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Trump administration 2024-2028

Well today he claimed the Russians alone suffered over fifty million casualties in the Second World War (false) and that Vladimir Putin fought in the War. I dont think that he'll be winning for long. Dementia is something else.
 
PrairieFella said:
Well today he claimed the Russians alone suffered over fifty million casualties in the Second World War (false) and that Vladimir Putin fought in the War. I dont think that he'll be winning for long. Dementia is something else.
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He's ignorant, not senile. After Biden, to all the critics who turned a blind or wilful eye, I wish luck.
 
Remius said:
And to those that critiqued Biden for his mental acuity I also wish luck.

Your ability to accept “because they did it” is astounding.
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Obviously I have not been clear enough. My points aren't to apologize; they're to explain. Don't assume I always approve, and in this case I'm simply pointing out what should be obvious to dispassionate observers.

I'm not saying "accept it because they did it". In this case, I'm saying the comparison is A to Not-A.

"Suck it up because they did it, and then do better when it's your turn" is a closer approximation of my position on other matters.
 
daftandbarmy said:
Quaint... but they are not apparently training with vehicles, which is how you beat rioters - a mixed baseline with troops and vehicles, mainly vehicles so you don't expose the troops to injury:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1932840358137762120


Nicely demonstrated by the PSNI this week in Ballymena, good drills...

https://twitter.com/x/status/1932544120817336351

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I dunno. I see one video of ragged shield walls not facing opposition and 3 videos of Land Rovers sitting still or driving around ineffectively. Neither looked impressive.
 
Rifleman62 said:
To add from up thread.

Trump at it again. In a lot of the commentary, replace Australia with Canada.

Australia must 'pay the price’ for betraying Trump on defence spending​

Sky News host Andrew Bolt says Australia must “pay the price” for slapping Donald Trump around and refusing his demand to spend more on defence. Ties between Canberra and Washington have frayed as the Trump administration launches a review of the AUKUS deal after the Albanese government resisted requests to lift defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP. The Albanese government also provoked frustration from the Trump administration after its decision to sanction Israel—a move which the US publicly “condemned”. “The US defence department says it’s going to review our deal to buy the American nuclear submarines we need – critically need,” Mr Bolt said.
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Australia wasn't even going to buy American subs anyway at first - they were initially going to go with French subs...

So I guess they may just have to go with Plan B, even though less than a year ago their Plan B was their Plan A


🤷‍♂️
 
Andrew Sullivan, not a raging lefty, discusses the scary moves and rhetoric coming from the Administration and warns progressive Dems to not take the bait.

andrewsullivan.substack.com

The American Caudillo

Trump, the ugly Anti-American, is bringing the US military to bear at home.
andrewsullivan.substack.com andrewsullivan.substack.com

Reading Stephen Miller’s Twitter feed is a useful way to see the core motivations of the second Trump term. With Miller, the mass migration of the last four years — and more generally, of the last four decades — is not another wave of immigration like all the other waves before it, just startlingly bigger in scale and pace. It is literally an invasion by a foreign force. For Miller, we are currently in the middle of a hot war, under occupation by an alien army, which is aided by a fifth column of anyone who opposes the Trump administration. In this war, there are only two sides, and only one is not treason. This is actually how he sees the world. A civil war is already under way.

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The following tweets, we have to keep reminding ourselves, are not from some incel loser on 4chan. They are from one of the closest advisers to the president of the United States. “Deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection. These are the choices,” is one of Miller’s recent contributions to the discourse.

He retweets Vance with the same “invasion” language: “We have foreign nationals with no legal right to be in the country waving foreign flags and assaulting law enforcement. If only we had a good word for that...” Miller sees this moment as existential: “We’ve been saying for years this is a fight to save civilization. Anyone with eyes can see that now.” Trump chimed in: “A once-great American city, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied” (my italics). Miller adds: “Look at all the foreign flags. Los Angeles is occupied territory” (ditto). And this was how the cabinet secretary who literally doesn’t know what habeas corpus is describedsending Marines into Los Angeles:

We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.
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She intends to liberate Los Angeles … from its duly elected officials. She might be talking about Baghdad or Fallujah, rather than an American city. And here’s the full summary of our current situation through the eyes and ears of Miller — a rare, unashamed, bona fide fascist in an American administration:

America was invaded by illegal aliens.

Americans voted to end the invasion.

Democrat rioters are now waging violent insurrection to overturn the election result and continue the invasion.
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This is a description, it’s vital to note, of a country already in a civil war. And a country in such a war needs a president with wartime powers. That was the logic of using the Alien Enemies Act to grab illegal immigrants and random brown people and swiftly send them to a foreign gulag, without even the due process we accorded to Nazis in the Second World War. That is why Miller has openly mused about suspending habeas corpus — because wartime emergencies allow it. And it is the obvious rationale behind Trump’s eagerness to deploy the National Guard in California, against the governor’s wishes, and to get the Marines involved in domestic crowd-policing. The president will use the military against this foreign invasion and internal insurrection because, well, that’s who we use to fight wars.

