Trump Hopes War Mongering Ace Card Will Boost Failing Polls
“Spanish treachery, invasion” are the phony facts being circulated by the war monger trump.
Very similar words were used by politicians to rally support after the USS Maine exploded on Feb. 15, 1898, leading to the Spanish American war.
Then there was one president’s somber speech to the nation that “renewed hostile actions…have required me to order the military forces for the United States to take action in reply.” Those were President Lyndon B. Johnson’s words on Aug. 4, 1964, in response to another manufactured crisis, the so-called attack on Navy vessels in North Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin, which presaged the full-scale U.S. war in Vietnam.
Which brings us to the latest made-up crisis of “anarchy” in Los Angeles by protesters of trump’s fascist immigration policies. This time around, trump has used Fox News to help arouse national panic, as in Fox’s selected videos of isolated violence in Los Angeles with the headline “ANARCHY.” A variation of such provocative, yellow journalism surfaced in 1897, when the publisher William Randolph Hearst, cabled the artist Frederic Remington at Havana, Cuba, with the words: “Please remain [in Cuba]. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Hearst’s rabble rousing helped lead the U.S. to declare war onSpain.
Today, the economy is failing, the Russians are winning and Musk has jumped ship. It’s time for another grand diversion; call in the Marines or rather the National Guard, something that trump the Taco Man has been just itching to do his whole political life.
There is nothing better than a good old military adventure to respond to a made-up crisis, to rally the country and take the spotlight off of the abysmal failures of the administration. Trump and his administration flunkies have ratcheted up the heat over the anti-deportation demonstrations in Los Angeles, with false claims that disorder is raging out of control and that local authorities cannot cope.
In classic and tasteless fashion, trump posted on Truth Social, “If Governor Gavin Newscum, of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can’t do their jobs, which everyone knows they can’t, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!”
The next day, trump posted that he was “directing Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, in coordination with all other relevant Departments and Agencies, to take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.”
If that doesn’t warm the cockles of your heart and quell any concerns, nothing will.
Trump showed that he won’t take any guff from anyone against “our police officers,” even though he raked heroic officers through the fires for trying to fend off violent trump supporters at the Capital on Jan. 6, 2021. And rubbing salt in “our police officers’” wounds, trump went on to pardon all the real insurrectionists.
“Nobody’s going to spit on our police officers. Nobody’s going to spit on our military,” trump said, although no such spitting was reported. “That happens, they get hit very hard.”
It’s a warning to protesters: No spitting.
What Insurrection?
Trump’s apparatchiks are calling the Los Angeles protests an “insurrection” while the same trump puppets refused to label as an insurrection the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol by trump supporters, which was in fact a failed insurrection.
Trump didn’t mention the nasty violence of his lemmings at the Capitol, like when the mob shoved a police officer to the ground, later threatened to shoot him with his own gun, or the insurrectionist who slammed a flagpole into another police officer’s chest, or the officer who screamed in agony as he was caught in a closing door.
“These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED,” trump posted. It must be the same non-existent, troublemakers who were paid non-existent cash by the FBI to trash the Capitol on Jan. 6, while trump supporters held a peaceful rally.
Trump has called 2,000 members of the National Guard into federal service, deploying them to Los Angeles. Trump ignored both Bass and Newsom who objected to the intervention and said California has the resources to deal with urban unrest.
In fact, there was more damages on the streets of Philadelphia from post game celebrations after the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl. The National Guard was unnecessary and nowhere to be seen.
Trump painted a similar scenario in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the Marines but he didn’t after Defense Secretary Mark Esper objected. Trump also asked the governors of a handful of states to send troops to D.C. in response to the Floyd protests there. Some governors agreed, but others turned aside the request.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz showed state resources were adequate when he deployed the state’s National Guard to quell civil disorder and mostly peaceful protests over Floyd’s murder. Protests led to three nights of rioting, with an estimated $500 million in damages, 604 arrests and two riot-related deaths.
Trump also wanted to send in the troops in 2020 to quell peaceful demonstrations in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. The group was protesting police brutality when U.S. Park Police and National Guard troops used tear gas to disburse the group to make way for trump who marched, Mussolini-like, to the church, escorted by various federal officials, where he stopped briefly and held up a Bible. Trump had earlier made remarks at the White House, declaring himself “your president of law and order” and demanding that governors deploy National Guard units and “dominate the streets.”
Esper, Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Attorney General William Barr all stepped in and overruled Trump’s plans to use active-duty troops to end the demonstrations.
Not coincidentally, trump’s desperate efforts to show non-existent strength in a non-existent crisis comes days before a disgraceful show of force that trump has orchestrated to celebrate his birthday, complete with thousands of troops, tanks and military jets.
It is more than transparent, that trump is prepping to use the “insurrection” as a legal excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and to deploy the military. “Project 2025,” a blueprint for the trump administration, sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, is developing draft executive orders to deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act.
