How to Resist Trump's Militarization of America

The president’s deployment of the armed forces on American streets is an alarming escalation. Fortunately, there’s a playbook for fighting back.

https://newrepublic.com/article/200112/resist-trump-militarization-chicago-ice

https://archive.ph/pwHp6


Demonstrators march through downtown Chicago during a protest against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, on September 6.

On Saturday, September 6, Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States, apparently declared war on the city of Chicago. That is, unfortunately, not an exaggeration.

In a recent social media post, Trump riffed darkly on a famous line from the film Apocalypse Now, declaring: “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” He then stated, with his signature lack of grammar and aggressively emotive capitalization, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” Below that, a picture of the Chicago skyline showed Trump dressed as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore—Robert Duvall’s character from Apocalypse Now—as helicopters fly over a burning Chicago, smoke billowing from the flames, with the title “Chipocalypse Now” scrawled across the bottom of the picture. The message was clear: The city of Chicago will be subjugated by the sheer force of the U.S. military—not because that city is in armed revolt, like the Confederacy in the 1860s, but simply because the president wants to do it.

If the president of the United States threatening a U.S. city with “WAR” is not a red line for constitutional democracy, then nothing is. Trump has since tried to downplay his rhetoric, but he was not making idle threats: He has already deployed the military to police two other large, Democratic-voting, racially diverse cities, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Additional cities, such as Baltimore and New York, are on his wish list for military deployments too. And while Wall Street may take comfort in his reputation for chickening out on certain destructive economic plans, Trump has been following through on his threats to deploy the military on American streets. Trump’s vision is for significant parts of the U.S. to exist under military occupation.

In the face of this sweeping mobilization of military force against the domestic population, three things are clearer than ever. First, one of the central components of Trumpism is the militarization of the U.S. government. Second, that militarization goes hand in hand with a politics of white supremacy. Third—and as a result of the first two points—the struggle against authoritarianism, the struggle for racial justice, and the struggle against militarization are deeply intertwined projects. Consequently, racial justice activism, pro-democracy activism, and antiwar activism must form a united front. Let’s take those points one at a time.

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