And how they love the word “insurrection”. They get a particular frisson of course from the fact that this very word was previously used — accurately — to describe a mob that violently tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in January 2021. That attempt to “overturn the election result” was, however, not an insurrection in Miller’s eyes because it was in favor of Trump — the rightful landslide winner of the election. It was the Congress’ certification of that election that was the insurrection. This “insurrection” in Los Angeles? The same logic applies. It’s not pro-Trump, so we need the Marines. There is only one legitimate political party in America, and it can use the military to keep the other one in check.

And tomorrow, we are going to witness a military parade in DC that just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday and the Army’s 250th. It’s set to brandish 26 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 27 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, eight CH-47 helicopters, and 16 UH-60 Black Hawks. The last parade of this scale was almost 35 years ago, to celebrate the US victory in the First Gulf War. No such victory is now being hailed. Trump’s parade is simply another sign of his preference for the British monarchical system over the American republic. In honor of the British sovereign’s official birthday, after all, a ceremonial Trooping the Colour has been held since the 17th century. In this sense, Trump can be seen as the final denouement of the American experiment — a bookend, as it were, to the first King George III.

And this was echoed in Trump’s speech to the troops assembled this week at Fort Bragg. The soldiers were vetted so they were all Trump fans; Trump merchandise was openly soldat the military base (including faux credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything”); the speech was crudely partisan; and the president encouraged boos from the uniformed crowd as he lambasted his usual targets — behavior that violates Pentagon rules. If disgrace were a word Trump even understood, it wouldn’t adequately capture the despicably un-American spectacle. But this, in the president’s mind, is not America’s military, but his own.

And anyone peacefully protesting this grotesque cooptation of a military parade worthy of Putin or Xi? They will be met with a “very heavy force,” just as they would be in Beijing or Moscow. Yes, that’s what free speech now amounts to in this man’s America. Write an op-ed criticizing a foreign country’s mass infanticide, and you will be deported pronto. Protest this caudillo’s trashing of every American value since the Founding, and his masked thugs will arrest you, deport you, or injure you. Be a US Senator and ask a cabinet secretary some questions at a press conference, and guards will wrestle you to the ground and cuff you. This administration has now praised ICE and Secret Service violence against elected Democratic officials more than once.

And this, I suspect, is just the beginning. Just because Trump is reluctant to use armed force abroad doesn’t mean he wouldn’t love to use it at home. There is, in fact, no other logical conclusion to the rhetoric of Miller and Vance than imposition at some point of martial law. They believe we are under invasion, that the enemy is allied with a treasonous domestic opposition, and that the goal is to “overturn the election result,” i.e. regime change. If this is not the time for Michael Anton’s beloved Red Caesar — the partisan tyrant who recognizes that the Constitution is long since gone, and he must now rule by fiat — when would be?

It’s all a fantastic lie, of course. We are not at war with anyone; there are no armed invaders in America; and no foreign government is sending them. The opposition is merely doing what an opposition is supposed to do: expose an administration’s incompetence and authoritarianism. It’s not a side in Miller’s imagined civil war.

And this hideous lurch into militarizing American politics is not even about mass deportations. They can be done legally, humanely, and expeditiously with new legislation, administrative streamlining, many more courts and judges, and e-Verify. It might take a little longer, but it’s the surest way to do it. But Trump is uninterested in that dry, difficult work. Just this week, he even praised the millions of illegal immigrants in the agricultural and hospitality sectors — the domestic industries, along with construction, most responsible for exploiting cheap, illegal labor:

Our farmers are being hurt badly. They have very good workers [that] have worked for them for 20 years. They’re not citizens, but they’ve turned out to be great. And we’re going to have to do something about that. We can’t take all their people and send them back ... And leisure too, and hotels.
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So what the fuck is all this about really? Like the tariffs that gyrate, and the spending cuts that don’t cut spending, and the great deals that turn out to be surrenders to China, and the end to wars that never end, and the executive orders that collapse at the first judicial review, so much of this is just theater. The real goal is to find illegal immigrants who can be associated with the left and the Democrats, to gin up a conflict, and to use it to smash and intimidate domestic opposition. That’s what this is about. It’s about state terror in the pursuit of ever greater executive power.

Putting masks on agents of the state is integral to this campaign of state terror. It is unconscionable that in a free society, those with the power to arrest and detain are not clearly identifiable as such, with their full faces and names and identity visible. Protestors who wear masks are just as anathema to a liberal democracy, and wearing a mask in such a context should be grounds for arrest. But for the state to be anonymous and lethal is a mark of totalitarian societies, not democracies.

And sending masked men — like Putin’s masked agents — to grab harmless foreign students and bundle them into vans, or to raid Home Depots and car washes, is not a serious attempt to deliver mass deportations. It’s designed to tell everyone — citizen or non-citizen — that this is a police state now, answerable to one man alone, and you better keep your head down. This applies even to judges who can be grabbed, handcuffed, and perp-walked; and US Senators, who can be tackled by Secret Service goons if they dare interrupt Kristi Noem, the wannabe Only Fans model now cosplaying as DHS Secretary.

