Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Another Civil War?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” JB Pritzer, Governor of Illinois

 

CBS

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been documenting the irrational talk of President Trump, who seems to be trying to distract the media from the bad economic news and his involvement in the Epstein files in her quote from Governor Pritzer that she cited above.

“Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” said Professor Richardson

I believe it’s worse than that. He seems to want to foment a civil war by threatening to “invade” Chicago and New York as he invaded Los Angeles, using armed red state National Guard troops. The message is clear. Red southern states are finally able to invade blue northern states, something they couldn’t do in the 1860s civil war!

Can it also be a pretext for stopping the vote in upcoming elections by declaring some form of martial law? The courts have stopped his alien invasion rationale to date for rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting them without due process.

But economic growth keeps being revised downward. In the Labor Department’s latest revisions, the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs in the last months of the Biden presidency and early stages of the Trump administration, indicating the labor market began to weaken far sooner than previously believed.

The updated employment figures from April 2024 to March 2025 could cause the Federal Reserve to lower short-term interest rates even more in September — and beyond. The latest downward revision is the biggest since at least 2000, reports MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

As a result, the pace of job creation from May through August slowed to 27,000 a month, one of the worst stretches since 2010 if the pandemic era is excluded.

Trump’s desperate attempt to deflect media attention now that the SCOTUS shadow docket has just allowed him to ignore the Fourth Amendment ban on indiscriminate search and seizure, will give Democrats plenty of political ammunition for the upcoming elections. The Supreme Court decision means ICE can stop any Hispanic looking, or Spanish speaking, person who must prove to their satisfaction that they are a US citizen or here legally.

It is an incredible overstretching of authority. And the immigration roundup in general will harm legal immigrants and minorities as well. Will Americans vote for a political party that blatantly breaks the Fourth Amendment, other than the hard line MAGA base that believes anything Trump says?

It is why Trump wants to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now talking and acting like a White Supremacist to rally Trump’s base.

I believe that Trump will touch a nerve that he hadn’t counted on, Americans’ love of freedom. Trump preaches the opposite, the right to imprison many Americans on almost any pretext.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

No comments: