Seeking A National Emergency
Trump has long wanted an excuse to invoke martial law to abolish any remaining pretence of democracy in his country. Musk’s end game is to install Vance as a more controllable and longer term dictator who is not, on his own, palatable to the voting public. It is all beginning to come together this week as America’s top two oligarchs fight it out in public while armed reinforcements are sent to Los Angeles to put down rising protests.
The American government has given its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency a mandate to arrest 3,000 illegal immigrants per day. That is more than one every thirty seconds or over a million per year. It is not surprising then that the agency is taking very aggressive steps to arrest people anywhere there might plausibly be undocumented workers, while so far arresting few of those who illegally employ them.
They’re doing so wearing facemasks to hide their own identities with the full support and encouragement of their leadership, in the face of the long-standing American practice that law enforcement officers be prepared to identify themselves in the performance of their duties, particularly when not in uniform.
This week in Los Angeles, locals in the community actively protested to obstruct another of these dragnet raids, pushing ICE back until other agencies were brought in to reinforce them and repel the protesters. Last night, the US administration announced that they will be sending the National Guard in to protect the ICE crackdown raids.
The government crackdown of what they call illegal aliens — who they describe as gang members, criminals, and rapists, for which there is no evidence — is intended to create an other for the American people to blame for their problems. It is meant to dehumanise a class of people, bring fear of non-conformity for the rest, and lay the groundwork for long term totalitarian rule.
To eliminate the last vestiges of democracy, the team occupying the White House need the appearance of a genuine national emergency in order to declare a state of emergency and suspend what bits of the constitution they are still forced to follow.
Having apparently violent protests against the immigration crackdown fits the bill. Bringing in the National Guard does nothing to cool the temperature and everything to create more tension and opportunity for the violence they need to occur in order to justify the invocation of martial law.
Trump’s first act was to grant pardons to some 1500 people involved in the January 6th, 2021 coup attempt. It was his opening act in telling those who would defend his will over the law or the constitution itself that he would have their backs. He was not granting them pardons for what they had done, but what he would still need them to do. That day is coming.
That the MAGA administration is intent on dictatorship should not be a surprise. But the big fight that we will see over the next weeks is over who will be the dictator going forward. It is not necessarily going to be Trump. With the election already won, the constitution undermined, basic civil rights under attack, and the American people being distracted by an artificial financial crisis created by their president with their woes blamed on illegal immigrants, Trump himself will soon no longer be needed by MAGA’s most powerful oligarchs. His role in winning elections is not essential if there are no more fair elections to win.
The installation of JD Vance as his vice president was not by accident. His political rise was funded by long-time Musk associate and fellow oligarch Peter Thiel. Musk and Thiel are members of what’s come to be known as the PayPal Mafia.
Vance, who once described Trump as “America’s Hitler”, clearly belongs to Thiel and Musk, whose influence was no doubt instrumental in his candidacy as vice president in the first place. Musk, in this week’s public spat with Trump, has posted on social media agreeing that Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vance.
Musk’s departure from the White House a few days ago has been seen as a falling out with MAGA, but I don’t think that is the whole story. Musk’s departure may have been earlier than planned, but it was tactical; he has achieved most of what he wanted to achieve in the short term, and now has his sights on the next steps.
Yes, he is offended by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act but for all the wrong reasons. He is mad that it is bankrupting the American treasury, endangering his lucrative government contracts, but not that it gifts — or grifts — unfathomable trillions of dollars to the wealthiest through tax cuts while also raising taxes on the poorest.
Protesting the bill is just accelerating his timeline. He has every intention of taking Trump down sooner or later and, lacking an American birth certificate himself, placing his proxy in the presidency. Vance’s feeble protests and tepid wish that Musk return to the fold is a fairly strong indication that the vice president is in on the deal and is not quite sure how to play it at this particular moment.
With the ICE raids and counterprotests causing Trump’s administration to bring in the National Guard to gain control of Los Angeles, the ball is rolling for martial law. The race is now on to see if Trump can use it to consolidate his power before getting pushed out by the limitless resources of Musk and Thiel in favour of their marionette Vance.
The American descent into dictatorship has been clear for some months, and now the once-mighty empire will have to endure the fight over the crown — unless and until the people come together to reassert their constitution.
You have laid out a frightening scenario. There is nothing that we as Canadians can do directly but we must certainly work to strengthen our democracy. It looks like Canadians are waking up to that fact a bit: see Nik Nanos on how support for Pierre Poilievre is dropping https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/06/07/support-numbers-for-poilievre-plummet-after-federal-election-loss-nanos/. But if he gets back into the House and maintains the support of his party (no longer a slam-dunk) that can shift back again as his nastiness and rage are again pumped up by the social media algorithms and the Conservative Party fundraising machine.
A frightening scenario, indeed.
It makes Sheila Eskenazi’s comment even more powerful.