Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer, dir., Paramount Pictures, 1964. Screenshot.

Stephen Miller is trolling me

Like most other writers for Counterpunch, I’ve written my share of columns about the current president. I’m slightly embarrassed about that fact; attention for a narcissist is like heroin for a junkie, and nobody wants to feed an addiction. But Trump is as liable to read Counterpunch as he is The New England Journal of Medicine, so on that score, my conscience is clear.

I’m less certain about his entourage. Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and very own Goebbels, is just perverse enough to read Counterpunch to buttress his claims that his boss’s opponents are “communist lunatics.” And that possibility, however remote, gives me pause. Since I started writing for Counterpunch in 2018, almost every awful thing I predicted Trump would do, he did. Almost every cruelty he enacted, I anticipated. Has Miller been trolling me? Have I been feeding him and Trump ideas? I therefore offer the following with trepidation.

A secret hidden in plain sight

Trump has sought to undermine every stabilizing institution of American political or civil society: Congress, the courts, federal agencies, universities, law and medicine. Were his goals not so corrupt and self-aggrandizing, we might call him a revolutionary. Instead, he is simply a greedy bastard who has for reasons unfathomable, hoodwinked a significant minority of Americans into believing he will make them rich or redress their grievances. They are discovering the con, though far too slowly for it to matter. But just in case there’s a major erosion of popular support, or congressional opposition arises, Trump has a back-up plan – so well broadcast it might be called a “front-up” plan: a presidential proclamation of national emergency and declaration of martial law.

National Guard troops and ICE agents, the latter a veritable Gestapo, are already pre-positioned in Los Angles and Washington. They may be sent soon to Chicago, New York, Boston and Baltimore, though public opposition is growing and there is a chance Trump will hold-off for now. What will be the pretext for a declaration of martial law, followed by postponement of midterm elections? What will martial law look like? Can it be stopped? Here’s a brief primer on martial law and its prospects in the U.S.A.

Definition

Martial law is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. The nearest reference is Article I, Section 8, Clause 15: “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasions.” There’s also Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature........

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