It may be difficult to pinpoint a starting date, but we seem well on our way to a police state in which the object is government control of speech and criticism.
Sure, you can find elements that go back years, even decades, across government administrations from both major parties, but the accelerated, methodical march by Donald Trump is different in scale and kind than efforts of his predecessors.
Survey the current situation and you can see U.S. troops on city streets, a neutered Congress, a Justice Department and FBI trained firmly on Trump political enemies (while ignoring allegations against his friends), partisan and punitive budgetary decisions — and now a specific threat to use the IRS as a weapon against anyone Trump wants to target.
All of this has become familiar in this first Trump year — along with the understanding that, with few exceptions, neither courts nor minority Democrats or enabling Republican politicians can stop him.
The Trump administration on Monday had to offer justifications for what a federal judge said were violations of court orders against use of tear gas against Chicago civilians and failure to turn on body cameras. On the same day, a federal appeals court was overruling another judge to allow deployment of the National Guard in Portland over the objection of local officials. The wild thing about the case, which will be re-heard before 11 judges of that appeals court, is that the facts at hand as determined by the judge — that there is no emergency to address — were mostly dismissed for the prerogative of the president to determine.
The mantra that the police state cannot happen here has been blown out of the water. It is happening, and it is arriving amid blatant disdain for law or even humane treatment.
By the day, Trump’s efforts grow to turn democracy into dictatorship, dependent on a police state that responds at his beck and call and that recognizes partisan loyalty as the coin of the realm.
The rash of instant politically demanded prosecutions regardless of the legal worthiness of the cases now facing former FBI director James B. Comey Jr., New York Attorney General Letitia James, former National Security Advisor John Bolton all scream White House interference and direction of the nation’s prosecutorial powers — and a retribution for investigation Trump’s own foibles over time.
The tactics and specific directions increasingly being given to a Homeland Security force that amounts to an unfettered and relatively unregulated police force — and so far backed by Supreme Court decisions even over lower court findings — is troubling,
Deportations: Exhibit One
ProPublica, the news organization that has tried to count detention of U.S. citizens, cites nearly 200 cases through early October in which citizens, including three pregnant women and 20 children, were arrested, handcuffed, held for days while being forced to prove their legal status.
That is far different from the picture that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had outlined for the court to allow ICE arrests based on race and appearance rather than on evidence-based investigation of serious criminal background for targeted migrants that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insists are underway. Her public declarations require listeners to deny what they are hearing, seeing and witnessing.
A federal judge in Chicago now has ordered masked, camouflaged homeland Security agents to wear body cameras after a rash of abusive arrest tactics and teargassing in that city. The judge made clear in remarks that statements by the government blaming non-existent organized Antifa rebellions were hooey and not credible.
The very cloaking of armed, if under-trained immigration agents in unidentifiable military garb recalls military dictatorships of the past.
The deportation campaign has become Exhibit One in the unveiling of the U.S. as police state, along with the widening stream of indictments in cases previously set aside by the Justice Department for lack of evidence. Trump already has pressed for prosecution of Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., on questionable mortgage fraud charges, of former prosecutors Jack Smith and Andrew Weissman for involvement in Trump investigations, former FBI Director Christopher Wray and others.
The Trump administration has used the courts to expand its policing powers, even as it has shut or redirected various civil rights and public corruption units in Justice and erased court-ordered limitations on selected police departments for brutality.
From the perspective of Team Trump, the over-weaned police power of the state expanded exponentially with investigations of Trump, election-manipulation schemes, probes of Russian interference in campaign and other familiar refrains. We also see Team Trump blatantly holding back from exposing the home team to Justice review in cases like the one involving FBI videotapes of border czar Tom Homan allegedly taking a $50,000 bribe in the months before being named, or in the constant delay in release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, a delay that seems aimed at protecting those named by Epstein’s under-aged sex victims.
Trump’s commutation of sentence for disgraced former Rep. George Santos, R-NY, for a host of frauds, including lying to his voters, just shows the folly of depending on a legal justice system in which Trump decides on who personally should sink or rise, regardless of evidence and a jury. .
Weaponizing the IRS
This week, Trump’s plans to use IRS policing powers against left-leaning political groups came to light through the Wall Street Journal. A senior IRS official involved in the effort has drawn up a list of potential targets that includes major Democratic donors, sources told the WSJ. Gary Shapley, an adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was named acting commissioner in April before being fired days later, will head this effort, apparently already collecting a target list of progressive donors and groups that include billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundation.
Legalities aside, such investigations could be used not only in pursuit of criminal cases, but also as a rationale for eliminating a progressive organization’s tax-exempt status.
Historically, of course, use of the IRS as an agent for policing goes back at least to nonpolitical but notorious gangster Al Capone, who finally was jailed on tax issues, not murder and mayhem crimes. Over decades, white-collar crime was redefined to include monopolistic business practices, environmental law, pricing and insider trading rules — regulation by a variety of federal agencies. The courts have varied in individual cases but generally had upheld growing enforcement arenas until this current conservative court majority started redefining enforcement to match Trump policy objectives.
Now we have Trump operating under court decisions giving him preemptive immunity for any action he takes as a part of official duties. In effect, it is a blank check that Trump is gladly depositing to ensure control.
Trump thinks he has legal authority to send armed troops either to block crime or to protect ICE or simply to declare that he can do so, spreading intimidation and fear. It is easy to understand the counteractions; it is far more difficult to understand why so many are going along with Trump as the police state becomes a reality.
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