Latest news with #insurrection
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 sue government for $100 million
WASHINGTON – Five members of the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys who stormed the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and were later pardoned by President Donald Trump are suing the government for more than $100 million. They allege the Justice Department and FBI violated their constitutional rights after arresting and jailing them for their participation in the effort to stop Congress from certifying former President Joe Biden's election victory in 2020. The Proud Boys and their families were subjected to forceful government raids, solitary confinement and cruel and unusual treatment, they argue in their lawsuit, which seeks $100 million in damages plus 6% post-judgment interest. The group, which filed the lawsuit June 6 in a federal court in Florida, includes Henry 'Enrique' Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola. In 2023, a jury convicted Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean and Biggs of entering a seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government. In several trials, each of the leaders of the group had been issued lengthy prison sentences, ranging from 22 to 15 years. On the first day of his return office in 2025, President Trump issued a sweeping clemency order, granting pardons to almost all of the more than 1,500 defendants who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and issuing sentence commutations to 14 others. In interviews with USA TODAY in February, most of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit defended their actions on Jan. 6 and said unequivocally they would do the same thing again. Some, including Tarrio and Rehl, hinted at the possibility of running for public office in the future. Read more: Sheriff? Congress? Criminal Justice reformer? Freed Proud Boys leaders have big plans 'I am an intelligent individual, and I've done a lot in the community as far as activism is concerned," Rehl said. "So, I'm experienced in that respect, and I believe I can really represent the people in a good way.' Contributing: Reuters Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@ Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Proud Boys who stormed Capitol sue government for $100 million
The Guardian
15-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Right back at ya! Trump's crude but effective rhetorical standby
Donald Trump and his allies wasted little time in branding the people protesting against immigration enforcement raids in Los Angeles as 'insurrectionists'. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy – particularly the vindictive kind – spoke darkly of a 'violent insurrection'. JD Vance, the vice-president, inveighed against 'insurrectionists carrying foreign flags' on the streets of the nation's second-biggest city. It didn't escape notice that an insurrection was exactly what the president was accused of instigating on 6 January 2021, when the flag being paraded through the Capitol was that of the Confederate secessionists. And that Trump hadn't shown quite the same enthusiasm for sending in the troops then. But simply accusing the leader of the Maga movement of hypocrisy feels like such a 2015 move. It barely registers as news these days. What's really notable is that this is the latest example of Trump's well-honed tactic of repurposing criticisms of himself to attack his enemies. The world was first introduced to this manoeuvre on 19 October 2016 during a presidential debate in Las Vegas. When Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Vladimir Putin's puppet, Trump shot back: 'No puppet, no puppet … No, you're the puppet.' To many it sounded infantile, more proof of Trump's lack of seriousness as a candidate. Back then, Twitter was the go-to platform to register reaction, as CBS reported: ''NO, YOU'RE THE PUPPET!' A presidential candidate just went straight up preschool on his opponent,' one person tweeted. ''NO YOU'RE THE PUPPET' shows how truly childish our election system has become,' someone replied. True, but these reactions underestimated the power of this simple, some would say puerile, tactic. After all, this was a time when the term 'fake news' was still used in its original sense of fringe media stories that were deliberately untrue before Trump restyled it into a catch-all term for the mainstream media and anything it produces that he doesn't like. The fact that people are now less likely to associate 'fake news' with Pizzagate than with Trump's attacks on the likes of CNN shows just how effective this switcheroo is. But its real power lies in the way it undermines the very notion of truth. If everyone's an insurrectionist, no one is. As with Humpty Dumpty, words mean what Trump wants them to mean. The more you look, the more you see the tactic everywhere. It's a pretty safe bet the phrase 'election interference' had never tripped off Trump's tongue before 2016, when the question of Russia's role in helping secure his election ultimately led to the Mueller report. After he was charged with election interference following the 2020 vote, however, he accused, among others, the Biden administration, the Secret Service, Google, the British Labour party and Kamala Harris (on the – entirely false – grounds she had posted AI-created images of her rallies) of 'election interference' in the 2024 contest. When Democrats accused Trump of trying to 'weaponize' the Department of Justice in his attempts to illicitly