When this story broke a few days ago, I decided to skip covering Trump's shocking DoJ speech because I only have so much time to write each day, and applying a power dynamic analysis to the news at the time lead me to believe focusing on Trump's anti-trans policies, attacks on protest rights, and direct violation of judge's orders designed to protect marginalized targets of the Trump regime from state oppression, was more important than raising awareness about Downmarket Mussolini's so-called "airing of grievances" towards government lawyers who prosecuted him for very real crimes he absolutely committed. If nothing else I assumed the media would swiftly jump to the defense of DoJ lawyers, but they'd be less inclined to do so for incarcerated ppl, deported migrants, student protestors, and trans Americans.
Unfortunately in the time since, corporate media coverage of Trump's threats during his DoJ speech has become extremely squishy, actively working to minimize the gravity of what Trump said, while simultaneously Dowmarket Mussolini has revealed that said speech was simply an early salvo in what is almost certainly going to be an ongoing quest to root out and punish anyone who dared to bring court cases (criminal or civil) against him. Given that this is *not* going away, we're gonna have to back up a few days here and talk about Trump's DoJ speech and why its implications are far more serious than the "airing of grievances" many larger media outlets reported it as.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/us-trump-justice-department-speech_n_67d4a1ace4b08455bb0719ee
Trump Pledges To 'Expel Rogue Actors' In Political Speech At Justice Department
"Though other presidents have spoken from the Justice Department’s ceremonial Great Hall, Trump’s address amounted to an extraordinary display of partisan politics and personal grievance inside an institution that is meant to be blind to both. Casting himself as the country’s “chief law enforcement officer,” a title ordinarily reserved for the attorney general, he promised to target his perceived enemies even as he claimed to be ending what he called the weaponization of the department.
The speech marked the latest manifestation of Trump’s unparalleled takeover of the department and came amid a brazen campaign of retribution already undertaken under his watch, including the firing of prosecutors who investigated him during the Biden administration and the scrutiny of thousands of FBI agents who investigated the president’s supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over, and they are never going to come back and never coming back,” Trump said to cheers from a crowd that included local law enforcement officials, political allies and FBI Director Kash Patel. “So now, as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”
There's a lot to unpack here; including Trump's effective termination of the official independence of the Department of Justice, his direct identification of individuals in the DoJ he intends to target for reprisals, and the transformation of the department into his de facto private legal team by way of placing people who acted in his legal defense in positions of power throughout the DoJ. While this article still doesn't seem to grasp the full scope of Trump's fascist intentions here, I recommend reading it in its entirety anyway because it does a good job of not minimizing what he said and demonstrating a pattern of persecution in how Trump uses the law and the DoJ to target his enemies.
Additionally however, I think it's important to acknowledge how this story now fits into a larger, identifiable pattern in how Trump rules and how he's prosecuting his fascist agenda, in light of recent attempts to declare Biden's pardons invalid based on a longstanding right wing conspiracy about autopens and what "signing" a presidential order actually means. Whether we're talking about annexing Canada, mass deportations, kidnapping student protestors, or illegally handing over the power of the purse to Elon Musk, Trump appears to always preview his fascist activities by bringing them up, often casually, in his rambling public appearances first. This then establishes his personal antipathies as state antipathies, and his personal definition of reality as officially recognized reality. Once that is accomplished, the fascist administration will increasingly operate as if Trump's public utterances have always been known reality, and prosecute the regime's agenda based on that; "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" indeed. As such, it's no longer reasonable to question which of Trump's fascist ravings are "serious," but rather we must question when they will become "reality" and what fascist agendas they will ultimately support.
