The move suggests Donald Trump is doubling down on his claimed crime emergency in the nation’s capital after the election.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized the National Guard to begin using boats, several dozen marked police cars, humvees and light medium tactical vehicles in the nation’s capital — an escalation of the troops’ presence that could further blur the line between their military and law enforcement role.
It’s not clear why the Trump administration is making the move now. The Oct. 29 memo obtained by POLITICO detailing the expansion doesn’t provide any further details beyond doubling down on Trump’s plan to use the National Guard to crack down on what he’s called a “crime emergency”in the nation’s capital.
The beefed-up presence, which will be in place through the end of the year, would see members of the National Guard driving vehicles typically used by U.S. troops on battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan on city streets to support law enforcement officers making drug busts, though they are not allowed to pursue suspects or make arrests.
To be honest, I’m a little worried that Republicans aren’t denying election results. This is their entire MO, they’e still kind of at the height of their power, and they are the most rampantly criminal administration in history and have done everything in their power to avoid accountability so far. Narcissists and dictators don’t just give up, they will do whatever they can to avoid accountability.
And they’re just taking this lying down? Being normal about it? I’m getting a little worried they have a plot behind the scenes to keep power. Whether it be not seating reps on the 3rd, or something even worse.
Please assuage some of my fears.
Fair enough. And a good point. To that I would only point out THE ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY WENT BLUE including, no shit this is not a drill Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina.
Okay, not Florida, or Louisiana, but even there it was really fucking close. With that kind of vote presence I don’t think they’ll be as interested in swallowing whatever batshit deranged treason the orange rapist has in his Roger Stone file.
except for south dakota for some reason, which merits some investigation
Shouldn’t be hard to ask three people who they voted for?
I hope Democrats aren’t being lulled to sleep with how accepting Republicans have been so far. I know they’re aware they don’t really have wide public support anymore, but I don’t trust them at all. I’m not sure this is even an option, but I would want a contingent of state troopers to come with all of the Senator/House Rep elects to come with them on the 3rd. I would not for a second find it too hard to believe they could try to arrest them all. They will not just sleepwalk into life sentences
Florida is highly concentrated racist boomer soup. I tried.
I was really really surprised when Trump didn’t immediately call the election “stolen”. I figured that it might have been because he’s so narcissistic that he didn’t care because it wasn’t an election for him specifically.
But, with all the military mobilisation I’m thinking along the same lines as you: what’re they up to? Obviously a coup, but how and when?
To me it’s the Victor Orban problem. Election denying works when the margins are thin. It’s really hard when a million more people in Texas vote against you.
They have til January 3rd
Yeah, but the tangerine buffoon can’t think ahead, plan, or even follow a plan for that matter. He’d have blabbed already, unless he’s been kept in the dark this time.
One of my guesses is that claims of cheating would result in investigations that might actually find cheating–their cheating. They just underestimated the margins they’d have to cheat by to win, but might have still left some evidence.
Another guess is they saw how baseless claims did more to hurt their position than to help last time (tbh I suspect they only made the claims to try to put their opponents in a corner where they couldn’t accuse them back the next time without looking like they are just doing the same thing to all the people only half paying attention). They might be looking for cases where such a claim might be plausible instead of just making noise and sacrificing some lawyers’ reputations.
Guess 3 is that winning the elections was just plan A but they are ok going with plan B, and increasing the national guard presence in Washington is a part of that. It might be prudent for his political opponents to not all be in DC at once, or try spending time with the troops there to form bonds and/or guage their sentiments.
Guess 4 is that they were surprised at the sheer amount of opposition that showed up to vote and might have lost confidence they can get away with pushing it too much right now, especially with how things are escalating in France and they can see that the usual big block of “if there’s any bad behaviour at all during a protest, that cancels out whatever position they have” is eroding.
I think it was too big to rig, plus Bibi just cried stolen election, it would be ridiculous to do the same, especially given how he’s lied about it before. Im a little nervous too though.
