The Revenge of the Brownshirts

Within hours of reclaiming the White House, President Trump issued a litany of executive orders designed to destabilise the West and distract public discourse from the ruthless economic changes his oligarchy will be implementing. But then he did something even more dramatic; he issued pardons to more than 1,500 people in relation to his January 6, 2021 coup attempt.

The message to his most hardcore supporters is clear: he will protect them if they do his bidding. It was a message clearly and quickly received, with the most famous of the January 6 attackers declaring within minutes on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk:

JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER... I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!! NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!! J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME... EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!

At the same time as that was happening, Musk himself was behind the Seal of the President of the United States on stage giving an apparent Nazi salute — not once, but twice — as he thanked Trump’s supporters for making it possible:

Which supporters made it possible is itself an open question, as, on Sunday night at his final pre-inauguration rally, Trump declared, about 52 minutes into his rambling speech, that “it’s only because they rigged the election that I’ll be your president”. You can hear it for yourself:

It isn’t new. As you may recall, back on July 27th, he told his supporters that this would be the last time they would have to vote at all:

For progressives who keep telling themselves they will only have to endure four years of this, it may be time to consider whether anything resembling a fair election will be possible — or even bothered with — in 2028, as all of this makes a fairly strong case that the rule of law is a dead issue in the United States of America. The next presidential election will likely be a pro forma referendum on the continuation of the present administration with little pretence of fairness or democracy, though legitimate elections will probably be permitted at other levels to retain the plausibility of the country remaining a functioning democracy.

Of the 42 executive orders issued on the first day of his presidency, Trump revoked all transgendered rights, pulled the United States out of the World Health Organisation and the Paris climate accord, reclassified thousands of federal employees as political hires making it possible to fire them and replace them with political hires of his own choosing, and ended birthright citizenship, which would revoke the citizenship of anyone born on American soil to parents who were not legally in the country at the time, potentially leaving them stateless. Hardly an exhaustive list, but you get the point.

None of this is by accident, of course. Stripping citizenship from specific groups of people born and raised in the country, dehumanising transgendered people, and unilaterally withdrawing from foreign treaties is a roadmap that has been followed before. He needs to create domestic enemies to blame for all the failings of his country so that his supporters do not see that he is doing the opposite of everything he promised for them, alienate the international community so they have no ability to get involved or say anything, and consolidate his own power over that of the Constitution within the bureaucracy.

The one element he was missing was his own paramilitary force outside the structure of the nation’s armed forces. That, then, is where the more than 1,500 pardons for those who carried out a violent coup — with fatalities — on his behalf come in. He has given his supporters license to do anything they interpret as his bidding, even if it results in injuries and death.

If you have ever asked yourself what you would have done during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s, ask yourself what you are doing today — and make sure you save a bit of space in your attic for your trans and newly stateless friends.