Those who support the Constitution are likely to raise serious concerns over whether the deployment of Marines to Los Angeles violates the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the US military from engaging in domestic law enforcement without express legal authorization. Trump will likely claim that he needs no such authorization.
Faux Strong Man
Trump desperately wants to show he is a strong man. He wants people to forget that he told his minions that he would be right there with them to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Instead, the warrior trump retreated to the security of the White House and cowardly watched the riot unfold. He also wants to scratch from reality that he cut and ran to the depths of super secure underground, White House bunker on May 29,2020, as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion in protest of the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after he was pinned at the neck by a white Minneapolis police officer.
The truly spine-chilling part of this reality nightmare is that trump’s attacks on migrants will not end here but this his action is rather another salvo to disrupt any form of dissent. Whether he will use his brazen powers to stop anyone who would demonstrate against him is an open and appalling question.
And make no mistake, despite what the fascist propaganda machine says, there is no crisis in Los Angeles that merits a president illegally ordering in troops without even consulting with the governor, the mayor of the Los Angeles Police Department. And that is even more criminal by the fact that trump has proven time again to be incompetent and surely no expert in law enforcement. Trump has created a ghost. But also keep in mind, this is the same trump who separated immigrant families and kept children in cages.
Trump is angling for total, unchecked power. He has no need for the Constitution or rule of law, if it differs from his plans. One of his chief flunkies, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, followed the leader’s orders when he proclaimed that if violence continues, “active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized — they are on high alert.”
And what better way to dehumanize a whole population than to call them “aliens.” And what does Hollywood do with aliens? Why either send them back to where they came from, kill them or hope that their immune systems won’t be any match for normal human bacteria.
Sadly, this is no Hollywood movie; it’s a reality that is overturning the lives of millions of Americans. And there should be no confusing the issue; trump fancies himself a strong man in the image of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. He must create fear and paranoia in order to bolster his empty self image of the man who backs down from nothing, other than his tariffs, his plans to end the war in Ukraine, his plans to stop the war in Gaza and just about everything else he promised.
Remember that the attacks on migrants have been in the making for many years, honed by trump and polished by the group that created Project 2025, the far right blueprint to rid the nation of people of color.
The Los Angeles protests began after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went to a Home Depot in Los Angeles where migrants were lined up, as they are every day, in hopes of being hired as day laborers. ICE approached, looking for all the world like the gestapo, but they met resistance from protesters seeking to shield targeted immigrants.
The protests were sufficiently tame that the Los Angeles Police Department issued a public statement that the protests were “peaceful” and concluded “without incident.” So much for the “insurrection.”
Always The Bigot
Trump has always been a bigot and he has found a way through his lies and threats to bring a substantial number of people around to his sadistic MAGA ideology.
If nothing else, trump has been relentless and utterly without shame in his lies, particularly about immigrants. He and his sycophants know that it is human nature for people to tend to believe something that they are told over and over and over again, even if they initially did not believe it.
Trump frequently ties undocumented immigrants to crime, while there is no data showing a migrant-driven crime wave and there is no proof to one of trump’s many absurd claims that there are “millions” of people from prisons and mental institutions coming into the country.
In 2018, he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.” And there were the mythical “caravans” of immigrants that he invented to further terrify Americans.
“At this very moment, large well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an invasion. … These are tough people in many cases; a lot of young men, strong men and a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country. … This isn’t an innocent group of people. It’s a large number of people that are tough. They have injured, they have attacked,” trump claimed on Nov. 1, 2018.
On the day that trump launched his first presidential bid in June 2015, he accused Mexico of “not sending the best” people.
“They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting,” he said.
“The ones we are getting are the drug lords, we’re getting the gang members, and we’re getting some people that are fine, but we’re not getting the best and finest from South America, believe me,” he said on April 22, 2015.
Trump has claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, a term that Adolf Hitler used in “Mein Kampf” in advance of his campaign to exterminate the Jews.
In 2021, he turned his anger toward migrants coming to the U.S. to escape the deadly violence in Haiti.
“So, we have hundreds of thousands of people flowing in from Haiti. Haiti has a tremendous AIDS problem. … Many of those people will probably have AIDS, and they’re coming into our country. And we don’t do anything about it, we let everybody come in. … It’s like a death wish for our country,” trump said.
Trump returned to the scurrilous attacks on Haitians during the 2024 presidential race when he claimed with absolutely no basis in reality that Haitians in Ohio were killing and eating dogs.
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame,” trump said on October 10, 2024.
Trump repeated a favorite sadistic theme in April 2024 when he criticized “the Democrats” for not also calling for the wholesale deportation of immigrants.
“The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans. They’re animals,’” trump said.
“This is country-changing, it’s country-threatening, and it’s country-wrecking. They have wrecked our country,” he said on April 2,2024, adding on Sept.10,2024, “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically.”
And who can forget trump’s bizarre comparison of migrants to Hollywood’s worst cannibal, Hannibal Lecter.
“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s ‘Silence of the Lambs’ stuff. … Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter?” he said on March 4, 2024.