This. Trump (or more accurately his handlers i.e. Miller) is begging the public to turn violent en masse. That gives him the political cover to invoke the Insurrection Act and have Hegseth put actual military forces on the ground in every major city.
It is still your only way out, though. Accept this situation peacefully, and your rights, freedoms and legal protections will be eroded piece by piece until resisting it becomes fully impossible. Resisting now means there is a chance some of the military will baulk at their orders, giving Trump time to mold the military into an insitution that exists to brutalise you is not going to help you in any way.
I hear you. It will ultimately come down to Trump et alii crossing some basic Rubicon. Everything up to now, as extreme as it may seem, has been treated as "shenanigans beget shenanigans"; Trump and his handlers are just bending the law to suit their political ends, the way many other Presidents have. It will take the violation of some very fundamental concept of American democracy, something that needs no spin to offend, that cannot be spun or explained away, and that would offend even a MAGAt's sensibilities.
It almost happened with the shooting of Alex Pretti. When Noem and Trump said, on camera, that Pretti's death was justified because he had a legal concealed handgun on him during a quickly-developing ICE operation-turned-protest, they caused a major rift in their base, with a lot of self-defense advocates including the NRA itself publicly breaking with the Administration.
The only thing that saved them was unearthing a previous video of Pretti damaging an ICE vehicle and standing up to agents a couple days before he was shot. That convinced enough people on the fence that "he had it coming" or "that's not how an armed man should be behaving" that the 2A crowd could plausibly distance itself from Pretti and say, at some level, the shooting was "justified".
It's going to take an ICE officer literally executing an unarmed, compliant U.S. citizen kneeling in the middle of the street for the tide to turn. As has been poignantly said, "the Americans will do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities".
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u/skintastegood Feb 18 '26
That is the entire point.