The United States survived a coup. Can it endure the creep of dictatorship? |Lawrence Douglas

jJanuary 6 shows that long-standing democracies can easily resist the chaotic efforts of the coup. Their ability is low and cannot withstand the normalization of extraordinary measures: using federal agents to quell domestic protests, police attacks on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, i.e., the excuse call of emergency power. Each of these steps seems to be temporary and targeted. They may even enjoy legal thin patina. But over time, the democratic order became the book by Ernst Fraenkel, a German Jewish lawyer, whose books were one of the first and most acute scrutiny of the Hitler regime, known as the “privileged state” (the “privileged” government, which was a politician who “released all legal restrictions in all legal constraints and relied solely on the political people.

So let’s be clear: Trump’s command over the Washington, D.C. Police Department is just Salvo’s opening ceremony. Trump is already in the process of fighting equipment, small rifles and images of soldiers building obstacles and checkpoints Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsethby creating a “professional force” of the National Guard, to “be specially trained and able to deal with public order issues.”

What is the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump said he has the will and resources for peace alone.Killing Field“Chicago, but obviously his reason for “crime” is nothing more than a trick. Statistics, i.e. reality – tells us that the crime rate of Washington Trump’s dispatch of troops was at a 30-year low. This does not deny Rose’s rhetorical ability. Installing soldiers in the Democratic Party makes himself the Maga of Supportor, especially training himself in the Democratic context, especially Michael’s name in order to declare his orders as a Miga of Maga, which is Michael’s name. Suppor) acted to make its own orders supply. The largest and most multiracial metropolitan area of ​​the country is inequality and evil dirty, which was the president who pardoned unparalleled mob members, attacked the Capitol, fired prosecutors from the Department of Justice, who worked hard to serve as rebels and installed criminals in the crime department. Responsible for urging His rioters killed the police.

The militarized police also serve Trump’s intimidation politics. Here we can link the deployment of troops at the National Mall with the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residence. Both uncomfortably demonstrate the power of the police state more familiar than constitutional democracy. Both actions are formally legal facts – two federal magistrates signed on a Bolton warrant, and several D.C. law rules authorized the president to use the National Guard, making them a textbook example of the kind of authoritarian creep diagnosed by Franckel.

Deploy troops to police Chicago Of course, it will represent the more shocking and legal exercise of administrative power. The POSSE COMITATUS Act of 1878 was a late construction law that essentially violated the President’s use of troops as domestic police. But we naively conclude that federal law provides sufficient protection for consolidating privileged states. The Insurgency Act sets out the disturbing exception to the POSSE COMITATUS Act, allowing the president to deploy troops in “insurgency” cases to enforce federal law. The Supreme Court believes that the president has broad immunity for future prosecutions of all “official acts”, no matter how evil, questioning the president’s determination to what constitutes a “rebellion”?

While the emergence of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York could cause marginalized communities to exercise the fundamental right to free movement, it could also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The ghost of the city street patrolled by trained soldiers, rather than American citizens, may not quell the violence, but invite violence. The prospect of protests becoming ugly and violent is too real. Forces are deployed as an excuse to respond to emergencies and then work to create emergencies to justify evolving deployments. Danger is what the president wants.

Why? Trump has actively inserted himself into the mid-2026 battle to push Texas toward Further Grimand It’s already a little clumsy area; joke May provide reasons for delaying the election; and promise Issuing an executive order End of mail-in ballots – obviously lacking the power to do so. What if he deployed his troops to the voting site on Election Day?

In principle, the powerful legal building explicitly prohibits such deployments on election day, but imagine the president citing the Uprising Act to “maintain” polling stations in the wake of a series of violent protests? Now we have armed soldiers at the polling stations, handling votes, and “surveillance” the chain of custody, all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such deployment would expand recognition of the Uprising Act, but the court’s deliberate slowness. The election is decided within a few days.

As Fraenkel points out, authoritarianism does not operate outside of law. It manipulates the law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.