Trump's Meta-poll rating according to FiveThirtyEight as of 3:30 p.m. 24th July.[/caption]
What really concerns me is that aspiring authoritarians don't get there alone; it requires the support and cooperation of thousands of people in official positions, a major party, and the support of a large demographic in a country's population. All of those are now in place. You don't hear stories of Trumpian storm troopers resisting orders, instead you hear the same thing we heard at the Nuremburg trials -- "I was just following orders". You see a Republican Party that is as silent as a nest of crickets, and you see a significant population who support the rising dictator. According to FiveThirtyEight although he is losing Trump's poll ratings have actually gone up over the last few days.
The majority of Americans need to wake up. The America you think you know is disappearing like a morning mist.:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/20149977/1227759599.jpg.jpg)
Late on Wednesday evening, Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) was tear-gassed in his own city.
Wheeler was visiting the main site of the city’s ongoing protests, which have devolved into violent clashes with the police for weeks, to try to understand their grievances. Seemingly out of nowhere, as-yet-unidentified law enforcement personnel unleashed gas on the crowd — while the mayor was still in it.
“I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler told a New York Times journalist on the scene.
According to the Times, the officers who launched the gas were not local police. Instead, they were part of the Homeland Security Department’s contingent in Portland, which the Trump administration has deployed over the explicit objections of both Wheeler and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D). The DHS officers operate in military-style gear without obvious identification. They have been extremely violent, using heavy-handed tactics that have escalated the conflict in downtown Portland. They have been filmed grabbing suspected protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans.
And now President Trump wants to send these detachments to other parts of the country — announcing, on Wednesday, “a surge of federal law enforcement” to Chicago and Albuquerque, language […]
