Time to take Trump’s actions seriously

Opinion

For most of U.S. President Donald Trump’s political career, his political and ideological opponents have lobbed accusations that a Trump White House would mean a descent into fascism and dictatorship for the United States.

Trump’s supporters, and perhaps observers looking to strike a more measured tone, might reject those fears. But as of right now, well, if the second Trump administration is not fascist or building a dictatorship, it’s giving one heck of an impression that it is.

On Monday, Trump said he was sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C. and putting its police force under federal control in what he calls a bid to make the city’s streets safer, claiming these militarized measures are meant to address homelessness and crime. He declared on social media the same day that the streets of D.C. would be “LIBERATED today!”

For a U.S. president to talk of sending troops in to an American city in terms of liberation should be chilling to any listener. That he lumps the homeless into his proclaimed mission to make the city safer only makes it more clear that this is more about removing those Trump deems undesirable from public view.

He has also suggested that he is prepared to do the same to other American capitals, expressing a hope that cities such as Los Angeles and New York “self-clean up,” or he may feel inclined to take the same measures there.

This is but the latest step by the Trump administration in its ongoing efforts to put U.S. residents, and citizens, under its thumb. Trump, of course lacking any self awareness, argued his plans to send the National Guard into D.C. would “end the days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people.”

Data for the city, meanwhile, show that violent crime in D.C. is down 26 per cent year-to-date. And whatever harm Trump is talking about, it does not presumably include the suffering inflicted by Trump’s masked enforcers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

In late June, the Guardian reported that 13 migrants had died in ICE jails in 2025 — including Canadian Johnny Noviello, who had been a lawful permanent resident of the U.S. since 1991. An Aug. 5 report on ICE’s actions by libertarian think tank the Cato Institute declared, “One in five ICE arrests are Latinos on the streets with no criminal past or removal order.”

In other words, innocent people.

Scenes of ICE agents rounding up migrants wherever they could be found — including at courthouses where they had arrived for asylum hearings — were revolting in and of themselves.

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But it now seems to be the case that ICE’s roundups were only the first step in Trump’s overall plan to create the America he envisions at gunpoint. He is now prepared to send in the troops to “liberate” America from Americans themselves.

If that sounds hyperbolic or melodramatic, so be it. But Trump has already done as much as he has because people underestimate how much he is prepared to abuse his power to get what he wants.

It is easy to dismiss Trump as a fool, a bumbling, decrepit billionaire who rarely knows what he wants from day to day or how to properly achieve it.

“TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out — quickly became a security-blanket catchphrase for those who want to believe that none of Trump’s threats ultimately amount to much.

It is high time that lawmakers in the U.S. — and national leaders abroad, including Canada — start taking the danger Trump represents, in his own country and elsewhere, seriously.