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They are not intending to deport ten million people in four years. They are attempting to use the purported deportation of ten million people as a way to attenuate liberal democracy, the separation of powers, and limited government — and to replace it with one man’s authoritarian whims. If they can goad the left into rebooting 2020 and initiating a long, hot summer of violent riots, they will achieve this much faster.

That’s why taking the bait is so dangerous and counter-productive. That’s why failing to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants — as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did this week — or going on about “racial profiling,” is so helpful to Trump. That’s why her statement that “Peace begins with ICE leaving Los Angeles” is a politically catastrophic statement. And it’s why Governor Newsom’s insistence that everything was under control until Trump commandeered the National Guard is also clueless.

There is nothing illegal or illegitimate about ICE enforcing immigration laws. There is plenty to criticize in how Trump is enforcing those laws — violating the Constitution, ignoring courts, commandeering the National Guard, sending in troops — but not the enforcement itself. But the Democrats still can’t make that distinction. Worse, their opposition is in acute danger of giving us BLM-style riots and rallies across the country, attended by the usual suspects, flying foreign flags, that will only rekindle memories of 2020 and remind many of us why we despise the Democratic left’s racism, contempt for law enforcement, and endorsement of looting.

By far the best policy is to let the Trump goons do their hideous, authoritarian worst (they won the election on the promises, after all), watch them fail to match the deportation numbers of Obama or even Biden, and then run hard against their authoritarian incompetence in 2026. The last thing we need is an excuse for Trump to ramp up the repression even further.

So expose the departure from American norms and values, spread the word about the abuse, defend the Constitution and the rule of law, and keep arguing for American values against this deeply anti-American president. But don’t defend illegal immigrants. And don’t give Trump a way to distract from his flailing on the debt, tariffs, and foreign policy. And if the Democrats really want to beat him, unveil your own program of legal, humane, expeditious, and constitutional mass deportation as a foil to this authoritarian mess. Show you can deport millions the right way.

And never, ever forget again that if liberals and conservatives don’t enforce borders, fascists will. Which is why fascists like Miller now are doing exactly that — and may do far, far worse in the near future.
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US Military arrests veteran... ironic

Reuters images showed Marines apprehending the man, restraining his hands with zip ties and then handing him over to civilians from the Department of Homeland Security.

Asked about the incident, the U.S. military's Northern Command spokesperson said active duty forces "may temporarily detain an individual in specific circumstances."

"Any temporary detention ends immediately when the individual(s) can be safely transferred to the custody of appropriate civilian law enforcement personnel," a spokesperson said.

Speaking to reporters after he was released, the civilian identified himself as Marcos Leao, 27. Leao said he was an Army veteran on his way to an office of the Department of Veterans Affairs when he crossed a yellow tape boundary and was asked to stop.

 
"And tomorrow, we are going to witness a military parade in DC that just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday and the Army’s 250th."

The shared date can be nothing but a coincidence, with just over 170 years between the birth of each and pretty much no practical way for any woman to plan an exact date for the birth of a child. June 14 is also Flag Day. Coincidences abound.

So that leaves the "coincidence of a military parade". The army could do without a celebration, or something less showy (and expensive). Too bad we can't run a counter-factual in which Trump is not the president on the army's 250th anniversary to see just what would be acceptable.

The run up to 2026 (1776+250) is going to be politically interesting, and the celebrations will be expensive. It's asking a bit much for the country to stiff itself just because some people can't stand their self-aggrandizing president trying to get in the frame of every picture.

This ongoing fray over illegal immigration reminds me of the Ukraine war. Escalate and win, make peace and cut losses, or just keep it going to bleed Russia at the cost of bleeding Ukraine. Option #2 for Trump, and #3 for Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans. On immigration: grant citizenship en masse, deport en masse, or just keep them as a class of peasants. Option #2 for Trump, and #3 for Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans.

If anyone wants to claim the high ground of #1 (of either) on behalf of Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans, they've got a hard case to prove.
 
This whole thing is an interesting question, isn't it?

Let me start off by saying that I'm in favour of the parade. It's not like there haven't already been grand military parades in the US. Take the Army of the Potomac's parade through Washington after the Civil War and the massive victory parade through New York on January 12th, 1946. A 250th celebration for the forming of the Continental Army is, IMHO, merited as a tribute to all the wars it has fought during that time.

I sometimes wonder where the opposition to such parades in the US comes from. Maybe its still a Vietnam War artifact? We seem to have the same backlash in Canada short of the benign Remembrance Day parades and the always entertaining tourist attraction every summer on Parliament Hill.

Personally, I think Canadians needs to see more of its army in fighting order with equipment on parade so that they understand that they have an army and not a peacekeeping paramilitary..

I'm somewhat hoping that the US Army's day isn't spoiled by the parade's association with the grandstanding that Trump will do to make it a day about himself and to vilify his perceived enemies rather than one for praising the nation's army.

🍻
 
FJAG said:
I sometimes wonder where the opposition to such parades in the US comes from. Maybe its still a Vietnam War artifact?
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Though IIRC there was a parade with tanks and so on post-GW1. Maybe as a routine thing it was seen as too like the Soviet Victory Day?
 
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