For as long as I’ve been alive, American
presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military
force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition.
This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived
long into the War on Terror era.
Ronald Reagan declared in 1981
that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to
control their own people and impose their system on others.”
His
successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about
American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact,
which had been “lashed together by occupation troops and quisling
governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own
people.”
Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized
that Hussein had used his arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign
adversary, and even against his own people.”
George W. Bush repeated
that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein’s government
“practices terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when
intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi,
warned that Qaddafi had said “he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own
people.”
It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been
principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared,
bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So
it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who
were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic
leaders elected in the United States of America, now apply to the
sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally
powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their
political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this
the “tyrant test,” and Trump is already failing it.
Trump came into office promising to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters
came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden
administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout
America.
Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy.
Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries
where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these
heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los
Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines
and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing
opposition to these methods.
Although there are circumstances where an intervention by the
National Guard might be justified, such a decision typically involves
the judgment of local authorities—and what’s happening in Los Angeles
now is nothing like Arkansas’s school-segregation crisis in 1957, when
President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.
Targeting California is no accident. Republican propaganda
consistently paints blue states such as California as unlivable
hellholes.
Some of the protests have been violent and have given way to
vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets’ best efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction.
American service members have been ordered there not to protect their
compatriots but to intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing
the president. On Friday, for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs building in L.A.
The president and many of his prominent supporters seem eager for
escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles has been “invaded and
occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and that “violent,
insurrectionist mobs” have been “swarming and attacking”
immigration-enforcement officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X
that “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration
enforcement officers, while one-half of America’s political leadership
has decided that border enforcement is evil.”
Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who had pointed out that the
city had been more peaceful prior to the administration’s response, of “insurrection.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to
“liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership
that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and
what they have tried to insert into the city”—just moments before
federal officers forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California and
pushed him to the ground when he tried to ask questions.
Right-wing media, aware that the administration’s actions and
rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have been telling their
audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by Democrats to trap
Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious fondness for
dictatorship. “Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when
Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even
more hatred and violence against him,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said
on Monday. “They’re burning their own cities just to prove to their
bloodthirsty base that they’re fighting Trump in the streets, burning
their own cities for power.” Someone might be bloodthirsty, but it’s not
the Democrats.
If L.A. had been taken over by insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them
and give them money—though only insurrectionists who try to overthrow
the government on Trump’s behalf, of course. Instead, the protests
provoked by the administration’s authoritarian tactics appear to be mere
pretext for using force against Trump’s political opposition.
The L.A.
police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city’s police force could handle the protests
without assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for
using the military against Americans who have the temerity to oppose
him. This has long been a fantasy of Trump’s—he praised China’s crackdown
on the Tiananmen Square protest movement as having “put it down with
strength.” Last week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful,
self-worshipping military parade would be met “with very big force.”
How did Republicans go from condemning leaders who threaten their own
citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here, too, we find a holdover
of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.
In the 1950s, the terms First World, Second World, and Third World
emerged as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned
governments, and emerging nations not allied with either faction,
respectively. Third World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.
And that’s exactly how Trump officials and their allies are referring
to communities such as Los Angeles in order to justify using military
force. Last night, following the massive “No Kings” protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network
Truth Social that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and
deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called
“the core of the Democrat Power Center”; he further described
immigration as turning America into a “Third World dystopia.”
The post echoed similar language from right-wing-media figures who,
last week, began repeating the same rote talking points about the need to ban all “Third World” immigration.
The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies
during the 2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of
an argument for Trump using the military to “take back the streets of
LA. Do it and do it fast,” a chart from a white-nationalist website
showing the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made
explicit that he wasn’t borrowing just the chart from a
white-nationalist website but also its ideological conclusions about the
threat that nonwhite people pose.
“This is the Great Replacement Theory,”
Kirk explained. “Remember we talked about how they want to replace
white Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with
El Salvadorians.” The term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What’s next in the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and perfidious Jews?
The increased support Trump received in the 2024 election from
nonwhite voters hasn’t altered prominent Trump proponents’ view that
America is the white man’s birthright and that all others are merely
interlopers. “The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically. It
is to make America less white, less European by descent,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared.
“You’re not gonna destroy Western civilization just by winning the next
midterms or whatever. You destroy it by importing non-Western people.”
These ideas weren’t coming from just commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A. “looked like a Third World country” on Fox News; Miller posted
on X that “huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed
third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.” If
Los Angeles is “balkanized,” that is because it has a long history of
being forcibly segregated by race,
starting decades before Miller was born.
But here, Miller’s objection
is not a call for integration but an expression of rage that the city is
less white than it used to be. On Thursday night, Trump said “illegal
aliens” were turning America into a “Third World Nation” and declared,
“I am reversing the invasion. It’s called remigration,” using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.
The math here doesn’t take much effort. In the view of these
officials and commentators, California (and, by extension, America) has
been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which
is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military force
against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather
neatly with Miller’s expressed view
that the repeal of racist restrictions on immigration in the 1960s
destroyed the country.
Both inside and outside the administration, the
consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you are not white, you are a
threat to Western civilization. This is how they rationalize Trump
failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being made
against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see
as not truly American.
This is how a tyrant thinks. Every dictator who has ever cracked down
on political opposition has done so by rendering them internal
foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body politic who can
justly be crushed like insects.
Those serving in uniform, military or
civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant’s instrument
against their own communities is what they had in mind when they signed
up.
Only whites from South Africa need apply - except for my wives present and future.
Rex Huppke
