Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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You know those optical illusions where you look at a picture and depending on where and how your eyes focus, maybe you're looking at a vase, maybe you're looking at two faces. It kind of keeps flickering back and forth. Looking at the Trump administration is like that for me. Though the flickering is between this is democracy. The American people are getting what they voted for good and hard. Or this is authoritarianism, at least the road. to authoritarianism. I can see the picture of a president doing what he was elected to do. Donald Trump ran unquestionably on mass deportations. He ran on reversing a historic surge of migration into this country. He won on that platform. He is just doing what he promised.
He's tripling ICE's budget. He's funneling tens of billions of dollars to build detention centers. In LA, protesters tried to obstruct him. So Trump called up the National Guard. And after years of railing about crime levels in our major cities, Trump is using the power he has over Washington, D.C. To do something about it, to show Americans that he's doing something about it. I don't like any of this. I certainly didn't vote for it. But Trump promised, and Americans did vote for the biggest deportation operation in US history. It was always going to be ugly and cruel. So I can see that picture. And then it flickers, my eyes refocus. I see the evisceration of due process. I see them building detention centers where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people in them.
I see men in masks refusing to ID themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they're an occupying army. I see Trump. Sending in armed forces to take over the American capital. What is going to happen? When predictably. A protester throws a rock at an agent. Or Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks they heard a gunshot. In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city and a country defining crisis. And then what? What happens then? Because that's the other picture I see, the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder, but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build.
An authoritarian state. A military or a paramilitary that answers only to him. That puts him in total control. На вондер, архіз пикс івен дифрин? Trump promised all of this. You can destroy democracy somewhat democratically. Radley Balko is a journalist who has written about policing and criminal justice for decades. He's the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, The Militarization of America's Police Forces, and he writes the terrific substack, The Watch, where he's been tracking the militarization and the escalation of all this under Donald Trump. As always my email EzraClient Show at my times dot com.
Riley Balco, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. So I want to start here by following the money a bit. The Atlantic reported that in Donald Trump's twenty twenty-six budget, you had the FBI seeing a big budget cut, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives a big cut, the Drug Enforcement Administration again, big cut. At the same time, they're passing bills to triple the budget of ICE, to all in add $170 billion to immigration enforcement. What's behind this pattern? Of the big crime agencies.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–19:47
2
How does Trump’s immigration agenda translate into a massive ICE budget increase?
19:47–23:46
3
Why are ICE and Customs & Border Protection described as the most loyal agencies to Trump?
23:46–1:04:59
4
What is the significance of the National Guard and Marine deployment in Los Angeles?
1:04:59–1:10:15