Trump is preparing the ground for a totalitarian dictatorship

[turbinetree]

Published 2 hours ago on April 4, 2020
By Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon- Commentary

This article first appeared in Salon.

We’re all going to know someone who has died of the coronavirus when this is over. The tragic news is all over Facebook and Twitter already. My friend Patricia Bosworth, the actress and biographer, died on Friday of the virus. Everyone has friends and acquaintances who have the virus, family members who have died, favorite musicians or actors and friends of friends who are sick and dying. The virus has taken them from us, but so has Donald Trump with his inaction and lying and childish finger-pointing and failure to take responsibility.

Even the funerals have been taken from us. People grieve alone in apartments and bedrooms, many separated from family and loved ones, and outside our four walls, people keep getting sick and dying. There are photographs of refrigerated trailers lined up behind New York hospitals being used as mortuaries for the dead because there is no more room in the city morgues and funeral homes. Orders have been placed for 100,000 body bags, to remove the dead from hospitals that are overrun with patients dying by the hundreds every single day. The military doesn’t even have enough body bags to keep up with the demand, as preparations are made for more people to die than the total of Americans killed in the Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Korean wars combined. The Army could handle the dozens, even hundreds killed at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they can’t handle tens of thousands of dead bodies to come.

Nobody is ready for what is coming. Already there are stories in the newspapers and on TV questioning the White House estimates of 100,000 to 240,000 dead. The White House officials who devised those models won’t provide the assumptions that went into them, and none of the models contained an endpoint for when the virus might run its course and the dying will stop. I just saw a public health expert from the University of Minnesota on MSNBC who dismissed the White House models out of hand and said we’re looking at more than a million deaths from COVID-19 before the end of the year. More than a million.

This is chaos on a scale we have never seen before. Much of the chaos is the responsibility of Donald Trump in his role as president of the United States. He actively denied the size and severity of the threat and failed to provide leadership when it counted. This went on for months. As recently as a couple of weeks ago, Trump was crowing about “reopening” the economy by Easter. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the disease,” he said only last week. “We’ve never closed down the country for the flu. So you say to yourself, what is this all about?”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/trump-is-preparing-the-ground-for-a-totalitarian-dictatorship/

[2naSalit]

1. Anyone who hasn't figured this out

hasn't been paying attention.

[cilla4progress]

28. Game plan all along.

In fact, for several decades.

Those who read Greg Olear's great article last weekend, or who listen to Sarah Kendzior, are well aware of this.

[2naSalit]

35. I'm not sure about the numbers

but the intent is clear.

[cilla4progress]

40. Yep.

[magicarpet]

60. Billy barr has his machete out round the clock keeping a clear path open thru the jungle...

... so not too many obstacles remain to block trDumpie's path in his quest for The Western World's top Despot/Oligarch/MafiaThug.

So then unrestrained plunder, pilfer, launder $, can commence forthwith.

[at140]

2. A million deaths due to covid-19 in USA in one season?

Unlikely based on S. Korea's results, and our model is now closer to theirs.

[NickB79]

3. Where are you hearing that?

We're losing 1000+ a day already and we're just going up the curve. We're weeks from a peak, at which point we could be losing thousands a day. We're far closer to the UK or Italy than South Korea.

[at140]

6. The curve is expected to peak mid-April

which means deaths will also slowdown after that. We are not losing 1000/day in United States.
I am talking about United States deaths in 2020. My estimate is about 50,000 total.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

[JCMach1]

13. Way off... Most states peak well into May

[Doodley]

18. "We are not losing 1000/day in United States." Are you kidding? We lost 1328 yesterday.

It will be in the thousands in the next few days.

[D_Master81]

23. At 700+ by noon today

Anyone who says we aren’t losing a thousand a day isn’t paying attention. We have been right around a thousand for 3 days and will probably bee 1500+ today. At the current pace in a couple weeks we will also have the most deaths not just cases.

