As Thousands Jeer

 

Via ABC News.

Via Axios:

Trump signed an executive order Monday that puts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in charge of training a specialized National Guard unit dedicated to "ensuring public safety" in D.C.

• "They say: 'We don't need him. Freedom, freedom, he's a dictator,'" Trump said at a White House event, suggesting deploying the National Guard in Chicago next.
• "A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator," Trump added. "I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person."

There's something there I don't think he's done before, and it's at least a little spooky. Nobody comes out and says, "Hi, I'm Donald and I'll be your dictator tonight." When Trump was saying during the campaign that he was going to be a dictator but only on Day 1, to "close the border and drill, baby, drill", it was reasonable to understand him as joking, or whatever that thing is he does when we're expected not to take him literally, because that's not how you apply for the job, in the first place.

You never announce your intention to be a dictator if that's your plan: you get some simulacrum of the vox populi to ask you to be the dictator and turn them down. Caesar got Antony to offer him a golden diadem three times at the Lupercalia (the Carnival-type festival held on the Ides of February) of 44 B.C.E., according to Plutarch, and he said no each time, understanding that the Senate and People of the city had absolutely rejected kingship centuries earlier, but he had already accepted an offer (from Antony's colleague Lepidus) of the official dictatorship in 49, which he held for just 11 days, long enough to stage an election making him one of that year's consuls, and was subsequently reappointed another 3 times, until his appointment early in 44 as dictator perpetuo, dictator in perpetuity, the thing that decided Brutus and Cassius and the other conspirators that they had to kill him right away, a month after the Lupercalia, on the Ides of March. Caesar's rejection of the golden diadem hadn't impressed them.

Anyway, that's what Trump is doing in the Axios story, "A lot of people are saying we like a dictator." He's saying I don't want it, but maybe you should make me an offer, because I am extremely qualified, by gender and sense both common and uncommon. That's the conventional way to put in your application.

Also, what's with the Commission of Public Safety there? Run by Hegseth? It's not a Comité du Salut Public (that was a parliamentary committee) but a Guard unit under presidential command (because the District of Columbia doesn't have a governor, Trump is already its official military ruler or imperator), and at first sight it seems to be basically an acknowledgment that the National Guard has no training for putting down a massive urban crime wave, even an imaginary one. On the other hand yesterday's order calls for setting up similar units in all 50 state Guards as well, and he could take command of any of them for up to 30 days, as he showed in Los Angeles, "federalizing" them to deploy against the "lawless rioters" demonstrating against his administration's cruel and illegal mistreatment of people who look like they might be, and often are, I guess, immigrants without papers.

Or maybe not; California sued against the practice, and a three-day trial was held August 11 to 13 in San Francisco. Judge Charles Breyer hasn't ruled yet,  but he seemed skeptical:

“What’s to prevent a national police force, if properly in place as a result of certain things that have happened on day one, to go out on day 10, day 20, day 30, month two, month three, month four and assist the execution of other laws for other crimes?” the judge asked. “Is there any limiting factor at all?”

But I'm afraid it will just end up fodder for the Supreme Court's shadow docket when the administration appeals—the Guard had left Los Angeles by the time case was heard, and we'll get another of their non-decisions. Meanwhile, those 51 Military Commissions of Public Safety will be buying equipment and getting ready for Chicago or Baltimore or Oakland or New York or whichever city with a large Black population and Black mayor Trump chooses to unleash them on.

Monday’s order appears to create a force of Guard soldiers that could be called out by the White House regardless of whether state and local law enforcement are available and able to handle civil disturbances, raising significant legal questions.

You bet it does, but they're not likely to be answered in time to make a difference.

If history rhymes, as they say, this moment is a regular Irving Berlin song's worth of it ("She started the heat wave/By letting her seat wave./It isn't surprising/The temperature's rising—/She certainly can/Cancan!"). 

