Will the 2028 election even happen, or are we watching the slow-motion rehearsal for its cancellation? Every signal from Trump’s orbit points to a deliberate strategy to turn fear, chaos, and manufactured crisis into political weapons.
History tells us how these stories end. From John Adams jailing his critics under the Alien and Sedition Acts to Richard Nixon’s troops gunning down students at Kent State to crackdowns by Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, authoritarians have always wrapped repression in the language of patriotism.
Today, with talk of “domestic enemies,” “rapid reaction forces,” and “nuclear demonstrations,” the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it.
Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries’ people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?
Back in 1964, Americans were worried that Barry Goldwater — with all his anti-communist rhetoric — might start a nuclear war with the USSR. Lyndon Johnson exploited that with his famous “Daisy” advertisement, where a little girl plucked petals off a flower as the countdown to a nuclear bomb sounded in the background. In the end, over video of a nuclear bomb going off, Johnson’s voice said:
“These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the darkness. We must love each other, or we must die.”
The ad ended with “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” It only ran once, but had such an impact that it turned the election and kept Johnson in office.
When I was a child we had “duck and cover” under our desks in elementary school, and lived in fear of nuclear war. My dad seriously considered building a fallout shelter in our basement; his concern wasn’t outside the mainstream.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president, people called him “Ronnie Ray Gun” because he was widely seen as the trigger-happy cowboy who might start the next world war. He reminded us of characters in the Dr. Strangelove movie.
Many folks also worried that both Goldwater and Reagan might use the intelligence and military services of America to go after their “socialist” enemies in America. Those old enough to remember can tell you how, on May 1, 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” and added, as The New York Times noted at the time:
“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”
Three days later, on May 4, 1970, Reagan got his bloodbath at Kent State University when 28 National Guard soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on an estimated 3,000 student protestors.
Over a mere 13 seconds, nearly 70 shots were fired. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed, and nine others were wounded. Schroeder was shot in the back, as were several of those injured.
Trump, it appears, intends to out-Goldwater and out-Reagan both of those two old cold warriors and take us fully into Putin-style leadership territory.
The top two headlines on Drudge Report on Thursday were: “TRUMP ORDERS NUKE TESTS and HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB” with a graphic reminiscent of Slim Pickens.
They were followed by six subheads:
Pentagon readying thousands of ‘reaction forces’ as DOMESTIC missions widen...
Troops across country being trained for civil unrest...
Top White House Officials Moving Onto Military Bases...
The Don Swaps Decorated Admiral With 33-Year-Old DOGE staffer...
DOD can’t say who it killed in military strikes against ‘drug smugglers’...
Dems excluded from briefing...
Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he’s ordering his military to prepare for demonstration explosions of American nuclear weapons. (“Tests” is an euphemism; there’s no doubt our bombs work just fine. Exploding them is more appropriately called a “threat.”)
Later in the day we learned that he’s ordered all 50 state national guards to prepare “rapid reaction forces,” not to fight a foreign enemy but to turn their tanks, drones, and automatic weapons of war on Americans who dissent from Trump’s coming crackdowns on “the enemy within.”
I’ve written before about how in 1798 Federalist President Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts — precursors to the Insurrection Act that came a decade later — to shut down the nation’s roughly 20 Jefferson-aligned Democratic newspapers and imprison anybody who spoke out against him (including Newark’s town drunk, Luther Baldwin).
When Jefferson became president in 1801 he let most of Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts expire, but today Trump appears hell-bent on reviving and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 that replaced them.
It appears that Trump’s plan to either sabotage or completely suspend the election of 2028 (with 2026 as a testing ground) is straightforward, a play in three acts.
First, he’s having his ICE and CPB people engage in as provocative behavior as possible, trying to produce a violent response from the citizens of Chicago or any other city where they can pull it off.
The apparent reason for this and his many lies about cities in flames and chaos is because he wants an excuse to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, and either lock down or suspend altogether for the duration of the “emergency” the next presidential elections in 2028.
Steve Bannon is already claiming Trump will be president in 2029; Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have both specifically referenced this possibility.
And it appears the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court may be planning to help him out with his project of using the military to end democracy in America. There’s now a debate about whether the phrase “regular forces” in the law Trump’s using to deploy troops includes ICE, local/state police, federal police agencies like the FBI, or military forces. The Court has asked for further arguments from both sides on the issue, with filings completed by Nov. 10th.
Second, once Trump’s thugs have stirred up enough opposition in the streets of one or more major cities to justify it, he’ll then drop the hammer with troops in a way that may well make Kent State look like a high school play.
The resulting violence and chaos will give him the excuse he needs to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, something he has repeatedly referenced in the past few months.
Third, with the authority of the Supreme Court and the Insurrection Act behind him, he’ll suspend the elections “until the present emergency subsides” and essentially declare himself king for life.
And now he’s ordered his so-called Department of War to begin testing nuclear weapons. He’s not only trying to lock down America and turn us into a dictatorship, but he clearly has serious plans to use the threat of nuclear war to further solidify his hold over America; presidents during or on the edge of a time of war have extraordinary emergency powers.
Just ask the descendants of Eugene V. Debs, who President Woodrow Wilson threw into prison for opposing World War I (then called “the Great War”) and who then ran for president from his jail cell.
The question then becomes: “Who will he choose as America’s allies?”
Will it be Europe, Ukraine, Australia, and the democracies of Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea)? Or will it be the authoritarian and nearly-authoritarian regimes of China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Russia, and Israel?
Is Trump leading America into a new Allies vs Axis conflict where the “allies” are the countries run by authoritarians who praise and fund him and his family? If so, is there any doubt he’ll replicate their domestic strategies for political repression and holding power? He’s already echoing Putin’s rhetoric about the “lying press” and “the enemy within.”
Is there any part of Trump‘s behavior that we’ve seen in the last decade that causes us to think he might join with France or Ukraine instead of with Putin or Xi, if given the chance? Just ask Volodymir Zelenskyy or Taiwan’s people about that.
Adding a final touch, Trump announced this week that he’s ordering the National Guard to create “Quick Reaction Forces” in all 50 states specifically to deal with domestic unrest.
He apparently wants a dozen violent Kent State-type events that he can use as an excuse to militarize the entire country, and a shocking number of elected Republicans and rightwing media celebrities are explicitly cheering on such an authoritarian crackdown.
California Gov. Newsom is telling anybody who will listen that the 2028 presidential election will be a “Putin [style] election” if Democrats don’t “stand up” and fight back now to block Trump’s plans to militarize the country and declare an insurrection.
“I’ll tell you what,” Newsom told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in an interview Wednesday, “we won’t have a country. We won’t have an election that’s fair and free if we don’t stand up, we won’t. There will not be a fair and free election — it’ll be a Putin election.”
Trump appears well aware of his weakness, his collapsing poll numbers, and the precipice the American economy is teetering at the edge of. He sees the same disaster coming in next week’s elections — and its presaging the GOP’s 2028 losses — just as clearly as the rest of us do.
And it appears that he has a plan to deal with it, a plan that takes John Adams’ imprisoning newspaper editors, Nixon’s Kent State massacre, and LBJ’s Vietnam War up to such Putin-like levels of intimidation, repression, and violence that the 2028 elections are at risk.
If we let him.