Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
The words of the President of the United States over the past three days suggest that he is determined to be a wartime president and that he has found the enemy: it’s the American people.
As racial justice protests raged in cities across the United States on May 30 over the murder of George Floyd in broad daylight at the hands of four policemen in Minneapolis, President Donald Trump tweeted that if the protesters had breached the fence at the White House, “they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.” (Considering that the President avoided military service on the basis of bone spurs, he probably hasn’t actually seen too many ominous weapons.)
Yesterday, President Trump held a phone conference with state Governors around the U.S. He said this at one point: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”
During the call with Governors, Trump put the Secretary of the Department of Defense, Mark Esper, on the phone. Esper’s message to the Governors was this: “We need to dominate the battle space.” To have a battle waged by the Department of Defense you need an enemy. If the “battle space” is American cities and the people on the other side of the military are American citizens, then it seems reasonable to say that the President and the Pentagon are preparing to go to war against Americans.
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