[uponit7771]

25. I think the person was trying to say its more than 1000. Our death and hospitalization rates from

... CV 19 are high because of lack of testing

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213231399

[NickB79]

22. Mid-April....in New York

Nationwide average is looking to be May. Predictions for a mid-April peak assumed all social distancing would be observed nationwide. It is not being observed.

And yes, we lost almost 1300 on Friday.

We lost over 1000 on Thursday.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/more-than-1000-people-in-the-u-s-just-died-of-coronavirus-in-a-single-day/

New York alone lost 500+ in one day.

[at140]

86. Without serious social distancing we are seriously screwed. Every other option is catastrophe.

S Korea is the size of Virginia. USA is huge, and it will be impossible to track every exposed individual like in S. Korea.
Come on people, you can do social distancing for a few weeks. The government does not have resources to hospitalize millions of people.

[Botany]

5. Flattening the curve does not reduce the # of cases it just spreads it out over a longer period ...

... of time.

C-19 Math

330,000,000 (US Pop.) x .4 (40 to 70% infection rate W.H.O. figures) x .03 (death rate W.H.O. figure) =
3,960,000 dead

I hope this equation is wrong. The only fixed # is the US population. I took the low end on the infection rate
and the 3% death rate MIGHT also include a higher death rate for other "things" such as accidents, chronic
medical problems, and diseases because our medical system might be over run.

Sadly outside of the "advanced nations" C-19 has a chance of running wild because they just don't have
the way to deal with it. The Gaza Strip + C-19 might be a hellscape.

[at140]

9. That 3% death rate in WHO numbers seems too high to me

As we are testing more people in US, they are finding out that a large number of positive testing people have no symptoms (asymprommatic)
That in essence makes denominator larger, and death percentage lower.

[JCMach1]

14. If we have less than 1M dead I will gladly admit I was wrong

But our response has been piecemeal, awful and lead to really bad results. I think we did enough to not have 2M+ deaths, but we are still very, very high ...

[Botany]

19. Thanx to Trump will still haven't done the needed testing and waiting until people show symptoms ..

... might very well allow the disease to spread because people can have the disease and be actively
shedding virus for up to 2 weeks before they show signs of C-19.

This "beast" will not be under control until we have heard immunity, we have a vaccine, and
treatments for the disease.

[uponit7771]

29. +1, we're 40 something per capita testing according to WOM (link) and have the highest number cases

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213231399

[at140]

85. I hope we don't have a million deaths from the virus

That is simply awful and unacceptable. I am not depending on Donny to save my 80 year old ass. I am practicing extreme preventive procedures. Not going out of the house except for groceries and driving my wife to hospital for cancer treatments. And wash hands after touching anything others may have touched. The only way this virus can be defeated is if we all practice prevention. The country can not survive if 10 million people get sick and need ICU hospital treatment. If people keep getting together in groups, we will be in dire straits.

[Doodley]

20. Worldwide figures are 5% and that isn't taking into account newly added

cases that are too early to add significantly to the death toll.

[JCMach1]

21. I think even at 2% we still get to 1M

[uponit7771]

30. +1

[Squinch]

91. Well, gosh. If it seems too high to YOU, we better alert the WHO!

[at140]

92. May be you will believe webMD estimates? I will provide the link for you!

In the new analysis, the death rate in confirmed COVID-19 cases is estimated to be 1.38%, while the overall rate,
which includes estimated unconfirmed cases, is calculated at .66%.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200331/covid-19-death-rate-drops-still-deadly-to-seniors

[Squinch]

93. Webmd vs WHO. You're really asking this.

[uponit7771]

27. THANK YOU !!! Flatting the curve is for the hospitals not human normality and yes, even at 1% that's

... over 1 million dead in the US.

Swine flu looks to be the worst before cv19 but swine flue there was world leadership that kept the death rate down.

[uponit7771]

24. We don't know this cause our per capita testing is so low

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100213231399

[meadowlander]

78. CDC says potentially 1.7 million

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/cdcs-worst-case-coronavirus-model-210m-infected-1-7m-dead.html

The 100-240,000 is if we do everything right, which we obviously aren't doing. It assumed that we went into a country-wide stay at home order weeks ago. We haven't.