stay in office after his 2020 election defeat, it was only a question of time before 'weaponization' would re-emerge, rotated 180 degrees, as a favourite term in the Maga lexicon of vitriol. Once Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives in 2023, it was they who set up a formal subcommittee on 'weaponization' of the federal government, to castigate their enemies. And when the Trump 2.0 administration weaponized the federal government to fire justice department officials who had participated in Jack Smith's 'election interference' case against Trump on the grounds that they had weaponized the government … we had truly stepped through the looking glass. Accusing anti-racist campaigners of racism? Check. Denouncing Jews as antisemites? Check. And it's all helped by another apparently childish but startlingly effective tactic: repetition. Why did a majority of Republicans in 2024 believe that Biden's election victory four years earlier was rigged despite all evidence to the contrary? Probably because Trump spent fours years, day after day, saying it was. Why did so many Americans in the 2024 election campaign insist they had been better off four years earlier despite the demonstrable fact that Covid-hit 2020 had been an economic disaster? Well, maybe Trump's constant bragging about presiding over the 'greatest economy in the history of the world' had more than a little method to it. (As the musician Mark E Smith said in another context: 'It's not repetition; it's discipline.' You can say that again.) Trump's rhetorical tropes may display a certain reptilian genius but there is nothing new under the sun. 'The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.' So claimed a 1941 article called Churchill's Lie Factory written by one Joseph Goebbels, who had been accused of … exactly that. Chris Taylor is a subeditor at the Guardian US and author of The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump's insurrection routine: fuel violence, spawn chaos, shrug off the law
Donald Trump's stages of insurrection have passed from trying to suppress one that didn't exist, to creating one himself, to generating a local incident he falsely depicts as a national emergency. In every case, whether he inflates himself into the strongman putting down an insurrection or acts as the instigator-in-chief, his routine has been to foster violence, spawn chaos and show contempt for the law. In his first term, Trump reportedly asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' Trump was agitated about protesters in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. On 1 June, Trump ordered the US Park police to clear the park. Some charged on horses into the crowd. Trump emerged after the teargas wafted away to walk through the park, ordering Milley to accompany him, and stood in front of St John's Church on the other side to display a Bible upside down. Milley felt he had been badly used and exercised poor judgment in marching with Trump. 'I should not have been there,' he said. 'My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.' A day later, the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, held a news conference to oppose publicly the use of the military for law enforcement and any invocation of the Insurrection Act. Trump was furious with Milley and Esper. He was determined to have a pliable military, generals and a secretary of defense to do his bidding, whatever it might be. Then, Trump staged an insurrection in a vain last attempt to prevent the ballots of the electoral college from being counted that would make Joe Biden the elected president. While Trump's mob on 6 January chanted, 'Hang Mike Pence!' the vice-president hunkered down in the basement garage of the besieged Capitol, where he made the call for the national guard that Trump refused to give as he gleefully watched for hours on TV the followers he had organized and incited batter police and threaten the lives of members of the Congress. On the day of his inauguration to his second term, Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 insurrectionists convicted or charged in the 6 January attack. At least 600 were charged with assaulting or obstructing the police, at least 170 were charged with using a deadly weapon, and about 150 were charged with theft or destruction of government property. Trump granted commutations to 14 members of extremist militia groups convicted of or charged with seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government. Now, Trump is toying with invoking the Insurrection Act to put down a supposed rebellion in Los Angeles. But his application of the act would be a belated attempt to cover his unlawful nationalization of the California national guard and deployment of marines to Los Angeles in response to a conflict that his administration has itself provoked. In late May, Stephen Miller, Trump's fanatical deputy chief of staff in charge of his immigration policy, called a meeting of leaders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to berate them for failing to pile up the statistics he demanded of deported immigrants. Restraint and the law were to be cast aside in their new wave of raids, which hit a flashpoint in LA. 'Federal agents make warrantless arrests,' reported the Wall Street Journal. 