Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force

 

"You could really imagine Mamdani coming into office and the administration stepping up ICE raids even above where they are now — I mean, during his primary campaign, Brad Lander, the comptroller of New York City, ended up arrested as he was accompanying immigrants in a court during these ICE raids.

So you could imagine them really stepping up ICE raids and then using some kind of backlash to that as pretext for sending in the National Guard, as they did in Los Angeles. Or sending in, as Phil Hegseth wants, the National Guard plus more Marines and other kinds of military officials or soldiers.

And you could imagine something going really wrong — or maybe from their perspective, right. So in D.C., there was a case of a guy who appeared to be drunk. I think he threw a sandwich at a federal agent, and they made a very big deal out of this. Maybe in New York or elsewhere, maybe it’s not a sandwich — maybe it’s a rock. Or maybe there’s gunfire. Or maybe there is a car backfiring that some member of the National Guard thinks is gunfire and they open up retaliatory fire. Maybe there’s, all of a sudden, a bunch of people dead. Maybe there’s violence. There has already been tear gas at these things.

It’s there for a crisis point to be reached, where then they’re saying: It’s an insurrection — and now we’re invoking the powers of the Insurrection Act.

The conditions they’re creating seem very frightening."

READ EZRA KLEIN'S CONVERSATION WITH RADLEY BALKO