Friday's firing or attempted firing of the nation's first Black Federal Reserve governor, Dr. Lisa Cook, on the same bogus pretext (alleged mortgage fraud) as the administration's recent attacks on Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Tish James, and not even someone likely to vote against Trump's desire to lower interest rates, is a funhouse reprise of the firing of the nation's first woman Federal Reserve chair, Janet Yellen, in February 2018, in favor of the white man who would vote exactly the way Yellen would, who Trump is now trying to drive out of office. Reading Hakeem Jeffries's statement on the case made me want to see if Nancy Pelosi had made a statement back then (I couldn't find one). 

When Trump preceded his meeting with South Korean president Lee Jae-myung with a diatribe against South Korean politics

Ahead of Lee’s arrival, Trump expressed apparent displeasure with the process by which Lee rose to power this year in South Korea — winning an election in June after the previous president, conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, was impeached and removed after briefly declaring martial law.

It instantly put me in mind of his fulminations in July against Brazilian president Lula da Silva and declaration of 50% tariffs on Brazilian coffee over the jailing of ex-president and failed coup artist Jair Bolsonaro. Leave no failed coup artist ex-president behind! Although Lee flattered him into a calm mood and this meeting went better than expected (like Japan, South Korea made a promise of hundreds of billions of dollars invested in US manufacturing, with I think very few specifics).

I have some not so good feelings about the way things are going. It seemed to me around this time in 2020 that Trump and his people were definitely plotting a coup but had innumerable difficulties in putting it into action and were bound to fail—they wouldn't get cooperation from the military, with the basically honorable people then running it, and would have to work with whatever ragtag middle-aged fighting force they could scrape together from the Trumpy militias of Proud Boys and Oathkeepers and the like. Also, he was extremely unpopular going into the election, and wasn't going to have really any public support for an extraconstitutional rebellion against the results. And I was right, that series of attempts was absolutely a farce, from the first election denials and 60 court cases through the January 6 riot to the retreat to Florida, with his trove of stolen documents.

Now he's extremely unpopular too, but there's no big election in the immediate future (except the socialist triumph I'm hoping for in New York City), and Trump has people with ideas of how to prepare: especially the purge of the military conducted from the shadows by whoever is behind dipsotheocrat Pete Hegseth (I'm calling it Ross Douthat's old roommate Bridge Colby, if you want to know, but it's stuck in one of the dozens of posts I haven't finished writing in recent months), which "there's never been anything like" according to David Petraeus (at about 5:15 on this video—but it's not very exciting), not to mention the intelligence community, and now they're preparing these Guard units in every state. That's scary.

Also I've been getting the idea that Trump's people, panicked over the bad July jobs report, may have been trying to learn some conventional economics and starting to act on it in a way that could conceivably make them somewhat less unpopular. It came to me from reporting on the government's acquisition of a 10% stake in the Intel company, which has raised a certain amount of merriment, as a bit of communism on the part of the very conservative Trump administration seizing (partial) control of the means of production. But it's not seizing anything—I think a lot of people have been reading it too fast—it's buying the stake, and buying it out of funds from Biden's CHIPS and Science Act, $3.2 billion already allocated to the company under something called the Secure Enclave Program, and $5.7 billion in new grants. In other words, instead of eighty-sixing the Biden programs as the kind of subsidizing condemned in Project 2025, they'll be using at least some of the money in at least something like the way the Biden administration envisaged, in this case some very extensive semiconductor manufacturing facilities.

They're not doing it at all the way the Act sets it out—they're doing what Republicans used to denounce as "picking winners and losers" (in this case a loser: Intel has been falling way behind companies like Nvidia and AMD, particularly in chips for the AI space, and this deal can be characterized as a bailout), and they're subsidizing the plants instead of the jobs, which were always Biden's focus. It may deviate so much from the original legislation that it's not even legal. But who knows?

My thought is that they may be trying to do this on a large scale with all of the Biden legislation, even renewable energy projects, as well as the "investment" funds extorted from Britain and Japan and South Korea and wherever else, creating a kind of construction and manufacturing boom that will favor them in the midterms next year. And some kind of bracero program to bring migrant workers to do the work (Trump has been making a lot of noises appreciating migrant farm workers lately). It won't make Trump voters' lives any better, but it may provide enough of a vibe of energy and growth, the way the fascist regimes of the early 20th century did, or the way Orbán's Hungary does even as its economy fails, to win enough public approval to survive.