'Masked agents take people into custody without identifying themselves. Plainclothes agents in at least a dozen cities have arrested migrants who showed up to their court hearings. And across the US, people suspected of being in the country illegally are disappearing into the federal detention system without notice to families or lawyers, according to attorneys, witnesses and officials.' Miller ordered Ice agents to target Home Depot, where construction workers, many of them immigrants, go to purchase materials. On 6 June, masked Ice agents swooped down on a store in LA, arresting more than 40 people. Meanwhile, Ice agents raided a garment factory of a company called Ambience Apparel and placed at least a dozen people in vans. Soon, there was a demonstration at the downtown federal building where they were detained. Several Waymo robotaxis were burned within a four-block area near the relatively sparsely populated downtown. But the LAPD appeared to have the situation quickly under control, until Trump unilaterally federalized the national guard, whose presence prompted further demonstrations. One contingent of soldiers was sent to guard the federal building miles away in Westwood, an upscale neighborhood by the UCLA campus, where they were nuisances to people going shopping and to restaurants. Trump declared he would send in 700 marines. On 10 June, the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a complaint on behalf of the state seeking a restraining order in federal court against Trump and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. 'To put it bluntly,' it stated, 'there is no invasion or rebellion in Los Angeles; there is civil unrest that is no different from episodes that regularly occur in communities throughout the country, and that is capable of being contained by state and local authorities working together.' 'All of this was unlawful,' wrote Bonta of the administration's actions. Trump's use of the guard was in violation of the law that requires an order to be issued through the governor. Trump's deployment of marines was 'likewise unlawful', in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the US armed forces for civilian law enforcement. 'These unlawful deployments have already proven to be a deeply inflammatory and unnecessary provocation, anathema to our laws limiting the use federal forces for law enforcement, rather than a means of restoring calm.' Ironically, the Posse Comitatus Act was instrumental in the demise of Reconstruction. US troops stationed in the south after the civil war were forbidden from enforcing the law to protect Black civil rights. The Ku Klux Klan and other white terrorist organizations seized control of state governments, disenfranchised Black people and imposed Jim Crow segregation. In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower, then president, circumvented the Posse Comitatus Act by invoking the Insurrection Act; he used federal forces to implement the supreme court's desegregation ruling in Brown v Board of Education to integrate Little Rock Central high school. As a further irony, Trump had been indicted by the special prosecutor Jack Smith under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 for his actions leading to the January 6 insurrection. Count four read: 'From on or about November 14, 2020, through on or about January 20, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States – that is, the right to vote, and to have one's vote counted.' Trump evaded justice through a series of delaying actions by the conservative majority of the supreme court that culminated in its ruling for 'absolute' presidential immunity for 'official acts'. He was allowed to run out the clock and never held to account. If Trump's trial had proceeded on the original charges as scheduled on 6 March 2024, he would have undoubtedly found guilty and eliminated as a presidential candidate. On 10 June, Trump appeared before soldiers at Fort Liberty in North Carolina in anticipation of the Washington military parade he ordered for 14 June, opportunistically using the 250th anniversary of the US army (really the continental army) to celebrate his 79th birthday, 'a big day,' he said. 'We want to show off a bit.' Soldiers of the 82nd airborne division were screened for attendance at Trump's rally based on their political support and physical appearance. 'If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,' read a note sent by the command, according to 'No fat soldiers,' said one message. A pop-up store for 365 Campaign of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which sells Trump merchandise, was set up on the base for the Trump visit. Aside from the usual Maga gear, it sells T-shirts reading: 'When I Die Don't Let Me Vote Democrat', 'I'm Voting for the Convicted Felon', and a false credit card that reads, 'White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything'. Send in the marines, but first send them to the Maga merch store. In violation of longstanding military policy on discipline, the selected troops cheered Trump's sneers and jeers. He announced he had renamed the fort to Fort Bragg, in honor of Braxton Bragg, a confederate general and large slaveowner notable for his defeats and bad temper and disliked by his officers. 'Can you believe they changed that name in the last administration for a little bit?' he said. He told the troops that they were to fight a war within the US against 'a foreign enemy', 'defending our republic itself', in California, where there was 'a full-blown assault on peace, on public order and on national sovereignty carried out by rioters bearing foreign flags with the aim of continuing a foreign invasion of our country'. Trump spontaneously invented a conspiracy theory on the spot. 