to be mindful that it becomes a continuous operation and that war powers question needs to be raised. I felt more comfortable coming out of the hearing. I'm not completely satisfying — I've got a lot of other questions — but they were forthcoming and I appreciated it."

There's a chilling explanation for why the House went AWOL

A lot of language that never used to be part of America’s political discourse has come into vogue since Jan. 20. Like “Rubicon,” that ancient Roman river that’s come to symbolize a divide between democracy and dictatorship, and has been crossed more times lately than the Hudson on a busy Monday-morning rush hour.

Or this one: “Reichstag Fire.”

On Feb. 27, 1933, less than a month after Adolf Hitler was named Germany’s chancellor, an alleged arson fire destroyed much of the nation’s legislative building in Berlin, the Reichstag. A Dutch Communist was blamed for the blaze, which sparked the ruling Nazis to implement the Reichstag Fire Decree — expelling leftist lawmakers and sending political foes to newly created concentration camps. The now-Nazi-dominated Reichstag soon passed the Enabling Act giving dictatorial powers to Hitler, and so “Reichstag Fire” has come to symbolize a crisis — real or manufactured — used to justify tyrannical rule.

What’s interesting is that the Nazi regime never abolished the Reichstag. It continued to meet — rarely, and as a ceremonial rubber stamp — until Hitler died inside his bunker in 1945. That’s typical under strongman rule to this day. For example, Russia’s Duma continues to meet and pass laws — but only the ones that Vladimir Putin tells them to enact.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar?

In Washington, the House of Representatives has met for only 12 days over the last three months, even as the nation confronts a wave of crises either linked to, or overlapping with, the shutdown of the federal government that began when Congress couldn’t approve a budget bill by the Oct. 1 deadline. After passing its own dead-on-arrival spending plan on Sept. 19, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — in a measured tone meant to mask the increasing insanity of what he’s saying — keeps find one excuse after another to shut down the branch once dubbed, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as “the People’s House.”

The Louisiana Republican has insisted — without any historical precedent — that there’s no point in the House conducting business as long as the gridlocked Senate refuses to pass the lower chamber’s bill to keep the government open. Many cynics have honed in on an alternate explanation — that Johnson is using the shutdown as an excuse not to swear in Democratic Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva. She would be the 218th vote to force likely passage of a measure to open up the government’s files on the late millionaire sex-fiend Jeffrey Epstein, including its likely references to President Donald Trump.

The cynics are right. The resistance among Trump and his allies to any reopening of the Epstein case is surely a motivation for Johnson’s obstruction — but I also can’t help but wonder whether the flap over the Grijalva swearing in is also a cover for something that is much more deeply disturbing.

The virtual disappearance of the House for most of three months, and the nagging fears that the body isn’t returning anytime soon (or ... ever?) is looking more and more essential to the authoritarian project of a movement that pleaded for a “Red Caesar“ to crush ”woke“ liberalism with unchecked executive power.

For the Founders who mapped out the American Experiment here in Philadelphia in 1787, the House was central to their vision of what democracy looks like. The idea was based on smaller districts and every-two-years elections that would closely bond its members to the people. It was, in other words, supposed to be the antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.

For Trump, the absence of a functional Congress — despite the need to keep the world’s largest military, essential services like air traffic control, and definitely not-essential services like a masked secret police force running through the shutdown — makes it easier for him to run the country by fiat.

This is not a completely new problem. Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched Congress grow from a body fiercely committed to its own power and independence — especially in the early 1970s when the House and Senate went after Richard Nixon’s crimes and passed a War Powers Act aimed at restraining future Vietnams — to only caring about the fate of their party, and its president.

These “lawmakers” aren’t troubled when Trump no longer rules by law but by executive order. I’m pretty sure there’s a word for a would-be strongman who rules by dictate.

“I’m the speaker and I’m the president,” Trump has reportedly said in private conversations, according to inside sources blabbing to the New York Times. And in the supposed speaker of the House, Trump has found the perfect vessel for his ambitions. Johnson — a soft-spoken true believer who acts like he just emerged from a Manchurian cave whenever he’s asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, which is pretty much all of them — seems to love the trappings and the attention of the job, even as he cedes all of the job’s actual power to the president.

This supposed budget impasse isn’t only preventing the House from opening up the Epstein can of worms, but from doing any real oversight of a president who seems to have two or three Nixonian Watergates every week, including his family’s shady crypto deals and even drone consulting work. And that 1973 Wars Powers Act? Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth are blowing up boats and murdering persons unknown off the coasts of Latin America, and the castrati up on Capitol Hill are not going to do a gosh-darned thing about it.