South Korea started aggressively testing and contact tracing and isolating cases from day 1. We didn't do any of those things. We don't even have a clue how many people currently actually have the disease.

Our curve isn't going to be anything like as good as South Korea's curve. We can already see that:

[Squinch]

90. Our model bears no relationship to Korea's. Who is feeding you that line??

[Newest Reality]

4. This is a good article.

I realized Trump's motive early on and then continued to observe him and is actions carefully.

Now it has been my opinion, based on what I see and know so far and I have posted some points here at DU.

A while back, somebody told me I had my "head up my ass" when I brought it up and mentioned a few points. That person kindly has now admitted that a Trump, dictatorial regime is very possible based on his behaviors overall.

Now, the only reason I would make this an issue is because: how dangerous to our democracy and way of life would a dictator who has total control with authoritarian rule be? Really. What's worse than that?

Maybe some folks are on a "it can't happen" here roll, or think our checks and balances can prevent it. I firmly believe it can happen here and we are discovering how a shifty confidence man who persists can muck up and neuter our checks and balances.

Once we have a full on dictatorship, there will be no foreign alliance that will land on our shores to save us and bring back democracy as in the past. We are on our own and you really don't have much of a chance of escaping totalitarianism once it becomes the norm.

[Kaiserguy]

8. It can happen anyplace

America can become a fascist dictatorship overnight. The GOP has shown us that it has no regard at all for our democracy. It all depend on us. Do we sit back quietly or do we take to the streets in mass and do our best to stop it. As long as the military doesn't back Trump we have a good chance to stop it.

[Newest Reality]

10. That's touchy...

Last edited Sat Apr 4, 2020, 02:08 PM - Edit history (1)

The impulse to take it back is healthy and prudent.

However, it seems that we are in a touchy situation. He now controls the government to such an extent that civil unrest would actually be a big step for him in his playbook. Any emergency along those lines would allow for possible restrictions, curfews, Martial Law, et. In this case, that's Dictator Chow.

Frustrating. However, we may have other ways to fight this and at least, (thank goodness) we do have the House. As long as they are safe and it is intact, we may see some push coming to the shove.

[brush]

50. Nah, that fucker is toast. No incumbent has been re-elected with unemployment...

sly-rocketing and projected to reach 30%, higher than the 25% height of the Great Depression. Not to mention all the deaths from this virus which he neglected to do anything about for weeks—and his handling of this pandemic is catastrophic in it's ineptness.

He's gone.

[cilla4progress]

33. I'm with you.

Logistics, under COVID?

Call me crazy, but I believe this is intentional on drumpfs part.

What better way to neuter opposition movements than to make everyone stay home?

[cilla4progress]

31. All true.

What do we do about it?

[notdarkyet]

7. He's too stupid, too weak, too corrupt to be the dictator. Not good enough or smart enough.

[shockey80]

11. I agree.

This is still America. If Trump ever tried to become a dictator the American people would burn the Whitehouse to the ground.

[cilla4progress]

37. We are already there.

I'm sorry.

Firing IC IG last night? Subverting notice provisions? This is a signal, as much as an autocratic move. Follow Adam Schiff. He thinks we are already there.

[Newest Reality]

46. +1

[ooky]

42. We'll see. I hope you are right. I'm pretty convinced that in his deranged mind he is

plotting a dictatorial takeover, and he has a lot of enablers already in place around him, including pretty much the entirety of the GOP.

[bdamomma]

71. If that

happens this saying comes to mind, the tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

[treestar]

43. +1

A dictator has to manage to keep people scared all the time. It's a lot tougher than the Presidency.

[Newest Reality]

48. I can understand your view on that...

Have you ever considered that you are dealing with a character he has crafted, (as on a reality TV show) to induce you to consider him incapable of pulling off a dictatorship in America?

It's just a thought experiment. I would think a confidence man would be very skilled at convincing people to believe what he wants them to, both on the base side and ours, with two different outlooks.

