The sharpest (and scariest) analysis I've encountered is this: the administration governs as though no government will ever follow. The blanket pardons for January 6th insurrectionists, the revocation of Secret Service protection for political enemies—these are not the actions of someone who expects to face accountability from a future administration. And that's precisely the point. Trump is not governing recklessly; he is governing with a specific end in mind: to be president for the rest of his life.
That project requires dismantling the judiciary, hollowing out independent institutions, muzzling the press, and having his own goon squad. By all appearances, he is on schedule.
My baseline (as an outside observer) is still that they are too stupid and uncoordinated to do a facist take-over. But that a significant possibility even exists that there will be a facist take-over is awful.
(The main ingredient for a facist take-over is control over the military and media and he is not creating many loyalists in either)
The abduction of Maduro was not about naming his crimes, but about ignoring them. The worst thing that Maduro did is just what Trump is beginning to do: killing civilians and blaming them for their own deaths. After Minneapolis, Maduro’s lies are being repeated: in American English, by American authorities.
The thousands of extrajudicial killings in Maduro’s Venezuela were carried out by organized death squads. These actions were described as defensive. The Maduro regime claimed that the people they murdered were resisting government authority, and that the men who pulled the trigger had been provoked by those whom they murdered.
Minneapolis has just witnessed an extrajudicial killing, at the hands of ICE, which looks more and more like a presidential paramilitary organization.
The action was, horribly, excused by the president, the vice-president, and the director of homeland security, using the same lies as those told by Maduro’s Venezuelan regime.
The victim was resisting government authority, they said.
The man who pulled the trigger had been provoked, they said.
It was not the killer who was a terrorist. It was the mom who had just dropped off one of her six-year-old at school.
Also, the proposed expansion of the White House doesn't align with the interests of Trump leaving at the end of his second term as it would have barely been finished by then. He does not seem like the type of person who would do something that only benefits someone else.
(My conspiracy-inspired theory is that they are working on the underground bunker there with the understanding that it may soon be in use when war breaks out)