'The best money can buy, somebody is financing it,' he claimed, 'and we're going to find out through Pam Bondi and Department of Justice, who it is.' He complained to the soldiers that the election of 2020 was 'rigged and stolen'. Then, he swiveled to talk about George Washington: 'Has anybody heard of him?' Then, he attacked Biden, 'never the sharpest bulb', or perhaps the brightest knife. Twice, Trump said he would 'liberate' Los Angeles, and promised that after that the Republican Congress would pass his 'big, beautiful bill', his budget stalled in the Senate. 'They call it one big, beautiful bill. So, that's good and that's what it is.' And then he rambled about the JD Vance-Tim Walz vice-presidential debate, and how some 'ladies', 'beautiful, wonderful women', followed him to '138 rallies', and on. Along the way, he praised his new chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Daniel Caine, who Trump insists on calling 'Razin Caine'. The next day, 11 June, Caine appeared before the Senate appropriations committee, and was questioned by Hawaii's Democratic senator, Brian Schatz, whether the events in LA show the US is 'being invaded by a foreign nation'. 'At this point in time,' replied the general, 'I don't see any foreign, state-sponsored folks invading.' As Caine was testifying, the Department of Homeland Security posted a cartoon of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign: 'Help Your Country…And Yourself…' Then, in capital letters: 'REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.' Which was followed by the telephone number for Ice. Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of The Court of History podcast
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump lied about LA protests to deploy the National Guard. He wants violence.
Donald Trump, the president who glibly pardoned the men and women convicted in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, wants you to believe that the second most populated city in America is in ruins, destroyed by 'insurrectionist mobs.' That's nonsense. Trump inhabits an imaginary, dystopian America spun from his opportunistic lies. The president wants you to believe, because it's politically expedient for him, that predominantly peaceful protests in Los Angeles over intentionally provocative raids by agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency are vast and violent. He wants you to believe that Los Angeles has burned. He wants you to believe that, as he posted on social media June 8, 'violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents,' and that the city is under siege from a 'Migrant Invasion.' I'll say it again: Our president inhabits an imaginary, dystopian America spun from his opportunistic lies. After promising to target 'criminals,' Trump's administration, to make up for the paltry number of actual criminals ICE agents have been able to find and deport, has resorted to going after immigrants waiting for work in Home Depot parking lots. It's targeting immigrants who are properly following the immigration process, posting ICE agents outside courthouses to snatch noncriminals who are seeking a better life. It's making a point of hitting a liberal city with a large immigrant population for one reason and one reason alone: Trump wants violence. He wants you to believe there are hordes of murderous immigrants making America dangerous and unlivable. He used that baseless imagery to justify ordering National Guard troops to Los Angeles, against the wishes of the California governor. Trump wants to normalize this kind of power grab. Opinion: Manufacturing down, food expensive and ICE is deporting moms. Happy now, MAGA? Because that's the kind of power you want if you exist in an imaginary version of America spun from opportunistic lies. Republican leaders want all of this as well. Trump is living, breathing evidence that the GOP wants power at any cost, and Republican lawmakers are more than happy to parrot their leader's xenophobic fearmongering. Despite years of screaming about 'government overreach,' they'll sit back and gladly watch Trump sic U.S. soldiers on American citizens and use a blue-state city as a test model for tyranny. Why? Because our president and members of his party inhabit an imaginary, dystopian America spun from their opportunistic lies. Opinion: Republicans, be so for real. This embarrassing government is what you wanted? California officials, from Gov. Gavin Newsom to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have made clear they don't want or need the National Guard in the city. Over the weekend, there were isolated incidents involving property damage, vehicles burned and, as KLTA-5 reported, "LAPD said officers encountered demonstrators throwing 'concrete, bottles and other objects.' " Police responded with sizable force, from tear gas to rubber bullets and flash bangs. But overall, officials have said, and widespread reporting has supported, that the protests have been small and predominantly peaceful. Still, Trump told his millions of social media followers that he was sending federal forces to 'liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots. Order will be restored, the Illegals will be expelled, and Los Angeles will be set free.' I repeat, because it bears repeating: Trump inhabits an imaginary, dystopian America spun from his opportunistic lies. On June 8, the same day Trump and Republicans were telling Americans that Los Angeles was a chaotic war zone, the Los Angeles Pride Parade went off in Hollywood without a hitch. And The New York Times reported: 'The