They say, (I think Trump said this too, but I cannot source it) if you don't know he's a confidence man, then you are the mark.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

12. America would become Cuba after their revolution or Iran after their revolution

Everybody with the means to leave would go to Canada. As long as they have money, education, and can support themselves they would be welcome. The entire professional class would be wiped out. It would devolve into a Lord Of The Flies situation with the MAGATS fighting among themselves.

[roamer65]

15. Separatism will be in vogue.

It will be like Yugoslavia on steroids.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

16. Cuba's entire professional class was virtually wiped out. Same for Iran.

In the case of the former most fled to Miami. In the case of the latter most fled to Beverly Hills.

[cilla4progress]

38. No,

Canada does not want us. There is a 6 month limit on non-Canadians living there, last I checked.

I would be interested in seceding, however. My state borders Canada. Viable option, in my mind.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

41. The Start-Up Visa Program

The Start-up Visa Program is a general Investor Visa option that allows you to immigrate to Canada by starting a business anywhere in the country. You and your business will have to meet a set of requirements in order to be successful with your application. In general, your business must be innovative, create jobs for Canadians and be able to compete internationally. While you wait for your application’s approval, you can also apply for a temporary work permit to keep you busy in Canada

https://canadianvisa.org/canada-immigration/business/investor-visa

You think doctors, lawyers, engineers and businespeople are going to want to live in Trump's Hee Haw dystopia and be led around by Jethro and Billy Bob who used to work at the filling station?

That's what happened in Cuba after Castro deposed Batista and in Iran when the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah. Everybody with the means to leave did.

I wouldn't be surprised if some successful Californians moved their operations to Mexico. That would be the ultimate irony.

[Steelrolled]

17. Conspiracy theories are fun reading

but this one could use some work.

[Newest Reality]

49. I agree...

Conspiracy theories are often speculative and even fomented and even encouraged by Russia and China for those in this country that fall for unsubstantiated information from questionable sources.

However, there are real conspiracies and they are the kind that provide evidence to substantiate the claims upon investigation. To dismiss that by calling something a conspiracy theory is also a tactic, as per Bush Jr.

Personally, Trumps actions have indicated a motivation that strongly supports this view and I think it is worthy of more than a superficial glance.

[onenote]

53. typical overwrought under thought stuff from raw story.

[Newest Reality]

64. Are you a denier or an enabler?

Or maybe you just don't like articles from Raw Story? You didn't make that clear

Maybe Americans just don't know enough to see it? One rubs the sleep from one's eyes and then wakes up.

Short list:

https://www.alternet.org/2018/06/trump-becoming-dictator-hes-already-showing-7-10-notable-signs/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/kimmel-trump-dictator-proof/story?id=54897841

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/05/donald-trump-dictator-not-enough-laugh

https://www.newsweek.com/robert-reich-how-tell-whether-trump-dictator-592238

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/trump-xi-jinping-dictators/554810/

There are plenty of articles that explore this dimension of Trump, (his personality indicates it, of course).

Read up more about it and then decide for yourself.

[onenote]

80. I'm a realist who recognizes raw story for what it often is.

[Newest Reality]

81. Thanks.

I understand. I actually use some media debunking tools that reveal a lot about various web sites, their veracity and leanings and even foreign influences.

In this case, the Raw Story article only skimmed the surface and provided a rather brief synopsis, so that is a flaw to me. It is not a new revelation, but it has less prominence than it should right now.

Let me know if you find any of the links helpful on the matter. There is a lot of good information out there on this and it is worthy of further consideration.

[cilla4progress]

26. Endorse.

Now, what do we do about it?

[cayugafalls]

32. Corporate fascism can look like a democracy as long as the people are complacent.

With enough money and the proper media cooperation, the right can keep the blinders held firmly in place and elections can still happen so long as those running are corporate elite, the game is rigged. Pork will still roll into the hands of those at the top.

There is no need to go full blown Authoritarian Regime, there is only the need to install the right/evil people, of which Trump has done a tremendous job.

