Inside Stephen Miller's Secret Plan to Normalize Trump's Dictator Rule

[Celerity]

He wants to supercharge searing civil tensions to get low-information voters to embrace their inner authoritarian. Exactly two Democrats appear to fully grasp this.

https://newrepublic.com/article/201453/inside-stephen-miller-secret-plan-normalize-trump-dictator-rule

https://archive.ph/lndCg



Stephen Miller has a theory about this political moment. As President Trump expands his lawbreaking and dictatorial rule, the powerful MAGA disinformation apparatus—at Miller’s direction—is supercharging public attention to the debate over Trump’s conduct in a way that’s designed to deeply polarize it. That will force Americans to take a side in that standoff, Miller clearly believes, driving them to embrace authoritarian rule, though perhaps without understanding it in exactly those terms.

Do Democratic leaders broadly have their own theory about this moment? It’s unclear. But here’s what we can divine right now: Governors J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California do have one. They grasp Miller’s theory of the case, and they are responding in kind, with their own war for attention, on the intuition that voters will side with the rule of law over authoritarian dictatorship—if they are presented with this as a clear choice.

This week, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act after a federal judge blocked him from sending the National Guard into Portland, in a ruling that sharply noted Trump is making up facts about crime there as his pretext. “It’s a burning hell hole,” Trump said. “You have a judge that tries to pretend there’s no problem.” Trump declared that he’d enact the Insurrection Act “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

The specter of Portland “burning” is dimwitted MAGA propaganda. But Trump is now nakedly threatening to invoke the notorious nineteenth-century act if Democratic governors or the courts lawfully exercise their roles in our constitutional schema, in a way that displeases him. This would unshackle vast and dangerously vague authorities to domestically deploy the military, powers nominally reserved for extraordinary domestic unrest or civil breakdown. Trump would invoke it based on sheer fabrications, or possibly on old footage of Portland he saw on Fox News.

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