Doesn’t matter. A fascist at the head of government, whose party is in line behind him, controlling all branches of the federal government, having enough military support, can shush as many opinions as he wants.
The military is incredibly weak when it comes to domestic matters. Without police training, they will be incompetent.
There’s a reason why part of Hitler’s rise required the rise of the SS, a separate branch of the military AND police that was loyal to Nazism and Hitler alone.
What Trump is going to do next is cut off the heads of our Military and try to bring them under his control. What will actually happen is that US Military will become incredibly weak, as leaders are the experts in navigating the bureaucracy and actually getting things done. Installing dumbass loyalists at the top won’t do much, and I’m not convinced that there’s enough competent leaders in Trump’s circles to actually do everything he wants to do.
They don’t necessarily need to be competent. They only need to be loyally fascist and willing to deliver criminal orders. Firepower “trumps” competency in a whole lot of short-term scenarios. Beyond that, they only need a sufficient number of servicepeople to execute those orders. Even if most servicepeople refuse to obey, the US military is such a massive organization that there will be more than enough who do.
A best case scenario is one where one part of the US military stands up with force against the other part, and the fascists lose, followed by a military coup.
Incompetence means they won’t be able to get anything done at all. Which leads to the rise of SS or other loyalist police groups (in the case of Putin: KGB/FSB).
You’re ignoring a huge part of what makes fascism actually work. The ability for orders to be carried out at all.
Secondly, its not military powers that allowed SS to help Hitler or KGB/FSB to help Putin. Its police powers that let them do that. And Donald Trump has royally fucked his reputation with the FBI, the closest thing to a proper police agency.
I’d keep an eye to see if Trump can successfully take over FBI, because that’s where the worst-case scenario lies. But FBI lost their headquarters back in 2016 because Trump fucked them over, and Trump still hates them because of Jack Smith’s most recent investigation. So I’m betting on incompetence here.
Force means jack shit. Police powers are the powers to launch investigators and build intelligence. Knowing who and how and why to arrest people is the power of the Police. And a corrupt police is the most dangerous.
Military? They can shoot but they don’t know what to do after that. There are Military Police units, but they’re too small for any real action. Its FBI and other police agencies that have the real power that you’re talking about.
It’s not an on/off switch. Of course the military will be less efficient and more error-prone; that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Need to put down a big protest in St Louis? Send in troops with live rounds, none of that less lethal bullshit. Maybe it takes a couple days longer to get them there, maybe there aren’t quite as many boots on the ground as you wanted, maybe they get deployed in kind of dumb ways.
They’re still far better armed, far more cohesive, and far more replenishable than the protesters they seek to trample. The military would still win, they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be better enough than their opponent.
Now imagine if the opponent isn’t “protesters,” but “these brown people we’ve conditioned you to feel animosity towards, and they’re iLlEgAlS!” Those brown people aren’t even loosely organized into a protest, and as long as the troops aren’t popping “my” people (yet), the public pushback is going to be weak as fuck.