This is just my opinion and I hope we can sweep the Senate and Presidency this fall and start rebuilding, that is the only way we can start righting the ship at least to some extent.

Stay well.

[brush]

47. The recession we're in NOW is projected to bring 30% unemployment. trump's...

orange ass is going down. No incumbent has been re-elected when the nation is under going what we're enduring and will be enduring for months.

[cayugafalls]

51. That makes me feel better. Thank you. I lost sight of that for a bit.

Stay well.

[brush]

54. You too.

And then there are the deaths on his hands as well.

[Loki Liesmith]

34. He's not preparing anything

He doesn’t do preparation.

[brush]

45. Exactly. All we have to do is look at his non-response as the pandemic...

approached. And if I recall correctly, no incumbent has been re-elected in the depths of a recession/depression. And what we're in now is shaping up to be a massive depression—30% unemployment which is worse than the 25% height of the Great Depression.

[procon]

82. No, not an original idea from Trump, but don't forget

how easily he can be influenced and manipulated with a few words of Faux flattery. There are plenty of other actors around him who are smarter and they are playing a long game to bring down the US.

[Loki Liesmith]

88. That much is true

Of course he’s also bad at executing their plans.

That’s the problem with useful idiots. In the end they are still idiots.


That’s why I still like our odds.

[Thomas Hurt]

36. Trump is a wannabe Putin. He will try to stay in office till he drops dead.

He will lie and cheat to do it. His pathology will not allow him to do less.

He may get his second term unless we get the vote out.

I am somewhat optimistic that people vote to get rid of him, and if they do we will have some kind of resistance from the pig.

He is going to whine and scream rigged election. He will sue and sue.

If he loses he will eventually be gone but the nutjobs on the right are the real threat.

There are certain number of them that are going to snap and kill people. We will see some increase in right wing terrorism.

Hopefully not many people will be hurt.

[cilla4progress]

39. This.

Sadly.

I'm 65. I'm ready.

[brush]

44. trump may fancy himself a dictator but he's not equiped to pull it off.

And his henchmen as just as inept as he is. Plus, the nation won't stand for it.

[dchill]

56. I fear that some of his henchmen...

...are pretty ept.

[brush]

59. Which ones, Pence, Kushner, Miller? Obsequious, feckless and evil does not...

equal competence. Plus, no incumbent has been re-elected with unemployment sly-rocketing and projected to reach 30%, higher than the 25% height of the Great Depression. Not to mention all the deaths from this virus which he neglected to do anything about for weeks—and his handling of this pandemic is catastrophic in it's ineptness.

He's toast.

[dchill]

61. I sincerely hope you are right.

But his handling of this pandemic is NOT inept. It's a PLAN.

[brush]

63. If it's a plan that just shows his evil ineptness. Who but an idiot thinks a projected...

200,000 deaths and an economy in shambles with 30% unemployment is the ticket to getting re-elected. The fool didn't anticipate any of this, which in my book shows, as I said, ineptness to the nth degree.

He won't weasel out of this—both a national health debacle and an economic shutdown. It's an unprecedented federal failure.

He's gone come November.

[Newest Reality]

57. Well,

If you look at how far he has actually come, it gets more difficult to buy the "ineptitude" character he portrays superficially to us and the "stable genius" he represents to his base.

I mean, so far, those are some pretty startling results for somebody that is considered to be ill-equipped. They seem to be succeeding and the nation is hardly even able to see and admit the possibility so far, calling it a conspiracy theory, etc.

I guess being that inept makes having the DOJ stuffed in your pocket and the Attorney General acting as your lap dog just luck, etc.

I see him for what I think the information reveals him to be: a skilled con man with instinctive manipulative skills that he has been using and practicing all his grifter life. This might be a good time to come to terms with a clear and present danger rather than to underestimate an enemy.

And, as per Monty Python, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition."

[brush]

62. Sounds like you think his downplaying of the approaching pandemic...

was competent leadership. And what about his handling of it now as it's here? Unemployment schedule to reach 30%, higher than the 25% of the Great Depression, not to mention the projected 100-200,000 deaths?

