If he happens to wind a second term in office as a result of the 2024 election, failed former president Donald Trump and his allies are already considering the deployment of U.S. troops into American cities for the purpose of quelling any demonstrations and exacting “revenge” on his political opponents, according to a disturbing report from the Washington Post.
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The military being used for domestic law enforcement. That’s a page directly out of Nazi Germany and China under Mao. It’s the very definition of a police state where any dissent is immediately crushed and demonstrators are either imprisoned or executed in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Trump was urged by some of his supporters to invoke the Insurrection Act in 2020 to quell protests over the murder of George Floyd, who was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murder and manslaughter and sentenced to over 20 years in prison.
The failed ex-president also has plans for revenge on those who have dared to oppose him, according to the Post.
The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
Additionally, a second Trump term would feature devoted loyalists at every level of the federal government, true believers who would gladly carry out any order given to them by the president, no matter what the Constitution or Congress might have to say on the matter.
The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agendain his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
It has been said before but needs to be repeated from now until the day of the 2024 election: A vote for a second Trump term is a vote to end the American republic and our version of democracy. It would result in a totalitarian state that harkens back to some of the darkest days in world history and regimes that carried out the systematic murder of hundreds of millions of innocent people.
