Why is Trump Treating Immigration Protests as a Literal War between Red and Blue?

 

Why is Trump Treating Immigration Protests as a Literal War between Red and Blue?

There is no question that even beyond his “distractions” – well produced for television with lots of well-edited footage – Donald Trump is satisfying his MAGA Base’s desires. First, to tear down the elusive “deep state” by taking down huge chunks of the federal government to no one’s real advantage. Second, to impose Red cultural values on the Blue states and cities that have repeatedly voted against those values. The notion that the federal government was a cesspool of waste and corruption was clearly not substantiated, as this opinion from a DOGE employee clearly illustrates:

“A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were ‘relatively nonexistent’ during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs… ‘I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,’ Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

“Lavingia was a successful software developer and the founder of Gumroad, a platform for online sales, when he joined DOGE in March. Lavingia said he had previously sought to work for the U.S. Digital Service, the technology unit that was renamed and restructured by the Trump administration. He told NPR that he just wanted to make government websites easier for citizens to use and didn't really care which presidential administration he was working for, despite protests from his friends and family.” NPR, June 5th. The operations of Social Security, Medicare, etc. were also found clear of measurable fraud or waste. Their software was in dire need of updating, but that was not much of a revelation.

If there were anywhere that waste were rampant, it would have to be in the Department of Defense, where a detailed budget had not yet been provided to Congress when the MAGA House passed the Big Beautiful Bill with a significant increase for military expenditures. The DOD is indeed continuing to fund a massive new construction effort that is little more than an expansion of the Cold War military. Big aircraft carriers, new massive stealth jet fighter-bombers plus the cost of the upgraded flotillas needed to protect those massive investments. Did someone miss the massive drone attack (each costing in the hundreds of dollar range) In the span of a few hours on Sunday [5/29], nearly a third of Moscow’s strategic bomber fleet was destroyed or damaged with cheaply made drones sneaked into Russian territory, the latest evolution of asymmetrical warfare? OK, those weapons do look good in naval show-offs and military parades and flyovers, but that’s just not the way wars are fought these days.

And truthfully, we are deploying a whole lot more active military troops these days against our own people in American cities than against foreign powers attacking us. While a lot of what we are seeing in US cities seems to mirror the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, that outrage was about our involvement in a foreign war. Starting with the relatively small protests in Los Angeles, which were easily handleable by local police, then spreading across the country, Trump was clearly putting the United States on genuine wartime footing. The Red vs Blue war, an intentional fomenting of a civil war.

“The Pentagon is reviewing a Department of Homeland Security request to deploy more than 20,000 additional National Guard troops to aid the Trump administration's widening crackdown on illegal immigration around the United States, according to officials and documents… Keeping 20,000 National Guardsmen on duty for one year would cost $3.6 billion, according to a U.S. official briefed on the potential deployment. However, it's unclear how many Guardsmen are available to fill the request, according to a Defense official.” USA Today, June 10th. Active duty US Marines, purely a combat force, are also being inserted into local protests.

In Los Angeles, those federalized Guardsmen didn’t really have much to do, but they were apparently mostly there to intimidate and instill fear. As the above photograph of those Guardsmen sleeping on concrete floors suggests, they weren’t treated particularly well either. But through all of this brouhaha, journalists were subjected to rubber bullets and detention, members of Congress have been arrested, and the protests went severely national. Inexperienced, ideolog and former Fox News commentator-turned Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was having the best time playing with toy soldiers… but who were definitely not toys:

“Pete Hegseth’s first congressional hearing as Defense Secretary was supposed to focus on budgetary matters, but the former soldier was not going to miss an opportunity to strike fear into the hearts of America’s enemies — in this case, a few hundred protesters in Los Angeles… In his opening statement to the House Appropriations subcommittee, Hegseth delivered a made-for-Hollywood’ monologue about the U.S. military’s new ‘warrior ethos,’ one that is focused squarely on ‘war fighting’ and ‘lethality.’.. So deadly are the soldiers under his command that the word ‘soldier’ no longer suffices. In Hegseth’s Department of Defense, they are ‘war fighters’ — a term he used repeatedly, implying an army of perpetually deployed and exhausted Rambo figures always searching for targets to shoot.” The Independent, June 10th.

Invoking statutes from a long, long time ago, Trump is reveling in the unclear use of buzz words – like “rebellion,” “insurrection,” and all sorts of national “emergencies” to justify a transfer of Congressional, and even judicial power, to him alone. Trump has become an economic wrecking ball of such economic proportions that according to a “World Bank report, the U.S. economy alone—which is the world's largest—is predicted to grow half as fast in 2025 than it did in 2024, with a drop from 2.8 percent to 1.4 percent… The report directly ties this predicted slowdown to a substantial rise in trade barriers following the Trump administration's sweeping tariff campaign against major trading partners… ‘It isn't theoretical anymore. It's measurable damage. The economy already contracted 0.3 percent in Q1, with Yale's Budget Lab projecting a sustained GDP reduction of 0.6 percent annually,’ Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek. ‘That translates to $180 billion in lost economic output every year. That's the equivalent of losing an entire state's economic contribution.’" Newsweek, June 10th. So, we have a failing economy and a wave of escalating domestic violence all in favor of an autocrat wannabe with little or no concern for human life.

On May 4, 1970, Four Kent State University students were killed and nine were injured when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd gathered to protest the Vietnam War. America and the administration were shocked. But if you listen to the rhetoric today, having our military inflict injury and death on civilian protestors is the apparent goal. Is that OK with you? 

I’m Peter Dekom, and is all this violence and destruction worth ending democracy to instill an angry mob’s effort to anoint Donald John Trump as America’s autocrat for life?