Donald Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller were preparing a “legal” military coup in the spring of 2020. Miller was and remains an important figure in Trump’s circle. He has been described as Trump’s link to the “white supremacy” current, which is fighting in America for ideas not very different from Hitler’s ideas regarding the “superiority of the Aryan race”. Miller is currently running a major “trumpist” think tank.
The above conclusion follows effortlessly from an article published by The New York Times on October 19, based on the testimony of senior American military officers. Probably fearing its explosive political implications, the Democratic establishment itself then sought to stifle this case as much as it could. Within hours the article was taken off the front page of the Times’ online edition, while there was no mention of these revelations on the online front pages of The Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, and ABC, NBC, CBS or CNN.
The pretext for initiating plans to impose martial law in the US was to deal with the influx of immigrants from Mexico, who were supposedly a particular threat because of the Coronavirus, and to combat drug trafficking.
Miller’s plan, with Trump’s support, was to deploy 250,000 US troops – more than half of the 481,000 on active duty in the US army and more than ever deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan – to seal the US-Mexico border. At the same time – and despite the Mexican president’s categorical opposition to any joint operation with the Americans – the US armed forces would invade Mexican territory with military gangs of assassins to kill members of drug gangs, as they did in Pakistan and Afghanistan with “Islamic terrorists”.
The most likely result of the implementation of such a plan would have been the conversion of major American cities such as San Diego, Phoenix and El Paso into military camps, clashes between the US and Mexican armies, mass demonstrations on both sides of the border, the creation of a state of disorder and the imposition of martial law. The drug gangs might have responded with violent attacks in other American cities far from the border, creating a pretext for the imposition of martial law there as well. The whole project was a pure provocation and certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with the problems of immigration or drugs.
It is significant that Miller did not attempt to put his plan into effect by appealing to the normal US military hierarchy, but by having his friends in the Department of Homeland Security appeal directly to the US Armed Forces Northern Command, which was created after September 11, with responsibility for the deployment of military forces on US soil.
Ultimately, as was the case with the plan for war against Iran, and probably also with that for war against Korea, if there was one, and with the later proposal to deploy military forces against the protesters over Floyd’s death, it was the US military that stopped the President’s plans. If it was Defense Secretary Mattis who “grounded” the Syrian bombing plans in 2018, turning them into something akin to fireworks; in the case of Mexico it was Defense Secretary Esper’s turn to put the final brakes on the White House.
Miller’s plan was not an isolated act. It represents the culmination of a strategy that began in 2017-18 aiming at creating the conditions for imposing military rule in the US, in parallel and in conjunction with military adventurism in the Middle East. The same plan was, moreover, intended to be implemented later, with the proposal to use the military against the Floyd protesters. The plan was to culminate around the November 2020 elections.
These revelations, as well as a multitude of other elements, confirm also that the international – and not only American – forces behind Trump have a “proto-Fascist” programme, which aims:
1. to generalize authoritarian methods of governance, both within the United States and other major states; and
2. to go to war.
It is probable that next year, those “protofascist” forces will attempt to seize power in Paris, and strike Biden from Europe as well. Neocons and Netanyahu have already used this method ten years ago, by using Sarkozy to launch the Libya destruction campaign when Obama was ruling in Washington.
Their basic stratagem, essentially the same as Mussolini’s and Hitler’s, is to use demagogically the very discontent from the establishment, the radicalism caused by the crisis and the sense of people being treated as if they are trash and have no control over the decisions that affect them, and to put this energy and this radicalism at the service of the more extremist forces of the very same establishment that has provoked them.
Their main weapons are the cultivation of a blind nationalism (because there is also a perfectly reasonable and healthy nationalism, one that defends the legitimate national interests of peoples), of generalized confusion, of chaos and of insanity. Their communication strategy has been described by Steve Bannon himself – who was Trump’s chief strategist, a former Goldman Sachs executive, a former US naval officer, and supposedly a late anti-globalisation guerrilla – in his catchphrase: ‘We will fill the Internet with shit’.