Painting a grim portrait if Donald Trump is re-elected, the New York Times is reporting there is every reason to believe the former president will make use of the Insurrection Act to deploy the U.S. military against American citizens during protests he finds objectionable.In a deep dive from the Tim...
    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
      103·
      3 months ago

      I was a medic in the AF - it was a pretty even split of red and blue. Air Force medical is probably the bluest slice of the military there is, so overall there’s definitely a strong lean red, but there’s this weird notion of absolution when it comes to the military’s political loyalty. Worse case scenario, Trump gets elected and attempts to ‘execute order 66’ …the military will implode on itself with infighting, and my money’s on one of the troops will take an opportunistic shot at him in accordance with their Oath of Enlistment’s promise to defend the constitution against domestic enemies. Officers and civilian federal employees oath has the same language.

      Edit - Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.

      • LastWish@lemmy.world
        29·
        3 months ago

        I’m currently in the AF. Can confirm, we’re a snapshot of the country. Not some frothing red dog.

      • TallonMetroid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        3 months ago

        Edit - Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.

        Yeah, but nobody who goes out of their way to advertise that they “support the troops” actually gives a shit about them. It’s always been jingoistic performative nonsense.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          3 months ago

          I tried Mission BBQ one time and their jingoism was just absurd. Their notion of supporting the troops is delivering barbecue in a Hummer and selling $2 plastic cups with (some of) the proceeds going to veterans in some vague way. Of course their worst crime is that their barbecue sucks.

      • bustAsh@lemmy.world
        17·
        3 months ago

        If he loses and tries to claim a stolen election, project 2025 promising a bloodbath will not go well for any of them. Especially since Trump continues to disrespect military personnel at every turn.

        I know there are some maga nuts in the ranks, but last I heard most generals have spoken out against the Trumpet crumpet.

        • LeadersAtWork@lemmy.worldB
          4·
          3 months ago

          Military leadership in the U.S. has always traditionally leaned pro-U.S. If it came down to it there would be fewer Trump allies the higher up you go. Exceptions though, always exceptions.

          Trying really hard to not draw parallels with that scene in Winter Soldier where it’s announced that some agents are Hydra while some are SHIELD and they turn on one another.

      • VubDapple@lemmy.world
        10·
        3 months ago

        My impression has been that the USA air force is perhaps the branch of the armed forces that is most controlled by high ranking evangelicals. Is there any reality basis to this belief?

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          3 months ago

          No idea how it compares to the other branches. Would be an interesting question to run by one of those crazies who served in like all of them (one of the nurses I worked with in the AF then had previously been a Marine and soldier. I’ve had patients who claimed to have served in Marines, Army, Navy, and AF, but no way to tell of they’re full of shit or insane enough to actually do that (the amount of paperwork that would translate to…).

          Anyway, in AF med they’d hit us with the occasional “the lord willing” or something in official functions like change of command ceremonies or squadron "all-call"s, which was definitely crossed the line of what I’d consider acceptable (it should be 100% secular), but that’s the extent of it. No down-throat-ism or pressure to convert or anything.

      • irreticent@lemmy.world
        9·
        3 months ago

        Also, Donald Trump fucking hates us. If anyone ‘supports the troops’ they’ll vote blue.

        Wow! I was expecting a link to one incident but there was a list of many, many unrelated incidents. He really does hate the military.

        Thanks for the link!

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          3 months ago

          Yeah his scandal-per-day tactic seemed to work pretty well - keeping up with his bullshit is a full time job, and we literally don’t have the mental realestate to keep track.

          And it drives me nuts… almost all of those would be a career-ender for a normal politician, but Trump gets away with it again and again because by the time we’ve processed just how bad one thing is, he’s commited 3 or 4 more.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
      122·
      3 months ago

      There’s a model for this. Basically, the reason you see dictatorships having a Republican Guard. Those guys are the loyalists that will do anything for the dictator and they get sinecure positions and help if they’re hurt. The rest of the military is lucky to get rations because the dictator is worried about other people using them to end their reign.

      The total transition would take awhile but Trying was already effectively using the Department of Justice and federal agents to run a Republican Guard during the BLM protests.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      312·
      3 months ago

      The military is filled with the most loyal beaten dogs in America. Master can beat them as much as he wants and they’ll never bite.

      • orcrist@lemm.ee
        4·
        3 months ago

        We have no idea how this would play out. Internal military use is right there in the coup playbook, and top military leaders know this and surely have privately considered it. Would they tell him to fuck off? Maybe. Whatever they would do, if it gets to that point, they’re betting their legacies and their lives on their choice.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
    63·
    3 months ago

    Alex Jones fixated on Posse Comitatus at the tail end of W’s second term and Obama’s first term, melding it with the idea that FEMA was ready to incarcerate millions of Americans in concentration camps after taking away hundreds of millions of guns, and turn cities into walled off, controlled ingress/egress zones akin to a prequel to Escape From New York.

    And now here we are a decade+ after that, with him having been on the ground for and whipping people into an actual insurrection, supporting a fascist who seems to want to actually do things approaching fairly close to his fever dreams of years past, invoking what was once a huge piece of his ‘plan for total enslavement’ or whatever he called it.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      15·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, Alex Jones was actually right on some of the weirdo extremist things he was claiming being planned, it’s just that he was part of those plans to begin with.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        3 months ago

        One of the problems with having your “truth tellers” rely on commercial sales to get the news out. Jones went from a guy who would mainstream generic fringe views of every conceivable quality to a guy who exclusively dealt in far-right conspiracy theories because that’s where the money was at.