Please!

[Newest Reality]

65. I have no idea...

I have no idea how you came to that conclusion or why you would decipher my comment that way.

You seemed to have missed my point entirely, but we often do read our own views into things. I do that sometimes also.

Thanks.

[brush]

66. What is your point then, it certainly isn't clear.

[Newest Reality]

69. Ah,

Well, you could refer to my other comments in this post.

If you read some of the articles, (of which there are many) that I posted on the matter, that would certainly help to clarify what my point is.

[brush]

70. Why not just tell me in one or two sentences. That seems easy enough.

I don't want to misinterpret anyone here on DU. We're all on the same side and anti-trump hopefully.

[Newest Reality]

72. Well honestly,

I don't know what you don't understand.

Trump has a demonstrable dictatorial personality. His history tells us a lot about him, actually. We see behaviors and actions that, if they are not carefully investigated and parsed, give us a certain impression, (and his base another gets a different one) about him that allows for many misconceptions.

My point is that not only does he pass the dictator test, (and he also admires them greatly) he is and has been in the process of conditioning the population for a dictatorship. That's certainly not ineptitude, but ineptitude becomes a good cover. In many ways, he has shown success in steering us in that direction and our concern should be about that potential now.

In the past, my main thought about him (again, after investigating and paying attention) was, if this manipulator gets a national emergency, we are in big trouble, because that could facilitate his motives to take total control of the country under the guise of all the aspects of the character he presents that, like a confidence man, reveal a cloak for the real Trump.

If we see that this is a precarious situation because of that, (this is no ordinary term of presidency) then we might be able to have more resilience and less gullibility when it comes to his various tactics. In that case, now that he has switched around his position on the COVID-19 crises, we should be vigilant about a use of, and exploitation of, fear. That would be the next useful tactic in the playbook and that's what I will be watching for. When people are vulnerable, shocked and experiencing great loss, exacerbating their fears is a dictator's method. We shall see.

I hope that satisfied your question, but I think it is a rather deep and complex subject and deserves more attention.

[brush]

74. I got it. I agree that he has dictatorial ambitions but IMO he's not smart enough...

to pull it off. We have a thing called elections, and we have even more people who won't acquiesce to trump's machinations if he tries to block them. It might lead to blood but so be it...

Get on board.

[Newest Reality]

75. Oh, yes.

I am with you on voting him out, should there be an election. No doubt. I am right on board. We have to.

It is the "not smart enough" definition I don't agree with at all. Forgive me, but I now see that as intentional, or at least, it doesn't matter what he knows or thinks he knows, a fox only needs to know how to get in the hen house and there go the chickens.

Maybe we could say that he has a very well-developed "dictatorial intelligence" and that's all we need to be concerned with. You might have a mechanic that doesn't know a thing about classic literature or even science, but he might be able to fix anything on your car with great expertise even if you have no idea what that's all about. Maybe that's a good analogy.

[brush]

77. I don't give him as much credit as you do. His whole history has been one of failure.

I mean how do you go bankrupt running casinos, even it you're money laundering through them? The odds are all in your favor. The mob otoh skimmed millions successfully for years until legendary Sheriff Ralph Lamb and Nevada authorities squeezed them out.

He would've actually made money if he'd just invested the 400 some million of his old man's money he cheated his sibling's out of instead of having to go to the Russian oligarchs because American banks would no longer touch him. Get it, he never paid back the loans they made to him.

He's failed at everything. The likelihood that all of a sudden he has the smarts to turn this country into a dictatorship, even if he has a dictatorial bent, is close to nil. And did I mention his history of failure in all his business from a college, an airline, selling steaks of all things, water, clothing and of course the casinos. I lived in NY during the '90s and took gambling junkets sponsored by the casinos down to AC. Trump's Taj Mahal, which he hyped for months as it was being built, was a colossally garish, plastic-y failure, which he doubled down on by buying other casinos on the Boardwalk, thereby cannibalizing it's potential profits by competing against himself—and of course he failed at all of them.