chaotic demonstrations that consumed social media and cable news in recent days were concentrated around only a couple parts of the region ‒ the working-class suburb of Paramount, where federal agents clashed with protesters near a Home Depot, and downtown Los Angeles.' Opinion: Trump's mass deportation scheme is an insult to all of us The city is immense. The chaos, in terms of people and the extent of any damage, has been minimal. Yet Trump and his Republican enablers choose to live in an imaginary, dystopian America spun from their opportunistic lies. Making all of this worse, of course, is that the supposed need for mass deportations is built on lies. Lies about a 'migrant crime wave.' Lies about America being unsafe because of immigrants. If the ICE raids targeting Los Angeles are necessary, why aren't they also necessary in the red states one would assume Trump is more inclined to protect? Why are ICE agents not searching for undocumented workers on farms in Nebraska or in meat-packing plants in Indiana? Why are anti-ICE protests in red states not being met with equal federal force? Why go to one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states? Why doesn't Trump simply let those Democrats deal with the alleged 'migrant crime' and focus on the 'real Americans' he claims to care about? Perhaps because this is all nonsense. Or a distraction from Trump's recent clash with Elon Musk or the criticism of his deficit-ballooning tax bill making its way through Congress. Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Newsom was asked late June 8 what he wanted to say to Trump about the situation in Los Angeles and the decision to federalize the National Guard and send soldiers in. The governor said: 'Where's your decency, Mr. President? Stop. Rescind this order, it's illegal and unconstitutional, and I said it, I'll say it again, it's immoral. You're creating the conditions that you claim you're solving, and you're not. And you're putting real people's lives at risk.' One last time: Trump inhabits an imaginary, dystopian America spun from his opportunistic lies. And that, unlike fabricated 'migrant riots,' puts every American in danger. Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @ and on Facebook at You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump is using LA as a testing ground for tyranny | Opinion
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The Independent
12-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Is Trump's America in the middle of a coup?
In conducting a coup in an impoverished undeveloped nation there is a basic to-do list. You capture the presidency, the courts, take over the international airport, emasculate the legislature, decapitate the military of potential opponents, storm the local TV station and declare a new dawn. Bigger countries require more effort, like the mass mobilization of xenophobia through false-flag attacks and terror scares, but from Moscow to Monrovia, the patterns are the same – an autocrat takes power in the name of national salvation. With Donald Trump in power for a little over four months, questions are swirling as to whether this process is happening to what was the most powerful democracy on earth. When he refused to accept he lost the 2020 elections and his supporters stormed the Capital, and later jailed, he pardoned them all. Now America's constitution is again under threat of what many critics are calling an internal coup d'etat. Driven, perhaps, because the president has openly considered a Trump 2028 campaign for a third, unconstitutional, term. While he was duly elected to his office for a second time last November, every check and balance to the power of the US presidency as enumerated in the Constitution has been, or is being, challenged.— a notion only heightened by the drumbeat of declarations from White House insiders of an 'insurrection' in Los Angeles. As protestors took to the streets against the mass arrest of alleged illegal immigrants, Trump lost little time in ordering 700 US Marines and thousands of National Guard onto the streets of Los Angeles. Californian governor Gavin Newsom described the move as 'deranged' which would only serve to inflame tensions on the west coast. The governor declared: 'Democracy is under assault. The moment we feared has arrived. 'Take time. Reflect on this perilous moment a president, bound by no law or constitution, perpetuating a unified assault on American traditions.' His words came only hours after Trump warned anyone contemplating protesting during his military parade on June 14 that they would be met with 'very heavy force'. Trump's to-do list in taking on - and taking down - the establishment has already been largely ticked off. First he moved against the military and intelligence services whom, during his first presidency, he blamed for holding back his agenda and for failing to back the 'protestors' who invaded the US Capital on January 6 2021. