Post #51183 by wzambon on the US Policy board

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Crisis Time: the Favorite Time of Autocrats

“We should pay careful attention to the rhetoric around states of emergency right now, since such situations have always been prominent at critical junctures of strongman history,” I warned in February, sensing that Trump would initiate a crackdown as the toll of his chaos and corruption became clear to many.

Now, with his popularity plummeting, outrage continuing at the coverup of his ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and rising disaffection and protest at a declining economy and Fascistic ICE abductions, Trump rolls out his version of the tyrant’s favorite activity: creating a crisis that resolves with an expansion of his power and a flex of his repressive capacities.

"Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people," Trump claimed at an August 11 press conference announcing a 30-day federal takeover of D.C. Police and a mobilization of the National Guard.

Let’s be clear: There is no crime emergency. Violent crime in Washington D.C. fell in 2024 and 2025 and is now at a 30-year low. There is no justification for Trump declaring what amounts to a “state of exception” with respect to the customary deployment of law enforcement and security forces in the capital.

For authoritarians, the truth is just another thing to be manipulated to justify extraordinary measures that often become normalized, “no longer the exception but the rule,” as the philosopher Walter Benjamin observed after living through the Nazi version

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

https://open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/trump-pursue...

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