Are Trump’s Purges and Calls for a Larger Military Budget the Setup for a Coup?
As Trump demands sweeping new resources in the name of war, the scale of funding raises a chilling question: is this about national security or consolidating power?
On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a rant that has shocked the world, threatening multiple war crimes with a level of obscenity that no Republican would have tolerated from President Obama or any other Democrat:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.”
The Iranian response was to call his language “vile”:
“Iran’s steadfastness and resistance have driven Trump to the brink of madness.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene shared an opinion most of the world now agrees with, tweeting:
He has gone insane, and all of you (the administration) are complicit.”
She also added:
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshiping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness. Our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians.”
All of which raises the question: What the hell is going on here?
When Donald Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin wanted to cement absolute power in Russia, he and Yeltsen authorized a terror attack against an apartment complex in Moscow that would be blamed on Chechen “terrorists.” It was Russia’s 9/11 event, and signaled the end of that nation’s brief experiment in democracy.
Timothy Snyder, the world-renowned scholar of fascism, argued this past week that Trump and Hegseth may be planning something similar for America, using the war with Iran that they lurched us into as its foundation, and a false-flag “terror event” within the US to trigger a legal state of emergency to corrupt our coming elections.
If this is their plan, it could also explain the seemingly-inexplicable decapitation of the JAG corps (which advises officers on the legality of orders), and the recent removal of about twenty of our most senior military leaders who were uniquely in a position to stop Trump and Hegseth from staging a military coup they could use to stop or severely interfere with the November election.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump has attempted a coup against our American form of democracy; that’s exactly what he was trying to pull off on January 6th. With that attempt he was able to get the military to stand down for hours; this time he could mobilize it against the people he has now already officially designated as enemies of America in his National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
It authorizes the FBI, DOJ, and over 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism. They include, as Ken Klippenstein first reported:
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
— Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
— Trash-talked capitalism or praised socialism on social media?
— Publicly questioned Protestant Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Evangelical-Christian belief system or religion?
— Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
— Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
— Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, Miller, or Hegseth?
Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents — or the Army — kicking in our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared eight months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.
I mentioned it in a Saturday Report and an earlier article, but, like pretty much everybody else in the media, dismissed it as virtue-signaling to the Trump base rather than an actual plan to set up a Putin-style police state here in America.
I was wrong.
In a second bombshell report, Klippenstein obtained and published a copy of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 4th memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russian-KGB/FSB-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.
And now, he reports this week, the FBI is actively in the process of setting up the architecture necessary to essentially become America’s KGB, what he calls “the FBI’s new Political Pre-Crime Center” looking for and rooting out dissidents and critics of the Trump regime.
Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as 5 years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of average Americans’ possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.
At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest Trump’s cabal or oppose their actions.
In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”
They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS/FBI can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.
They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the Trump regime. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:
“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”
ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.
The only clue you’ll have will be that your phone gets warm and battery life seems to have dropped as it’s pumping out to ICE your data and everything the camera and microphone in it pick up, all without your knowledge or permission.
This Putin-style “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he called the people who protested his policies “domestic terrorists” and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to the lawlessness ICE has been engaged in and Bondi ordered the FBI to begin.
With every passing day, Trump and his lickspittles grow more desperate that they’ll be held to account for their criminal activities and war profiteering if the November elections go the way they’re looking today.
Forty of Nixon’s senior officials, including his Attorney General John Mitchell, went to prison. Trump and his toadies realize they’re looking at the same thing if they lose their grip on power.
And now that the war is also going badly for Trump, and he’s decompensating right in front of our eyes with his obscene “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, You Crazy Bastards!” Easter rant, comes the very real possibility that after getting nearly $90 billion for ICE and proposing an astonishing half-trillion-dollar increase in the Pentagon’s budget, he’s doing it all to buy in advance the military’s willingness to go along with a second coup attempt against America.
An ICE officer can now make $200,000 a year, enough to ensure complete loyalty to his or her paymaster in DC, Donald Trump. If Trump’s purges of the military and request for additional funds are designed to do the same thing in the armed forces so that, like in Chile during Pinochet’s day, they’ll happily turn their guns on those who hold “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views,” we need to get ready.
That means spreading the alarm far and wide, as Snyder recommends in his excellent Substack newsletter.
Share the news of this threat with everybody you know, post to social media, reach out to your politicians to tell them in advance not to knee-jerk-react to a 9/11- or Moscow Apartments-type of terrorist event between now and the November elections.
And tell elected officials to cut funding to Trump’s ICE, stop his illegal war, and to begin immediate impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives.
Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump and His Coup”
My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.
How much of this is Trump and how much of it is Hegseth/Miller? All three seem to be drifting deeper into unconstitutional territory and Hegseth's continuing purge of professional leadership at the Pentagon is profoundly troubling.
It wouldn't take much research for them to learn that there are tens of millions of us proudly in opposition to this cadre of monsters. I'll make it easy for them, so they won't have to sift through five years of my criticisms. I oppose Trump with every fiber of my being because he is a corrupt criminal ogre and certifiably insane. All of his policies are inhumane and anti-democratic. He has done enough to be hanged several times over, yet I don't advocate his hanging, because I oppose the death penalty. Instead, I would punish him by forcing him to sit in a comfy chair and watch while people of all races, religions, nationalities, and sexualities live their lives in peace and harmony, untroubled by loudmouthed bigots and ignorant buffoons.