Why it's just genius I tell you, or should I say stable genius.

The only things he's been successful at is wiggling out of paying his depths/contractors, surviving his several bankruptcies and getting "elected" with Putin's help and repug cheating—if you call any of that being successful.

And btw, you failed to answer if you're on board with resistance if necessary. We do outnumber them you know.

[Newest Reality]

79. I agree...

He has weathered all his immense failures and turned them into being the President of the United States of America. I call that a win. I do think one has to look at the actions of his MalAdminstration and various successes he has had in that context so far. They speak volumes and the information is readily available.

I don't know any complete nincompoops that could do what he has done, or I would agree. They usually talk a lot, reach their Peter Principle level of incompetence and read the Dunning Kruger Times. None of them could take the Presidency and mess up a country that well, that fast.

In other words, the proof is in the pudding. The cognitive dissonance is how does an idiot loser manage to do this? Oh, he has help, but he has to manage to get the support from those he uses and he has done that while being brash, rude, bossy, (insert list here).

On board with the resistance? Are the partisans stirring in the forests? What is your idea of a resistance other than using the usual means of voting him out, which we are all aware of and prepared for if we can do so.

In a sense, my pointing out of what appear to be Trump's tactics, real capacities and ulterior motives is an aspect of my resistance as i share what I have discovered and observed. The old saying, know thy enemy applies and the wolf can wear sheep's clothing, but it does come off. Then, we are better situated to grapple with the coming shocks and blows that Trump will wield on us as this crises develops.

[brush]

84. He's been the luckiest dumb motherfucker ever. He has skated through out his life until now.

Every presidential admin has had at least one seriously challenging crisis. His is now and he has reached his level of incompetence with this dual virus and economic debacle that has laid bare his total unfitness for office. If the cavalier way he treated the approaching virus debacle, after being repeatedly warned of it is planned, I say it's the dumbest plan ever.

You can keep on giving him credit as a plan for the the state the country is in now but I don't.He badly miscalculated if this was his plan. He never anticipated the depths of misery that has insued. It'll take years for us to recover from this unfit idiot's mishandling of the WH stewardship he cheated his way into—with many others' help I must remind you. He was no genius mastermind of it at all. As I said before, he's the luckiest, dumb motherfucker ever, but his luck has run out.

[beachbumbob]

52. I know too many liberals that are as well armed as any one, this will not be done with out blood

[Jake Stern]

55. This just in from the Tin Foil Brigade

First they claimed he would cancel the election but that was debunked as not constitutionally possible so now the conspiracy theorists have changed to a new scenario.

I’ll keep checking back weekly to see what the latest theory is.

[Turin_C3PO]

87. Trump and his bunch

are too incompetent to plan anything like a dictatorship.

[PubliusEnigma]

58. The Reichstag is in flames.

[Newest Reality]

67. Some more links...

Related:

Donald Trump wants to be a dictator, says Art of the Deal co-author
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-dictator-art-of-the-deal-co-author-tony-schwartz-power-us-president-white-house-us-a8055841.html

Trump Is a Would-Be Dictator
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-impeachment-fascism-dictator/

[Progressive Jones]

68. This raises the question:

Is it too soon to have a conversation about "Mussolini Bon Voyage Parties"?

Asking for a friend of a friend.

[Faux pas]

73. Duh

that's been the plan all along. He just got extra lucky that this virus came along.

[dlk]

76. Let's not give Moscow Mitch or the other Republican enablers a pass

Trump couldn’t have done this alone. He’s just the face of the monster and when all is said and done, Republicans will make him the fall guy, not that he won’t deserve to be. However, we must remember he’s had lots of help.

[kentuck]

83. Firing the IGs does not give one comfort..

He is well on his way if he is so inclined...

[Blue_true]

89. If he tries that, he will get Mussolini's end.

One thing about this country is we fight eachother, but the majority of Americans really don't like being told what to do, that is why a attempted dictator will get met with a bad end.