The Threat of Retaliation in America
The Trump regime's actions are making America less safe. They are exploiting fear to seize more power. We should not be intimidated.
So many of the Trump regime’s actions can break your brain. Launch a war against Iran without a clearly articulated justification, a well-thought-out plan that addresses consequences, any idea how long it will last, authorization from Congress or support from the American public? Previous administrations well understood that attacking this country of over 91 million people could easily escalate into an uncontrollable regional conflict and trigger deadly retaliation by the murderous Iranian regime on allied countries and American bases in the Middle East.
It’s almost laughable that among the ever-changing reasons for waging this expanding war—now entering its second week—Trump particularly wanted to kill the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because of an alleged assassination plot. “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” the pumped-up Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week at a press briefing.
While Hegseth was belligerently insisting the regime is “toast,” his boss was busy demanding “unconditional surrender,” claiming that Iran is “the Loser of the Middle East” and condemning “our once Great Ally” the United Kingdom and Prime Minister Keir Starmer for potentially sending two aircraft carriers later than Trump would have wanted. “We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” declared the deranged Donald on his gaslighting platform, Truth Social.
If Trump were simply insane, desperate for retribution or determined to distract from the Epstein files, the reckless death and destruction “over there” would be bad enough. (Strikes yesterday on multiple oil depots pumped toxic gases into the air of a highly populated civilian area and, the BBC reported, “night turned into day.”) But this massive military assault comes in the wake of FBI Director Kash Patel firing a dozen counterintelligence agents and staff whose responsibilities included monitoring possible threats from Iran on American soil.
CNN reported that this gutting was motivated by “a simple reason”: Trump wanted the removal of agents investigating him for keeping classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the story by reporter Hannah Rabinowitz also noted that these firings “have added to concern inside the Justice Department and FBI that counterterrorism and intelligence investigations in the wake of the military operation in Iran could be hampered by a mass exodus of national security experts,” removing “decades of combined experience in identifying the types of threats that sources say could appear” because of the Iran attack.
How foolish is that? Well, extremely foolish if you think that the Trump regime should be committed to keeping America safe.
According to Miles Taylor, former counterterrorism operations lead at the Department of Homeland Security, his old department wasn’t in the room when the bombing started and doesn’t appear to have been involved in the defensive planning. Taylor, who now write the valuable Defiance newsletter, notes that “thousands of counterterrorism agents, experts and officials have been moved to ‘immigration’ enforcement.”
How dangerous is all this? Consider Taylor’s lucid summary of America’s current vulnerability, which is genuinely alarming: “Anyone who has partial cognition knows that a U.S. war with Iran…carries an immediate and predictable consequence. You hit someone, they hit back. In this case, we should be expecting Iranian-directed or Iranian-inspired attacks on American soil.”
And then there’s the sociopathic indifference of Trump, whose sickening response to a question by a Time magazine reporter about the possibility of a retaliatory attack in America was “I guess.” And worse: “Yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
In this moment, it’s important to soberly recognize what we are up against. Trump is not interested in our safety. On the contrary, he is more than willing to exploit a terrorist attack at home to further consolidate his power. We already know that he’s more than ready to incite an “emergency” in an effort to take control of or even halt the midterm elections. Human lives are just pawns in his self-serving plot.
I think it’s important to hear from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder, who just published a Substack piece entitled “The Desire for Terror.” He talks about “self-terrorism,” which involves “allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.” Snyder explicitly states:“A purpose of the war on Iran might well be to provoke a terrorist attack inside the United States.” This is aided by “the disabling of counter-terror.”
Snyder’s purpose here is not to provoke fear, but to urge us to pay attention to the patterns and be mentally prepared to confront this ongoing danger. “We must not allow ourselves the luxury of surprise,” he writes, since this strengthens the hand of the authoritarian regime.
Note the 18th of 20 lessons Snyder offers in his useful explanation of the authoritarian playbook. His advice:
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
To be clear: We may get lucky. We may avoid a deadly attack, be it by foiled plans, incompetence or a decision by one of America’s enemies to not proceed.
But it’s hard to see how Trump’s war in Iran is not escalating the threat. And so is his increasingly virulent rhetoric about the legitimacy of elections.
We can also expect Trump’s desperation to intensify as we get closer to the midterms, thereby ramping up the threat of his incitements. It will be increasingly hard—even for this man untethered from reality—to miss that Americans are rejecting the Republican failures to address the real struggles of regular Americans.
It would be a mistake for us to assume that Donald Trump—who can be accurately described as the enemy of the people—will not try something to provoke fear and deny our will. We should be ready. And we should keep in mind that his time is limited and his regime will not endure, as long as we stay engaged and keep the faith.
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“Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
A hundred thousand thanks for amplifying Professor Snyder's enlightening post, which focuses our attention on the dangers represented by Trump&Co. Anyone who would deliberately provoke an attack on his own people is a danger to himself and others, which is the legal definition for a person who belongs in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. And this current war and decapitation of our national counter-terrorism task force is part of a pattern. Does anyone not see that ICE's illegal acts and the illegal deployment of National Guard troops and the Marines in Blue cities was at least in part meant to provoke violent resistance, which Trump could then exploit to postpone or eliminate our midterm elections? These are the actions of a madman.