Hank Kalet: Dem Party and Media Aids and Abets Trump Power Grab
Republished with permission from the Substack Account of Hank Kalet
Power Grabs
by Hank Kalet
Trump Is Testing the Limits of power, and Press and Democrats are Complicit
There is a banality to the language used by the mainstream press when describing the actions of the Trump administration, a kind of careless obliviousness that cedes rhetorical power to President Trump and his political flunkies.
Today’s example comes from The New York Times (again), which offered this take on federalized policing in Washington, D.C.:
Union Station: The Transportation Department will take over Union Station in Washington in an effort to “drive out” homelessness and crime, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Wednesday. The announcement appeared to be the Trump administration’s latest move to crack down on crime in the city. President Trump has claimed that crime in Washington is worse than ever, but statistics show it has been falling.
Later, a longer post to the paper’s live-update stream repeats much of this — most notably the phrase “as part of President Trump’s crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.” It is attributed to Duffy, but lacks the needed context, which is that the use of federalized, and now armed, National Guard troops (working side by side with immigration agents) is more than a crackdown. As Jon Weiner reminds us in conversation with John Nichols on The Nation’s “Start Making Sense” Podcast, the “The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement,” with “very narrow exceptions” — Congressional action, invocation of the Insurrection Act to “suppress an insurrection or rebellion,” or (more tenuously) Title 10 of the US Code, which “permits the president to overrule the governor if there is obstruction of federal law enforcement.”
These conditions do not exist, not in D.C., not in Los Angeles where in June he called in the feds to “protect” immigration agents during protests against the will of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Trump has more leeway in Washington, but not cart blanche. His argument — that crime is out of control — is both built on a lie and just not enough to justify the federalization of policing. But that is not the point. Crime is and has always been a pet issue of Republican politicians, who often exaggerate its severity and then use it to beat up their Democratic opponents. We have seen this during nearly every Republican administration since Nixon (and a few Democratic ones). What’s different here, I think, is that this is more than political theater. It is part of a broader plan repeatedly detailed by Trump, which Duffy once again made clear:
“We’re going to take it back and we’re going to drive out the homelessness, we’re going to drive out the crime,” Duffy said in an interview with Fox Business, while also promising to bring more retailers into the Beaux Arts building. “This plan is going to make Union Station represent the president’s vision of what America can and should look like,” he added.
Again, this about the language and rhetoric, and how they influence action and reaction. “Take back” is the necessary pre-condition to the “president’s vision of what America can and should look like.” Taken together, the phrases are a recasting of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, which was always about white grievance, and meant to play on the mythology of a perfect pre-woke America that was stole from us (the white majority).
All of this might seem depressing, especially with a Democratic Party that seems insistent on failing as a real bulwark against Trumpism. The party’s leadership is proving too timid, too cautious, running too many candidates who have little to say about the issues that matter to voters even as a strong electoral strategy — alongside aggressive grassroots action in the streets — is needed here in New Jersey to keep the Statehouse in Democratic hands and nationally to win back Congress.
While fear and depression are to be accepted, they only help Trump advance his fascist agenda. Trump’s words and actions are meant to scare, to undermine, to probe, as Marc Cooper argues. Their “main objective” is instilling a level of fear that leads to inertia and a tacit acceptance of a new status quote. Fear, writes Cooper, “makes him a winner and not the decrepit loser he really is.”
Cooper rightly argues that we are not at the point of “a true dictatorship,” which requires “a working partnership with the regular active duty Armed Forces.” We are not there, and we still retain “at least the bare bones of a democratic republic,” one that now more than ever must be defended “by any means necessary as the fascists in power want very much to erase them.”
But it doesn’t mean everything is fine, or that we cannot succumb to Trump’s “vision.” Waiting on the proverbial “smoking gun,” on a scandal so horrid that Trump crumbles in shame (a la the Jeffrey Epstein files) is not a strategy. It is a pipe dream. Trump is immune to shame, too vain and confident in his own power to be pulled down by this. And his base, while angry that the Epstein files have not been released, does not seem to be going anywhere.
So, what to do? Cooper points the way:
As our protests have grown, Trump has concentrated more and more power in his hands because his crew knows they are highly unpopular. I would venture they are crazy and stupid enough to have now rendered themselves immune to public opinion. Whether we like it or not, we re going to have to simultaneously expand and escalate our street protests while working hard inside the system to defeat these blustering buffoons in the midterms.
Essentially, we need a multi-pronged effort that starts in the streets, but that includes legal and electoral responses, good journalism, and the crafting of an alternate narrative to the one Trump is spinning. This can undermine Trump’s authority and rhetoric while defending constitutional values and the most vulnerable among us.
Will this stop Trump, who has shown contempt for the rule of law and seems likely to disregard restrictions on his power by the court at some point? I can’t answer that. But we have to keep pushing back. Fighting. Fighting. Fighting.
Fascism takes hold when good people sit on their hands, when they allow people like Trump to be normalized. The mainstream press, the legacy media, is allowing this to happen by doing little to examine its own practices. The Democrats are failing in the same way. it is up to us.
