O.K., so look, America, I know you’re not listening, but goddammit I’ve f’ing well told you, more than once now, that Generalissimo Trump is on the warpath and just cracking to invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, suspend habeus corpus and start shooting women and children, and still all y’all are continuing to behave as if this isn’t really happening. Well, for the record: this is actually happening. Wake the fuck up.
Let’s take stock. Fat Donnie’s got masked men running around the country, kidnapping people off the streets, including those living in the U.S. legally, and almost certainly sweeping up US citizens as they go, then denying them due process, and, when he can get away with it, shipping them to a gulag in El Salvador where people go in, but they never come back out. Doing his damndest to pick a fight, he sent his goons into L.A. to grab agricultural workers and day labourers hanging around parking lots at places like Home Depot, looking to pick up some work – the scoundrels – and as soon as he provoked the civilian backlash he was aching to foment, he didn’t just federalize the California National Guard over the objections of the Governor, he put in a call to Twenty-Nine Palms and had them deploy a full battalion of the goddam U.S. Marines – America’s tip-of-the-spear foreign expeditionary force, trained to storm beaches and kick unholy ass – to the streets of L.A. to do, well, to do what, exactly? Unless he invokes the Insurrection Act it’s illegal for them to participate in law enforcement – say, you don’t suppose that’s why he keeps calling protestors “insurrectionists”, do you? – and meanwhile, he’s organized a huge military parade, replete with armoured vehicles, to mark the occasion of his own frigging birthday (and you can leave off with the bullshit about the Army’s 250th anniversary), and won’t that be fun! And won’t it send just the right message! He can wave at the passing tanks from a reviewing stand, just like Stalin used to – hey, do you think he shows up in some sort of African Dictator Field Marshall getup with six stars, plenty of gold braid, and two square feet of fruit salad? To warm up for his Big Day of Military Intimidation, he held what amounted to a political rally at the once and future Fort Bragg, recently un-renamed so it could once again commemorate the lacklustre career of piss-poor Confederate general Braxton Bragg, even though Congress passed a law to put an end to that shit. Donald had the assembled troops whooping and hollering and booing the Mayor of L.A. and the Governor of California.
Look at those guffawing arseholes. I can’t even begin to tell you how wrong this is. They aren’t allowed to do that. Their officers know this. They should have been briefed, in no uncertain terms, that their solemn duty was to stand there stone-faced while Donald rattled through his cheap, limited vocabulary applause lines, because Army regulations outright prohibit the participation by uniformed personnel in political events, for reasons which by now should be all too obvious. But hey, who fuckin’ cares, Orange Jesus there just does what he wants and everybody rolls over and lets him, and this time he wanted to broadcast some visuals to remind the libs and their America-hating protestor pals whose side the Army’s on, you know, in case anybody wants to show up to protest his North Korean-style armoured tribute this weekend. In which case, Donnie reminds us, they’ll be met with “very big force”, deploying, as ever, his Churchillian gift for rhetoric.
You know what really drives me to rage and despair? All these federal agents, all these ICE fuckos and Homeland Security Seal Team Six cosplayers, and now the rank and file of the frigging US Army, they’re all just so delighted to be let off the leash so they can push people around, break the law, ignore their oaths, and subvert every value they ever swore to uphold. They’re all just so fucking pleased. Trump has had no trouble at all getting the institutions of his supposed democracy to flush all that Constitutional shit down the crapper and start cracking skulls. Nobody needed any persuading. Nobody pushed back. Nobody quit. Don’t be counting on any of these happy authoritarians to balk at any unlawful orders.
Where do you suppose this is all headed, America?
Now, it turns out that very few Americans actually approve of all this, and when interviewed, the bulk of the witless bastards who voted MAGA say they didn’t think Trump meant it when he said he was going to deport 20 million people, they understood him to mean he was going after convicted criminals, you know, not poor Carol over there at Fred’s Diner, but does that mean they don’t support Fat Donnie any more? What do you think? Shit, man, even the Latinos who voted MAGA – and it’s simply mind-blowing how many did – are sticking with their man:
Get a load of this:
June 11, 2025
Reinerio de la Torre, a 56-year-old electrician who came from Cuba almost two decades ago, said Trump has gone too far with his immigration policies and deportation efforts. He also disagrees with the partial travel ban on Cuba, saying “visas should be decided case by case.” However, de la Torre said he still supports the president and is optimistic about what’s to come for the rest of his term. “But it’s still early in the presidency and we have to give him time to see what he does,” de la Torre said outside Hialeah’s City Hall.
A second resident, Patricia, agreed with de la Torre’s sentiment. “He is deporting innocent people, and I don’t like the tariffs, but maybe at the end it will be for the better,” she said.
I guess it’s not very nice if I hope that Reinerio and Patricia there get abducted by masked men next weekend while they’re shopping at Walmart, and wake up to find themselves in the custody of a prison system run by a Central American dictator. Oh well. Guess I’m not nice. Actually, from where I sit, the real pity is that ICE won’t also be rounding up all the Caucasian ass-wipes named Billy and Cleetus and Mabel and Jennie who’re still wearing their dumbass red MAGA hats and believing Donald when he tells them that actually, the price of eggs has come way down, and so’s gas, and tariffs are great because now iPhones will be built in Buttcrack Alabama, and anyway the foreigners are the ones who pay them, greedy pricks like those rat bastards in Canada and Europe, and did you know that the European Union was created purely and expressly to screw America on trade? It’s true!
I don’t know, here I am pleading with these brainstems to stop sleepwalking, and who knows, maybe some of them will, but it may already be too late. Last time around they all voted for guys like this:
And this:
…so Congress isn’t going to be any help, and neither, one can only assume, will SCOTUS, so people can march all they want, but there aren’t any legal avenues left to thwart the Mad King, and it isn’t obvious what else is possible, especially when taking to the streets is probably just going to get them all shot – I guess we’ll see – and you know what, even if they actually hold another round of elections, which, listen, don’t bet the mortgage, I bet the numbskulls still vote Republican, because Donald may be making the odd misstep, but his overall policies, whatever they are, are still generally OK, and the guy deserves a chance to succeed, you know?
That’s the saddest part. The people did this to themselves, and now, no matter how much they see, they don’t want to wake up, even if there’s still just a chance, just a little time, to turn this around. You know what they’d say: turn what around? Things are still going pretty good!
So why do I care any more? Why shouldn’t I just sit here eating my popcorn and basking in the sweet, warm glow of schadenfreude while Trump puts an end to the Republic, and all his adoring voters get exactly what’s coming to them? Well, I guess it’s because more than half of the folks down there didn’t vote for this, and they’ll be showing up this weekend at literally thousands of rallies all across America for what’s being called “No Kings Day”, and that kind of gets me in the pumper. It would even if the attainment of Trump’s goals won’t also threaten the entire world, which it will, in a hundred ways, making it hard not to root for the many who still oppose Donald, or to suppress the hope that the rest may yet come around, and the tide can still turn.
It’s starting to look to me like it’s already too late, only five months in to this fetid regime, but a guy has to hope.
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Post-script: even as I was writing this, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem – famous now for claiming that habeas corpus is the right of the President to have people imprisoned without due process, and once best known as the Governor who was proud to recount how she shot her dog – just had a sitting US Senator hauled away in handcuffs, after being manhandled to the floor, when he tried to ask her a question at a press conference. As usual, the federal goons were only too happy to rough up a man identifying himself clearly to them as a US Senator. This is no longer about things that might happen. They’re happening.
the needlefish 