With Congress sidelined, Trump — in an extreme flouting of the Constitution — is issuing dictates (that word again) on who’s not getting our tax dollars, including 40 million Americans who depend on food aid to feed their families, and who is. The latter category seems to include the over-the-top drive to recruit 10,000 new masked goons for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and — quite tellingly — supporting the troops.

Earlier this month, Trump announced that, unlike other federal employees, active-duty soldiers would get paid, at least for now, with $8 billion that the regime “found” by killing off research and development projects that had been authorized by Congress. Adding some icing on that cake, the president then claimed that an “anonymous” donor — quickly outed as right-wing billionaire Timothy Mellon — had donated another $130 million toward a few more hours of military paychecks.

It’s probably worth noting that both of these moves are almost certainly illegal — in blatant violation of the “antideficiency” laws that Congress has been passing since 1870 to prevent an administration from spending money without authorization. Trump is clearly banking on popular political support for the troops, but also the neutering of Congress, a Justice Department that works for him and not the citizenry, and a corrupt and compliant Supreme Court will all lead to nobody stopping him.

But what’s even scarier is that Trump surely hopes that by paying the troops, he is also buying their loyalty, which he will surely need as his abuses of power continue to mount. If you study tyrants beginning with Benito Mussolini and Hitler all the way through Putin, you know that strongman rule depends on many things, but especially a rubber-stamp legislature-in-name-only and a faithful military.

So, yes, the House’s endless summer is about Epstein, but it’s about more than Epstein. With Speaker Johnson in Trump’s back pocket, the touring ex-Talking Head David Byrne isn’t the only performer “Burning Down the House” this autumn.

Want to know what Trump has in store next? He just blurted it out

He’s now saying it out loud — blurring the line between his so-called “war” on alleged foreign drug smugglers and his war on the “enemy within” the United States. Both now involve the deployment of the U.S. military. Neither requires proof of wrongdoing.

That was his message yesterday when Trump told American troops in Japan that he would send “more than the National Guard” into cities to enforce his crackdowns on crime and immigration:

“We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled. And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities … . We’re not going to have people killed in our cities. And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”

In the same speech, Trump defended U.S. military strikes against suspected drug smugglers — more than a dozen on vessels from South America that have killed 57 people so far, without evidence they were actually smuggling drugs. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday that the military had carried out three more strikes on Monday.)

Trump repeatedly condemned Joe Biden. He told the troops that the 2020 election had been rigged. He savaged Democratic governors who have resisted the military in their cities.

“People don’t care if we send in our military, our National Guard,” Trump told the troops. “They just want to be safe.”

Trump also called out the “fake news media,” and encouraged the troops to deride journalists.

This was the third politically-charged speech Trump has made to members of the U.S. armed forces within the month — following his late-September address to the military’s top brass and his self-described “rally” of U.S. Navy sailors in Virginia the following week.

Trump’s speech yesterday to American troops — seeking to justify the use of lethal force against anyone suspected of acting illegally, domestic or foreign — is his clearest statement yet about what’s really motivating him and his lapdogs.

He’s not seeking to stop drug smuggling, nor to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, nor to display the military might of America to world leaders, nor to extrude undocumented immigrants from the United States, nor rid the U.S. of alleged criminals.

These are all pretexts. His real goal is quite different.

In the short term, it is to intimidate Democratic mayors and governors and potential Democratic voters in order to suppress Democratic turnout in next fall’s midterm elections.

His long-term goal — shared by his sycophants Hegseth, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi — is to turn America into a police state.

I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that Trump envisions himself as commander-in-chief of a domestic military force that would target alleged criminals (but not the white-collar sort), rid the nation of undocumented people, and remake America into a white, straight, male, Christian nation.

The good news is he’s now starting to say some of this in the open — directly to active-duty troops. He’s openly readying them for the role he wants them to play.

Essentially, he’s daring the top brass of the military to stop him. For now, they won’t. They’re worried and bewildered. He’s their commander-in-chief but they have an overriding responsibility to the nation to uphold democratic institutions, including the Constitution.

He’s also daring the rest of us to stop him — in the courts, in the now-defunct Congress, in the now-shuttered government. Also to stop him with our votes, our unwavering determination, and our nonviolent resistance.

Every American who shares the values for which American troops have been fighting and dying for almost 250 years, should join us on the side of democracy and against Trump’s emerging police state.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.