The Coming Disaster on Canada's Borders: America's Next Civil War
Photo Credit: (NBC News / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
The following is Part One of Adam Riggio’s exploration of the seemingly inevitable descent of the United States into its second civil war. Here, he discusses the conditions of a likely Trump coup, the machinery he has already laid in motion.
Six years ago, Donald Trump was a game show host with shady real estate investments and a side hustle spreading racist conspiracy. If you had asked the question above to most folks in progressive circles back then, utter confusion would have been the only response. But if we were asked, back then, to predict who would have been the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, we all would have named someone like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz.
Nothing Is Implausible Now
But we now live in an era where a racist game show host is President of the United States, rage-tweeting from his tanning bed, committing crimes against humanity by imprisoning tens of thousands of refugees from Central American civil wars and disappearing their children into Evangelical adoption networks. We progressives now face the sickeningly plausible situation, that the Trump Administration is allowing hundreds of thousands of people to die in a pandemic to score political points against the Democratic Party. As the joke goes, even the Onion isn’t as funny as it used to be, because all its most ridiculous headlines seem somewhat plausible now.
Six years ago, America was a country with many problems, but there was no possibility of catastrophe on the horizon. Now, there is. COVID-19 is spreading uncontrollably, and the President himself, along with Republican governors, legislators, and activists, as well as deranged conspiracy theorists, protest and mock laws, regulations, and even suggestions to encourage public health.
Meanwhile, Trump has responded to a nationwide and global wave of protests against the brutality of policing by unleashing violent suppression from the federal security forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. He first launched federal troops into Portland on the USA’s Independence Day, and promoted the crackdown as the restoration of law and order over dangerous radicals. American extremists promote notions that the Black Lives Matter movement are themselves totalitarians out to destroy Christianity and white culture, and are funded by Deep State money and the networks of George Soros. The American President encourages and boosts the credibility of this campaign of racist lies.
Destroying Americans’ Faith in Their Votes
Donald Trump’s re-election prospects were far from certain before the COVID-19 plague began decimating the United States. But now, all but the most dedicated and delusional Trumpists consider the President to have completely fumbled attempts to contain the contagion. Support for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leads Trump nationally, as well as in important competitive states in the US Rust Belt. Just as he did when his initial election was in doubt, Trump has begun suggesting that he would not accept the election results were he to lose.
This is more than a flippant comment to troll his enemies, since he has also been railing against mail-in voting, the only way that many people will be able to cast a ballot in the circumstances of America’s still-raging COVID-19 pandemic. Trump has suggested, in both his Twitter account and in his recent FOX News interview with Chris Wallace, that voting by mail is never done in the USA, and that the Democratic Party will rig the Presidential election with a flood of many thousands of faked mail-in ballots.
Now, voting by mail has been done in the United States since their Civil War, and mail-in voting has never been used to commit election fraud. In contrast, there are signs that the Trump Administration itself is able to interfere with mail-in ballots, thanks to the appointments of regime loyalists Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and longtime collaborator Attorney General Bill Barr.
Trump’s months of attacks on mail-in voting has also put many opposition politicians on the back foot, defending postal ballots as a safe, secure method of voting. So if Trump wins the election, he will have pre-emptively neutered his opposition from having politically legitimate grounds to investigate possible election fraud in DeJoy’s office. Having spent months defending mail-in voting from Trump’s bullhorn, it will be easy to paint them as hypocrites, as well as sore losers.
Meanwhile, The Coup Approaches
As the year so far has taught all of us so efficiently, things can always get worse. As Trump and his family and loyalists have encrusted themselves into the executive branch, one of their major goals has been to complete the erosion of American democracy. Destroying democratic institutions in America has been the goal of the American right since Paul Weyrich led the segregationist Christian reaction to the Civil Rights movement. Trump and the Republican Party are now ideally suited to finish it.
