Trump has brilliantly orchestrated a legal coup - Parker, WaPo

Of course President Donald Trump wants to extend his declaration that D.C. has a crime emergency. Ever since he sent in the National Guard, hardly anyone has been talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Few understand better than Trump how to convert a problem into an opportunity. If you can’t sue someone, distract, distract, distract. Since the start of Trump’s second term almost seven months ago, his modus operandi has been to throw as much as possible at the American people in hopes of overwhelming them beyond their capacity to process or protest.

This has worked rather well, given Trump’s “successes” — from deporting and/or caging undocumented immigrants to taking over the Kennedy Center. (You can hold your breath waiting for it to become the Trump Center; it shouldn’t be long.) Already, he has assumed the role of host for the annual Kennedy Center Honors, the recipients of which he was “very involved” in selecting.

He has defunded public media, gelded traditional media, dismantled government and educational institutions — or tried — and put fear and loathing in the hearts of D.C.’s 700,000-plus population, more than 40 percent of which is Black. (We might want to keep an eye on the demographics of Trump’s crackdown targets.)

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Regardless of whether National Guard troops carry weapons, their presence is a warning that the city is under Trump’s control. I don’t want to suggest that Trump is acting like a military dictator. But I have seen — and felt — this type of intimidation before, when I was a student in Spain and witnessed tactics employed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975. Franco and Trump share not only an obsession with loyalty but also a willingness to use military force to maintain civilian order.

(snip)

In the absence of a real crisis — riots, bedlam, natural disasters, alien invasion — this sort of federal intimidation has no place on America’s streets. Citizens should have the right to move about as they like, to gather peacefully, to think, speak and breathe freely, without fear. What’s happening now in D.C. is not of the people, by the people or for the people. It is for Donald Trump alone.

Speaking of whom, anything new on those Epstein files?

https://wapo.st/45q5Fr6

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