Ben Rhodes: Are We Going To Be Accustomed To The Military Being On Our Streets To Support ICE Raids?
On MSNBC, Ben Rhodes is concerned about President Trump sending military troops into Los Angeles to stop the riots:
BEN RHODES: What worries me is that, you know, we’re five months into the Trump Administration. We already have marines and national guard deployed in the streets of Los Angeles, where I live, over the objection of the officials who are supposed to make those decisions for reasons that are only to advance the personal and political interests of the president. That’s the authoritarian piece of this that is so important that mirrors what’s happened in other countries. He is personalizing the use of the United States military for his own purposes. What I’m concerned about is I don’t know when those troops are going to go home, you know, are we going to get accustomed to the military being in our streets, to the military being there to support ICE raids? Because that’s what the President of United States wants, just like we have to get accustomed to the military having parades on the president’s birthday, and the fact that this is happening so early in the Trump Administration should really worry people, because he’s just trying to make it feel like there’s nothing that we can do about this. We’ll ignore the courts to try to stop us from doing this. If the United States Senator from the state in question shows up at a press conference, we’ll throw him on the ground, handcuff him, and drag him away with FBI agents. This this goes beyond Jen, what i you know, i wrote a book about, among others, Viktor Orban, for instance, in Hungary. He’s never done anything like this, so we’re already past that pretty early in the Trump term. And it’s that normalization that we cannot allow, because once it just becomes normal that the military is used domestically, what other purposes are you going to use it for immigration raids, quashing dissent, any other number of things. You know, he he this is the Rubicon, truly the use of the us military domestically for political purposes. That does not happen. That has not happened in American history. And we have to keep repeating that, otherwise we’re like a frog that is in water that is getting warmer and warmer and we’re getting boiled. All of a sudden we’re living in a country where it’s not that unusual for the military to be on our streets.