President Trump first set off public alarm bells, or at least significant social media and cable news outrage, when he floated delaying the election until after the pandemic is genuinely over. Even Trump’s most dedicated boot-licker, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reacted with shock. However, there is serious reason to doubt how sincere he is, since Trump son-in-law and living embodiment of failing upward Jared Kushner publicly admitted on 12 May of plans to cancel the federal election outright.
With such a plan in action, delaying the election until the end of the pandemic amounts to an outright cancellation of any American election at the federal level. The very catastrophe that has cost Trump so much of his popularity could also enable him to remain president for the rest of his life. The mistakes and malice that has spread COVID-19 across the United States may now be so effective that the pandemic may not end there for many years.
This Always For Tyrants
The possibility of figures in Congress, the courts, and the military preventing a genuine Trump dictatorship of the United States seems more remote each day. Ultimately, the ability to stop a Trump coup rests with the ability of the many armed services to escort him and his cronies from their offices. Unfortunately for American freedom, Trump and his executive have been planning to deal with this as well.
We progressives have seen the brutality of the federal security forces Trump sent to Portland to brutalize protestors into silence and submission. These federal police work for the Department of Homeland Security, largely in Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The CBP is notorious for a violent, misogynist culture where racist bullying, even against children, is the norm.
ICE had already become notorious for their reigns of terror in immigrant communities across America. ICE is responsible for the “kids in cages” detention camps of the Mexican border, and regularly arrest entire families in violent raids to deport them. Having already been deployed to revel in the violence perpetrated on American citizens protesting the government and police, as well as on migrants, immigrants, and refugees all over America.
This image of army and marines fighting DHS security agencies in a violent conflict over a Trump coup is, unfortunately, a best-case scenario. Remember that, for decades now, white supremacist terror and extremist groups have targeted much of the USA’s regular army for recruitment. The army is also home to violent criminals who prey on their fellow soldiers, and have no qualms about sexually assaulting and murdering them.
So if Trump cancels or indefinitely delays the election, and sets his loyalist security forces on political enemies, no one can rely on any armed force in the United States to unite in their loyalty to democracy. Military bases like Fort Hood will more likely become war zones, as tens of thousands of soldiers will turn on each other, extremists and racists massacring the democratically-minded and ethnic minorities with whom they share barracks.
We should not even expect the civilian officials to restrain or tamp down extremist pro-Trump uprisings in the military. Trump has already installed a network of loyalists throughout the USA’s government bureaucracy, and their ideologies have become more unhinged as his term as continued. Many of his recent appointments openly spread and endorse extremist conspiracies like QAnon and birtherism. With extremist loyalists throughout the civilian government, much of the upper bureaucracy will resist Trump leaving office.
America’s Bright Future!
So the most likely outlook for the United States over the next year looks something like this. Its population will be ravaged, sick and dying by the millions, and its president will use the pandemic as an excuse to delay elections indefinitely and remain in office for life. Protests and activism to restore democracy will be met with violent oppression that will make the crackdowns of Portland city centre and Lafayette Square in D.C. look like arguments about parking tickets.
Government officials will declare even the milquetoast opposition of mainstream Democrats to be dangerous communist radicals. There will be mass arrests of legislators and activists throughout the country. Units and individuals in the armed forces will turn on each other in battles at army bases in America and around the world. Trump loyalists at the highest echelons of the army, or even small groups of extremist soldiers with security clearances, will turn their weapons on civilian populations that resist Trump’s regime.
I am describing a civil war. Canadians will then have tough questions to ask ourselves. The largest undefended border in the world will need defences, and fast. Canadian extremists have fled to America and easily avoided capture for months. We will need to prevent American extremists from fleeing in the opposite direction to plot terror attacks and help fascist terror groups here in Canada. We will also have our dedication to humanity tested as thousands, maybe even millions, of American refugees will seek asylum here from the violence and death sweeping their country.
What will we do? The second part of this column will explore answers.
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