        Joe Rogan is on a similar arc. The longer he churns out episodes, the more fascist his guests and his “common sense” views become. And then you look at his advertisers…

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      It’s the same way with all the preppers and the people stockpiling an arsenal because “government comin’ to get ya”. For the most part, these are the people that will gleefully take up arms against their own countrymen if they are given the go-ahead from a fascist government. They won’t fight against a fascist government.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
        1·
        3 months ago

        There are more civilian owned guns than people in the US, and yeah, a lot of it is from basically people that are building a personal armory.

        Hell, there’s a whole commonly repeated mantra amongst many guntubers that ‘one is none and two is one’ that is basically a thought stopping cliche that also shames people into always purchasing a backup gun roughly equivalent to their primary ‘just in case’.

        When it comes to the people with personal armories… I guarantee that the vast majority (not literally all, but most) of those kinds of people are such assholes, such antisocial totalitarians in their personal lives that they either arent going to have any friends to use all those extra guns, or their ‘friends’ will just take one and leave after armory man is an asshole long enough.

        Functionally, all these goobers have done is made the equivalent of loot boxes or mini dungeons with guns as the prize in an actual SHTF scenario.

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
    23·
    3 months ago

    As [New York Times] wrote, during his one term, the former president argued on multiple occasions to deploy military personnel to shut down protests and take control of the border. During a second term, he is not expected to have advisors pushing back.

    The report notes, " … as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes," adding, “During his time out of power, allies of Mr. Trump have worked on policy papers to provide legal justifications for the former president’s intent to use the military to enforce the law domestically.”

  • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
    121·
    3 months ago

    National guard maybe but the main military branches of the US cannot be used under posse comitatus, right?

    • Sludgehammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      3 months ago

      I’m willing to bet he’d just call it an “official act of the president” for legal immunity and the supreme court would back him up with a 6-3 split.

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 months ago

        Arresting and silencing people who did not vote for him under the guise of combating domestic terrorism would be so easy. For as much as the right wing bad actors like to claim false flag every time something bad happens that they are to blame for, if Trump were to successfully orchestrate a false flag attack as president, he could have carte blanche to do whatever he pleased to his political enemies so long as the Supreme Court abdicated their responsibility to check his authority.

        It really will be a terrifying time to live in America. The absolute best we could hope for with a second Trump presidency is him hunkering down for four years and do nothing after he gets what he really wants - all his criminal cases dismissed. That’s the best case scenario. I shudder to think of the worst case scenario, which would be all-out civil war.

        • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          3 months ago

          Read about Project 2025. They’re planning a lot more than that. Left to his own devices, Trump might fuck off for 4 years, but Trump has JD Vance and a whole cohort who have planned all kinds of terrible things if he gets elected. All Trump needs to do is rubber-stamp it, which I have no doubt he would do.

    • ours@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      With the Supreme Court in his pocket, laws are more like guidelines anyway.

      Or he’ll probably be able to find a few MAGA-friendly generals (shudders) and start a nice little coup/civil war taking the US well into the banana republic territory and ask any opposition to this move to stop him: “you and what army?”.

      But things are looking good for him to lose badly (please vote sensible Americans) before drifting away as he keeps losing his mind. Some MAGA idiots will probably try something extremely dumb but hopefully too disorganized and half-hearted to lead to anything serious except getting arrested/shot by law enforcement.

      • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
        6·
        3 months ago

        When listening to american generals speak they are usually wise men who know a lot about a lot, including the constitution, racism, dictators and such. Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I have a hard time believing they would follow Trump down that path.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
          61·
          3 months ago

          The good news is the officer corps isn’t trying to follow his illegal orders.

          The bad news is the DOJ and federal agents proved willing during the BLM protests.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
          21·
          3 months ago

          That was people. They could have bowed to the mob and declared Trump the winner. The military was actually prevented from deploying.

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        1·
        3 months ago

        Unfortunately legality has no correlation with morality. What if the legal orders are to fire on US citizens? We’ve already seen what happens to legal and peaceful protestors when they’re confronted by police.

        • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 months ago

          Well, since it’s illegal for the army to be deployed on us soil for police work. Any subsequent order, like firing on US citizens would be illegal.

          It is their duty to refuse. “Just following orders” is not an excuse to commit crimes.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      3 months ago

      Well now they have that supreme court ruling that the president can’t commit a crime if it’s an “official act” so genuinely who knows. But I could absolutely see someone like Trump using it to squash a protest and then jamming the whole thing up while the courts argue about it for the next 15 years or so.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    3 months ago

    So now that NYT has taken the gloves off for trump, I guess it’s even more clear that all that soft pedaling before was just because they wanted Biden out. 🤔

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
    32·
    3 months ago

    Sure, but could any of those military guys actually get a presidential medal of freedom? Not a purple heart or anything that Trump has suggested is dumb, but a real award for winners like the presidential medal of freedom.

    (opinions about these awards are from Donald Trump, on the record. /s from me.)