The Bolton Raid and D.C. Streets Putsch Are Signposts on Trump's Speedway to Autocracy

----

This post was prepared before the heartbreaking news from the Minneapolis school shooting. Given the murkiness of the motive and of the sourcing of the weaponry, for now this blog will maintain respectful silence on that event.

----

This was the week Donald J. Trump asserted "The right to do anything I want to do."

Kindly read the following passage without attribution as to the writer, and if I may, I'll ask if it summons your own sense, after a week of executive branch overreach, of what Americans face today:

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. We know this already--alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. 

Remember this, freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy.  There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause.

 Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And then remember this imperial need for control is so desperate because it's so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that and know this the day will come when all the skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority, and then there will be one too many, one single thing will break the siege. 

 Remember this—try.

In show runner Tony Gilroy's "Andor" series, the above declarations spill out via a recording made by a character called Nemik, as we hear it in Season 1, Episode 12.  Nemik's a frisky, earnest young rebel, a true believer who's laughed at sometimes for his ideological passion – even by his loyal cadre, a "rebel infiltration team." These underground freedom fighters zealously harass this series' version of the all-seeing, ravenously controlling Empire familiar to "Star Wars" aficionados.  

We listen to Nemik's words right along with battle-scarred hero Cassian Andor (Diego Luna).  It's part of a shifting story cycle, spun up across decades from Geroge Lucas' original conception.  Andor as a character has been familiar to the fandom as the narrative's focus since the 2016 film "Rogue One," for which "Andor" serves as a prequel, five years before the film's events, in the franchise's galaxy-spanning environment.

Luna, who began as a child actor, is as savvy and skilled in an interview as he is on the show's tautly paced, complex but accessible two dozen episodes.  “It's the most grounded kind of Star Wars you'll get," the actor says of the two seasons kicked off (joltingly, due to the pandemic) as Season 1 (September of 2022) and Season 2 (launched in April of this year.)

Luna's "innate decency and soulfulness is hard to hide," Gilroy told IndieWire's Anne Thompson, in considering his theme for the series that scored eight Prime Time Emmy noms for the first season and ten more for the latter, "What do we need?  Star Wars Jesus.  We need a Messiah.  We never said that until we were done." 

Very possibly the above call to arms is fully from writer Tom Bissell (credited as sole scripter for Episodes 9-12);  broadly speaking, the history-savvy Gilroy has sidled past overt comparisons to Trumpism. As he told Thompson, "The playbook of fascism is thousands of years of authoritarian behavior."

This newsletter will find time for further appreciation of the superbly crafted show's run on Disney+, but Nemik's point regarding our own national politics is this: it serves nothing to moan about how much oligarchy we can withstand.  In fact, the necessary and inevitable question is, how much harder and more consistently can we apply ourselves to fomenting some form of resistance?

Perhaps the hoariest warning--and yet it remains stubbornly applicable– comes from the formulation a German Lutheran pastor posted in 1946 as a call to his peers after the Nazis' defeat. When the British government's Holocaust Memorial Day Trust activated their charity in 2001 with the theme, "Remembering Genocides: Lessons for the Future,"  the group posted their iteration:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

 We might have hoped Red baiting was a figment from the past, but witness Trump's typically addled tweet of June 25^th:

"It finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line.  Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist lunatic, has just won the [New York City] Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor… yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!"

Normalization is our quiet enemy, and we can't simply accept either the raid on Bolton's home and office, nor the arrant expansion of autocratic authority epitomized by the troops in Washington D.C. (and, if Trump carries out a threat, Chicago and Baltimore).

 As  NBC News reported: Trump asserted during [this week's] Cabinet meeting that his authority as commander in chief has no limits when it comes to deploying the National Guard.  Not that I don't have — I would — the right to do anything I want to do.  I'm the president of the United States.'

As further reported by MSNBC following Tuesday's convening of Cabinet and agency lickspittles for a  clumsily-staged Trump love fest: Trump declared that "a lot" of unnamed people "would rather have a dictator" just so long as the tyrant combats crime.  Soon after, as part of the three-hour event, the president echoed that line, arguing, "Most people say, 'If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants."

Trump first pushed this line two weeks ago, and he doubled down earlier this week, claiming that "a lot of people are saying, 'Maybe we'd like a dictator'…. it means that he's now pushed this line four times in two weeks.  Not to be left out, Vice President JD Vance touted a similar position last week.)

Mark the week we're living through, this is when it all went from bad to truly threatening to democracy.  This just nine months into the under-recognized MAGA coup d'etat.

A now-trending fear has steadily become almost an obligatory expression among my friends who can't stop wondering exactly when we completely lost control of the civic narrative we were raised to live by.  He dispirited line varies but the takeaway has become, "I guess Vance is teed up to be next."

MSNBC's broadcast on "Deadline White House” on August 22 gives the damning boilerplate: "Today, the Trump Justice Department making what appears to be a major escalation in its targeting of Donald Trump's critics.  Early this morning, the FBI conducted a search the Maryland home of John Bolton.  He is Trump's former national security adviser turned Trump critic. Agents also later appeared at Bolton's Office Building in Washington, DC.  A source close to Bolton tells NBC news it was quote, "retribution, pure and simple".

"I will be your retribution," Trump had freely promised his coalition of rioters and rubes.  Bolton had poked the boar when he said, "I don't think he's fit for office. I don't think he has the confidence to carry out the job.  There really isn't any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what's good for Donald Trump's re-election.  That he wascapable of, was, on a daily basis, doing something more and more outrageous than he had done the day before, all to the same end of staying in power.

"I think he's already come after me and several others in withdrawing the protection that we had for from the Iranians for the attack on Qassem Soleimani."

As writer and editor for Protect Democracy Amanda Carpenter fittingly stated on MSNBC regarding the actions of Trump's F.B.I. chief and his outright score-settling, "I think what we're seeing here in reality is Kash Patel's enemies list in action, right?...the weaponization of that list.  Then they came to policy disagreements, Bolton left.  And he did what we ask all people of principle to do--if you see something, say something…this is just the latest escalation of it. You brought up him having his security removed. He needed that security because of the service that he did for Trump.

"They tried to stop his book.  They tried to seize the profits from it.  Then Kash Patel, who now runs the FBI, put a target on his back…now you're seeing the expression of that, and I don't think we should see it, downplay it, as anything other than that."

Finally, with this backdrop of (thus-far-unsubstantiated) besmirching of Bolton, give a thought to the equally damaging  deployment of the National Guard and hear Illinois Governor JB Pritzker's fusillade, on August 26, opposing Trump's plans for a  planned quasi-miliary occupation of Chicago:

I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in this city, and as a state, and as a country.  If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm… What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal.  It is unconstitutional.  It is un-American. … This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey, Stephen Miller, searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.

"This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.  This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see, where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions.

Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab. 

This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year.

"As Dr. King once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Humbly I would add, it doesn't bend on its own.  History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times."

How much more of a rallying cry to we need to stand up and address the rights and traditions and freedoms Trump and his cabal seek to destroy?