Is Martial Law Our Immediate Future?

And why that may not be entirely a bad thing.

I don’t know where I found this years ago but it haunts me every day.

Cassidy Steele Dale forecasts and contextualizes the present to equip us to make a better, kinder future…

… and one of those ways to help you discover who you are — if you didn’t already know.

I continue to work on my octet scenarios — they’re difficult to write — but the Los Angeles protests have been happening in the meantime and I’ve gotten a bunch of questions on whether I think Trump is about to invoke martial law. I suspect he is — if only as a means of rallying his flagging support because strongmen always think that they’ll rally support by beating up people his supporters hate — but I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing. I’ll explain what I actually mean by that but it requires laying out a few disjointed thoughts first.

There are three kinds of people in the United States and we’re about to find out who of us are which kinds. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

Yesterday was the last day of school for my kids and Beautiful Wife and I were relieved for all the usual reasons plus one additional reason: since January we’ve been afraid that one our kids’ classmates would be disappeared by ICE and we’d have to explain that to SnarkDaughter and Dervish. None of their classmates were disappeared this year though some adults nearby were. So (selfishly) we got lucky. Relatively speaking. This time.

There’s a subset of historians who have been claiming — in sober rather than partisan rhetoric — that when we look back on American history the United States will only have been a full democracy between 1965 and 2016 and that its sunset was the culmination of a long organized reaction to the Civil Rights Movement, the egalitarian human impulse, and the Golden Rule. (If you’re MAGA, the Golden Rule is in Matthew 7:12. You probably haven’t heard it lately in church.)

Regarding Los Angeles, what’s going on now is very simple. What’s next may be simple, too. Let’s recap and then think forward.

• Last year during the campaign Trump (and Stephen Miller) promised to expel violent criminal undocumented immigrants from the country in order to Make America Safe Again. Most Trump supporters didn’t understand at the time (though the rest of us did) that the Trump Administration 2.0 would declare every undocumented immigrant in this country a criminal and try to mass-arrest and expel them all in a great racist purge. In recent weeks and months Trump supporters have not liked it — and sometimes have been shocked — as their neighbors have been arrested by ICE. Over the past few months support for Trump’s immigration policies — even among the MAGA faithful — have been sinking as Americans have become exposed to what his policies actually meant.

• Trump’s domestic, foreign, and economic policies are failing, face existential challenges even when they succeed in part, or are about to fail — despite all the damage he’s done so far. When he’s taken to court he loses 90+% of the time. He just broke up with his boyfriend and if that breakup fallout had gone on much longer he would have found himself on the wrong end of Epstein discovery.

• So he provoked a crisis as a nationwide distraction/cataclysm — and this one is going to work because this crisis has legs. If he continues with this and if federal courts and/or the Supreme Court don’t stop him quickly — and I’m not sure they can — then this will be our summer ahead.

• Trump — or, more precisely, Miller — has sent out ICE to conduct mass arrests. With quota goals this time. Which means they may not care much about who they arrest. Or where. Or how. They’re doing it not just to conduct the purge but to draw out people of conscience in order to crack down on them and use their outrage as an excuse to invoke martial law so he can access and use those emergency powers. His executive order last weekend was a stealth invocation of the Insurrection Act. It criminalizes dissent and criminalizes some kinds of free speech, freedom of assembly, and more. It empowers the military to disrupt not just extant protests but to thwart protests against ICE that have not yet organized. Not just in Los Angeles but everywhere in the United States. (It’s a nationwide order; Los Angeles isn’t even mentioned in it. And on Sunday, Trump said “We’re going to have troops everywhere.”) He’s walking up to formally invoking the Insurrection Act very soon.

• The MAGA faithful will eat it up with a spoon until ICE comes to their towns because they have quotas to fill and because ICE will start considering blue cities a hard target and red areas a softer touch.

• Within a few weeks of protests and within a few weeks of his invocation of the Insurrection Act — no matter how much his orders and actions are struck down by the courts — the public is going to stop ICE wherever ICE shows up and they will shout and shame them back into their cars rather than be cowed by them. That’s already started. (Americans across the political spectrum generally have a visceral allergic reaction to secret police.) And a third of Los Angeles County are immigrants (of whatever status). Los Angeles County by itself is larger population-wise than most American states. If Los Angelenos step off the sidewalk and get out of their cars wherever they see ICE conducting a raid, the numbers will be on their side no matter how many National Guardsmen are present. ICE isn’t that large of an organization — that’s why they need the National Guard. The National Guard isn’t even that large. A determined Los Angeles County can swallow ICE and bog it down into a quagmire it will never be able to escape. (And I’m not even clear on when LAPD and California Highway Patrol can arrest ICE and the National Guard or gum up their works with compliance requirements and because they think they smell weed in the Humvee and suspect they might have guns in the car.) Once ICE concludes Los Angeles isn’t a permissible operating environment they’ll fan out into the red states instead where they think they’ll be liked. To, you know, arrest the agriculture workforce. From their workplaces. Which the red states are gonna love. And will have no impact on the shelves at Walmart in the red states. Nooooo, no impact at all.

• If and when arrests of citizens outpace the arrests of immigrants the public — and maybe even MAGA — will probably conclude that Trump’s main enemy aren’t brown people or the Democrats; they’ll conclude he’s at war with the American people. And that’s when he will begin to lose support, even in the red states. That’s what imperial overreach means.

• And then he’ll use those emergency powers to subvert the 2026 and 2028 elections by declaring states of emergency in blue areas — which may be his real endgame for invoking the Insurrection Act.

Here’s why this may be a good thing: all of this will be so much so fast that it will be impossible to ignore or brush away. Invoking the Insurrection Act will be a political, legal, and societal nuclear bomb. We’ll be considered a dictatorship overnight. Trump will think it will make things easier for him but every antibody in the country — and around the world — will turn out against him immediately.

If he continues this — and who thinks he won’t? — this summer is going to be very, very bad in as many American cities and towns as he can go after. But that will give us — very quickly — another good thing. It will tell us something we need to know: who’s who among three kinds of people in this country today.

We’ll find out who among us will defy tyranny, who will submit to it, and who masturbates to it.