Be prepared for "further escalation"

[marmar]

Be prepared for “further escalation”
Four experts on how Trump is using crises to expand his power

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published June 24, 2025 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the American people have been standing at a crossroads: One road leads to the end of American democracy and its replacement with some form of authoritarianism — or what political theorist Sheldon Wolin described as “inverted totalitarianism” — while the other leads to continuing the American democratic experiment and doing the hard, necessary work to improve it.

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Authoritarian leaders have historically used international crises — be they real, manufactured or false altogether — as a way of expanding their domestic power. In an attempt to better navigate this dangerous time in American history, I recently spoke to several experts about Trump’s military parade, the “No Kings” protests and what may happen next in the country’s rapidly spiraling democracy crisis.

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Norman Ornstein is emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the bestseller One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported.

I am extremely uneasy. As soon as Stephen Miller used the word “insurrection,” I saw it as a deliberate prelude to Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, itself a prelude to declaring martial law.

We are in for a bad time ahead. Trump is destroying public safety, from food to transportation to health, and the world is more, not less, unstable and dangerous with him, Rubio, Hegseth, et al. in place.

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Katherine Stewart is the author of the new book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy.

Creating an emergency to justify an authoritarian overreaction is one of the most frequently telegraphed stunts in the authoritarian canon. Trump basically told us over and over again before the election, that he wanted to use the U.S. military against U.S. citizens, and that’s what he’s doing. He chose to send ICE into downtown L.A. precisely because he knew these actions would yield the optics of chaos that right-wing media requires. ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/06/24/be-prepared-for-further-escalation/

[Skittles]

1. it has become the repuke playbook

invent "crises" only fascism can "solve"