Bibi and the Brazilian fuck
Do you really think that the party that just spent $500 million on campaigns and lost would have a 4D chess plan to take over the military to install their fascist regime?
Marco Rubio just floated qutting, Jimmy Vance just threw Donald under the bus. DeSantis called this “an extinction level event”. They don’t have the pull to convince anyone that it would be beneficial to help Trump at this point.
100%. A good one? No. A plan? Yeah.
Hegseth, Trump, Vought, etc. are willing to do anything to stay out of prison. They didn’t fire more than half of military leadership/generals for nothing. There is a 0% chance they’re just gonna fade away, let themselves get impeached, investigated, etc without doing something. I don’t think it’s going to work, but when have they ever just accepted something bad happening to them?
They’ve now been reminded of their actual numbers, not what they thought they had in their echo chambers.
They have had friends. When the rats jump ship, they are going to need a scapegoat.
Also, I don’t mean this in a rude way, but looking for consolation from your fears on the internet it NOT a good idea. Especially Doomy. Oops, I mean Lemmy.
They don’t need to take over the military – they’re already in charge of it. A coup isn’t really 4D chess, either. It’s a well-tread, brute force tactic by fascists, including many of trump’s friends. Thankfully it’s been failing a lot lately, but these lunatics have, until January, nearly unfettered control of the biggest military in the world.
Trump already tried a coup once and got away with it, so he really has no reason not to try again to avoid a power shift that might result in accountability. And he doesn’t need to rely on an ad hoc smattering of fringe militias this time. He’s got the full weight of the US military.
I really hope this is alarmism and they’ll go out with a whimper, but their own history would suggest not.
Considering they almost let a violent revolution start back when they murdered alex pretti, I don’t think they’re going to do anything too crazy since they’re MORE unpopular than before.
They’d be 100% uniting us peasants against the Epstein class. You might not think enough people would join in, but once people started losing family members to a tyrannical government, public opinion changes rapidly.
You are giving them more credit than you should. Trump is stupid. Like BIGLY stupid. How many of these people are willing to follow him at this point just to be thrown under the bus.
Trump is a figurehead for the Heritage Foundation and a few other accelerationist dominionist groups who will remain in charge even if trump drops dead tomorrow.
Compare their list of names to the ones that show up most often in the Epstein files and think about how motivated they are right now.
e: Do you think Vance of all people will oppose them, who they handpicked for that job?
Yep, rampant, scared spending that increased the closer we got to the midterms, Trump apparently trying to hide evidence he’s a felon (???lol???) all the conservatives scrambling to save their own hides already…
I definitely expect them to try something. I just don’t think it was plan A-E, so it’s probably a last-minute Hail Mary plan F. Still could be something awful and dangerous, but these peoples’ plan A is almost always a clusterfuck, and the American people just showed that we are tired of their fascist shit and are done with them altogether, so they’ll have a massively uphill battle no matter what they do
Republicans hate Trump rn, I doubt they will do anything that matters.
I’ve been feeling uncharacteristically optimistic the last few days. I just have a feeling things are turning around for the better and America will go back to normal.
The election results show Trump doesn’t have the political influence I thought he did and, now that they see he doesn’t have the political influence they thought he did, his own party may start turning on him
But there is still a part of me that fears this is too good to be true and it’s gonna come crashing down soon
My phone autocorrect randomly corrected wwiii to WWIII the other day. Normally, it autocorrects to WWII. And I rarely use WWIII.
But more likely, I think we’re staring down the barrel of an economic collapse bigger than 2008 in time for christmas, since with the midterms going the way they did, AI bros can stop pumping the bubble and blame Democrats.
Well, democrats may have won the election, but they haven’t been seated yet. If there were to be some fuckery around seating them, there would be a lot of protesting in DC, and a fascist regime would make sure they have their military power in place to quell the uprising.