Trump is wading into the Rubicon

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The past two or so weeks have to be among the bizarrest in U.S. living memory. It’s hard to even know where to begin. On May 30, President Donald Trump gave billionaire drug addict/faux tech savant Elon Musk some kind of golden key “to the White House” as a blatant kiss off from the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency. 

Obviously tripping on some pharmaceutical cocktail — and with a black eye apparently given to him after he invited his toddler to punch him in the face — Musk went back to whatever kind of hermetically sealed supervillain bunker he uses to house his true alien form and proceeded to rage tweet against Trump.

In the grip of a clear psychotic break, the world’s richest man called for the president of the United States to be impeached, alleged that he was part of a notorious child sex ring and took the dubious credit for getting the ungrateful Trump elected to his second term.

For his part, Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s billions of dollars worth of federal contracts (correctly pointing out that such a move would be a great savings to the American people), and the MAGAsphere erupted with a paroxysm of dissembling, hand-wringing, projection and viciousness as coherent as a medieval village in the throes of mass ergot poisoning.

That was all just leading up to last weekend, around the time that Trump ordered a large-scale military incursion of Los Angeles by federalized National Guard troops and active duty Marines, narrated with an insane stream of raving social media posts alternately claiming that L.A. would be “obliterated” without his protection (despite the protests being isolated to one small part of downtown) and threatening to use military personnel to commit retaliatory violence against protesters opposed to a wave of high-handed Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city: “If they spit, we will hit,” and, “I promise you they will be hit harder than they have ever been hit before.”

Photo illustration by Ben Olson.

Oh, and he called California Gov. Gavin Newsom “Newscum” and indicated it would be “great” to arrest the top elected executive official of a state that represents the largest economy in the nation and the fourth largest in the world. Arrested by whom and for what is unclear, though Newsom came right out and called the whole episode what it is: an “unmistakable step toward authoritarianism” and a “deranged fantasy” perpetrated by a “dictatorial president.”

It’s not accurate to say that what’s happening — physically — in L.A. is unprecedented in U.S. history. Presidents have deployed military forces against protesters numerous times in the 20th century alone: from the Bonus March in 1932 to several instances throughout the 1960s and even up to the 1990s in L.A., no less.

What’s different and most chilling this time is how rooted Trump’s orders are in his personal belief in the unchecked, and uncheckable, power of his office. These are actions being taken from a philosophical and political place of autocracy. It’s Czar Nicholas II siccing the Imperial Guard on worker protests at the Winter Palace in 1905; it’s the Chinese Communist Party mobilizing troops on Tiananmen Square in 1989 to oppose anti-corruption demonstrators.

Obviously those incidents resulted in mass bloodshed; and, so far, no one has been killed amid the (objectively minor) unrest in L.A. — though there have been injuries, including at least 20 reporters “assaulted or obstructed” by authorities, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

However, the broader significance of this unfolding event is that Trump is toeing into the Rubicon — a few more steps toward executive supremacy and he’ll have entered into a category of presidential imperiousness that has rarely been seen in our history and, once crossed into, is as difficult as it is dangerous to come back from.

Meanwhile, if there’s one truth to be taken so far from the L.A. ICE raids and militarized response to protests: No one who doesn’t eat paint chips for breakfast should ever again listen to the Republican Party or anyone in the conservative movement writ large about the sanctity of “states’ rights” or limiting federal power. They are the radicals, the proto-monarchists and the anti-Americans, and I predict that will be the resounding truth expressed when Trump’s ludicrous strongman military birthday parade in the nation’s capital is met with countless “No Kings” demonstrations across the country on Saturday, June 14. We had all better be listening, because history will be watching.