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chief of staff during Trump 1.0, lost his security detail and the pre-emptive pardon he'd been given by outgoing president Joe Biden after he was threatened with prosecution by Trump. Trump then fired his successor Airforce general Charles Brown, and the head of the US Coastguards Linda Fagan. They were axed, the administration suggested, because they were DEI hires. Nothing in their backgrounds indicates they were anything but qualified for the top jobs, but the messaging was clear from the White House – we want our own people. But they must be loyal above all – so General Timothy Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, has also gone along with the head of Naval operations admiral Lisa Franchetti. No reason was given for Haugh's dismissal in April. Trump told reporters on Air Force One at the time: 'We're always going to let go of people – people we don't like or people that take advantage of, or people that may have loyalties to someone else.' Moving on, the FBI boss Christopher Wray was replaced with Kash Patel, an avid Trump loyalist who has failed to produce a budget for his agency this year. The new deputy director Dan Bongino is a podcaster who peddled the lie that Trump won the 2020 presidential election. The director of National Intelligence is now Tulsi Gabbard, who has been an apologist for Vladimir Putin and Syria's Bashar al Assad. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News contributor, is secretary of defence and famed for his attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky, Nato, and for using his personal phone to transmit state secrets. Incompetence among cabinet members and top officials means that Trump knows they owe their place in his orbit to him alone. Each of these leaders have purged their own departments and replaced professionals with apparatchiks. The federal bureaucracy has been hammered by Trump's re-definition of more than 50,000 civil servants and 'political hires', allowing for him to impose pre-vetted loyalists in the executive heart of the government. Opposition to a coup will often come from the judiciary and universities. Trump has moved to stifle both. Top academies like Harvard and Colombia have been threatened with or have lost federal funding worth billions for pushing back at Trump's attempts to control their intellectual life. Foreign students are being banned. Students and academics who have supported Palestinian rights have been accused of backing terror groups like Hamas and fired, expelled or deported. The issue here is focussed on Israel and alleged antisemitism but again, the message is clear – free speech is over. Of course, none of this could have been achieved without the active support of the US Congress and Senate which is supposed to check the worst of executive power. But with Republican majorities in both, Trump has been given a free reign. And Republicans who do not subscribe to Trump's vision in Congress are often living in fear of criticising him. Standout Republican opponent Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski said during a townhall last month: 'We're in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. I'm oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real… 'I have to figure out how to help the many and the anxious who are so afraid [in Congress]'. Many academics from Africa in particular, who have lived through civil wars for the last 30 years, have wondered how long it would be before Americans realized they could be living through their own form of coup. A professor at a prestigious east coast university who has a green card and is world renowned in their field said: 'I'm just wary about being quoted. We (academics non-nationals) have even been told not to leave the US in case we can't get back in. The administration is monitoring our social media accounts'. Speaking anonymously for fear of retribution they went on: 'Those of us who have grown up under authoritarian regimes have learned of the signs of incipient and growing authoritarianism. None of this is rocket science. 'There is a method: the control of the press and judiciary, co-option of the loyalty of the police and the army, rise of militias, manipulation of elections. Trump discredited the mainstream media, stacked the judiciary… He demanded the loyalty of the FBI.' America's judiciary has had patchy success in getting the administration to observe the constitution that the president, military, and intelligence services have sworn to uphold too. Trump's White House has ignored orders to stay deportations. In May, over 130 former state and federal judges demanded the government drop its charges against Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, dubbing her indictment for allegedly helping man evade immigration officials as an 'egregious overreach' by the executive branch. But ICE immigration officials have spread across the country arresting suspects without showing identification, frequently without warrants, and using force to impose meet Trump's mass deportation promises. This week, Trump has been concerned with the manufactured notion of an 'insurrection' in California. A conflict between protestors and the armed forces on the streets of LA could be the excuse any autocrat would use to declare a national emergency, and suspend constitutional law. 'The president is trying to manufacture chaos and crisis on the ground for his own political ends,' said Robert Bonta, California's attorney general after announcing that the state, led by Mr Newsom, was going to sue the Trump administration for violating the US Constitution. 'Federalizing the California National Guard is an abuse of the president's authority under the law – and not one we take lightly. We're asking a court to put a stop to the unlawful, unprecedented order.' With decades of experience in West Africa and having published widely on the war that tore Yugoslavia apart, the anonymous east coast professor added a dire warning: 'I think, eventually, a state will consider seceding. Maybe California. Then it will be war, I think Yugoslavia is a good model for the US'.
