Buckle up: Win or lose, Trump promises potential scenarios of violence

Journalist and former editor of the Stars and Stripes for three decades, D. Earl Stephens, has recently opined in a guest essay for Raw Story that “The New York Times and our broken mainstream media seem to need the America-attacking Donald Trump a helluva lot more than the America-attacking Donald Trump seems to need The New York Times and our broken mainstream media.” Stephens has accused mass media news institutions of committing journalistic malpractice for not “monitoring the dangerous maneuvers of a sociopath, who is still free and on the loose after unleashing his rabid attack dogs to besiege our Capitol, stomp on law enforcement officials, seek out political leaders for harm and hanging, and prevent the certification of our vote while doing nothing for three hours except to root for the attack’s success.” To this criminologist, as the custodian of the democratic republic, the Fourth Estate seems derelict in its duty for not correctly framing the genuine issues that confront or threaten American freedom and constitutional democracy. Should Trump win the fall presidential election, perhaps the most dangerous of these maneuvers will have to do with the forthcoming transformation of the U.S. Department of Justice from an independent and self-directing law enforcement system to one that would become part of a proxy “police state.” A law enforcement system whose absolute discretion of power would become exclusively dependent on a de facto dictator with presidential immunity from any crimes, harms, injuries, or violence that he may inflict or unleash on the people of the United States. A non-exhaustive listening of these changes includes: placing FBI agents on loyalist leashes curtailing its online investigations of misinformation ending investigations of police misconduct and canceling existing consent decrees with police departments stripping local and state attorneys of their discretionary power to prosecute changing the federal government’s roles from upholding voting rights to suppressing them downplaying right-wing domestic terrorist groups and organizations like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys focusing instead on those groups and organizations advocating for voting, civil, equity, climate, and worker rights In tandem with these changes in the federal and state relations of the administration of justice, Trump plans on using the military to enforce domestic law violations involving, for example, criminal gangs, protesting demonstrators and securing the borders by using detention camps — all characteristic of illiberal democracies such as today’s Hungary or authoritarian regimes like contemporary China or North Korea going back to the 1950s. More concretely, the absence or lack of focus on the likely violence is related to the fact that “mainstream American political journalists have always been shockingly indifferent to right-wing violence emerging in our midst,” says David Neiwert, “ America’s foremost writer and thinker on far-right extremism.” From the Ruby Ridge standoff to the Waco siege and massacre of 76 Branch Davidians to the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in the 1990s to the Unite the Right weekend rally in August 2017 by white supremacists protesting the taking down of a Robert E. Lee monument who during their marches chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi-associated phrases at counter-protesters in Charlottesville, South Carolina, to the MAGA rioters assaulting the Capitol in January 2021.