“Tin Soldiers And Nixon Comin’ …”

Steve Schmidt is upset:

Donald Trump seems to be agitating for an American Tiananmen Square in Portland, Oregon, where American troops open fire on American civilians with the weapons purchased by American taxpayers to defend the nation from threats to our liberty.

Heil Trump!

Trump has menaced Portland by “authorizing Full Force” with the “if necessary” caveat venomously spit as an afterthought.

Illegal orders are coming to America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines from their debauched, debased, corrupt, un-American and psychologically-addled civilian chain of command. The orders will be passed down, and someone, somewhere will be expected to pull the trigger — under false pretenses — against make-believe enemies who, like the soldiers who will kill them, are America’s sons and daughters.

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There are two words that will break America: open fire.

This is coming.

Those words will be studied for all the rest of American history. Every detail of every person’s involvement who passed them forward and down the chain of command will be known — from Trump to Hegseth and on down, all the way to the men who light up an American city on orders from their superiors to kill their fellow citizens.

It has taken a long time to get here, but here we are.

There were many exits on the long road.

None were taken.

God help America.

If those two words were spoken on the campus of Kent State on May 4. 1970, nobody heard them. But they must have been said, because shots rang out and students, “America’s sons and daughters,” died. Who is studying the Kent State shootings for the rest of American history? Who recalls it to mind 55 years later? Remembers it? Cares? Given Schmidt’s history, I’m sure had he been an adult in 1970 involved in politics, he wouldn’t have batted an eye. Although none of the students killed were involved in the protest (which was mildly disruptive, but hardly violent. The students killed just happened to be between the Guard and the protesters.), the Guard soldiers were exonerated at trial. And everybody was fine with that. Everybody who mattered. The complaints of “America’s sons and daughters” were ignored.

Trump is an obscenity, a cancer on the body politic which, I hope, is also the cure as the nation renounces him and all his works. But please quit telling me this is the worst of times and America has never seen anything like it and it’s the end of the Republic if we don’t listen to the words of these brave prophets.

Because I know enough (and it ain’t that much) about American history to know Trump is just another speed bump in the road, and that the country hasn’t really fallen that far, because it never stood as tall as the myths we tell ourselves in the first place. Hell, his threat to the people of Portland is not even an unprecedented act. Mayor Daley unleashed his police thugs on the Yippies in Chicago in ‘68, middle class kids who were, again, “America’s sons and daughters.” Funny, they aren’t remembered that way.

Yes, these are perilous times, but when are they not? The history of America, from Columbus to today, is one of brutalizing people for the benefit of others. Trump unleashing violence in Portland is just another footnote in that history book.

“History, to the defeated, may say ‘Alas,’ but cannot help or pardon.” So please stop trying to put history on your side; it just underlines that you feel powerless. You aren’t. Trump is.

In the words of Sinead O’Connor: “Fight the real power.”