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The original was posted on /r/keep_track by /u/rusticgorilla on 2025-02-26 12:20:38+00:00.

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Amidst the scattershot of unjust firings of federal workers and reckless cancelation of government contracts, Donald Trump is quickly and quietly consolidating control of three key pillars of American government: the military, law enforcement, and election infrastructure. These institutions once safeguarded American democracy, denying Trump tyrannical power during his first term office. Generals like Mark Milley, John Kelly, and James Mattis pushed back on his fascist agenda; Department of Justice officials like Sally Yates and Geoffrey Berman investigated Trump’s illegal schemes; civil servants inside election security agencies tirelessly rebutted right-wing disinformation campaigns.

Pay attention: We are moving towards a future where the military and federal law enforcement apparatus pledge an oath to Trump, not to the Constitution.

Control the military

On Friday night, Trump announced he is firing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman CQ Brown, a three-star Air Force general who the Senate confirmed in an 83-11 vote in 2023. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is a group of senior military leaders that advises the President, Defense Secretary, Homeland Security Council, and the National Security Council on military matters. The chair is the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and normally serves a term of four years, staggered to provide stability between presidential administrations.

CQ Brown, the second Black general to ever serve as chair, has been a target of the right wing’s so-called “anti-DEI” push for years. To use the clearest language possible: This DEI “backlash” (in legacy media’s phrasing) is actually an attempt to resegregate positions of power along racial and gender lines. As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth explained, Black people must be assumed to be unqualified due to their skin color:

First of all, you gotta fire, you know, you gotta fire the chairman of Joint Chiefs,” he said flatly in a podcast in November. And in one of his books, he questioned whether Brown got the job because he was Black.

“Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt — which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote.

To better promote “merit” in hiring, Trump announced his pick to replace Brown: Dan Caine, a retired lieutenant general who so lacks the requisite experience to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs that his nomination legally requires a “national interest” waiver from the White House. But Caine does possess the “merit” Trump desires most: he is a straight white man.

• It may be important to note that Caine is an investor in a cryptocurrency venture capital firm, as well as an AI and defense technology venture capital firm, and is an advisor to a venture capital firm founded by Jared Kushner’s brother that received funding from Peter Thiel.

Just after Trump fired CQ Brown, Hegseth revealed that he also fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to be chief of naval operations and the first woman to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. With Brown’s and Franchetti’s removal, the Joint Chiefs of Staff is now entirely made up of white men.

Presumably, Trump believes that eliminating everyone with a hint of “diversity” will result in a military leadership that is more sympathetic to his Christian nationalist agenda—and, therefore, less likely to object to suspect orders. But just to be sure there are no pesky questions of “legality” or “lawfulness,” Hegseth fired three senior Judge Advocates General (JAG), the military’s top lawyers who administer the code of justice, provide legal advice to commanders, and conduct investigations of misconduct and crimes. Firing JAG officers would be a critical step for an administration that intends to issue illegal orders in the future. As Hegseth himself said on Fox News Sunday: “We want lawyers who…don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens.”

The question is: What is going to happen that reasonable lawyers would wish to stop?

Control law enforcement

The Senate voted last week to confirm Kash Patel, a far-right Qanon conspiracy theorist, to be Director of the FBI. Patel first entered Trumpworld as a staffer for the National Security Council in 2017, where he came under congressional scrutiny for taking part in Rudy Guiliani’s plot to pressure Ukraine to smear Joe Biden. In the years since, Patel has spent his time on the right-wing media circuit promoting the idea that the government is made up of “Deep State” actors who stole the 2020 election from Trump and need to be punished.

“Anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life and our citizens, here and abroad, will face the full wrath of the DOJ and FBI," Patel said [during his swearing-in ceremony]. "If you seek to hide in any corner of this country or planet, we will put on the world’s largest manhunt and we will find you and we will decide your end-state.”

Despite reportedly promising the FBI Agents Association that he would follow tradition and appoint an experienced Special Agent as his number two, Patel announced earlier this week that his deputy will be right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino. If you are unaware of who Bongino is, let’s look at a few of his greatest hits:

• He suggested that Trump should ignore court orders, adding: “Who’s going to arrest him? The marshals? You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? Department of Justice. That is under the — oh yeah — the executive branch. Donald Trump’s going to order his own arrest? This is ridiculous.”
• He argued that Trump should launch an investigation of “special tyrant” Jack Smith (who prosecuted Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection and for stealing classified documents).
• He said the person who planted pipe bombs on January 6 was an FBI “insider” who is being protected by the agency to hide that the entire “quote-unquote insurrection” was an “inside job.”
• He tweeted that the DOJ’s and FBI’s warnings of Russian interference in our elections cannot be trusted because the agency has “a deep and troubled history of election interference in defense of their democrat allies.”

If you were president, you would only select a Patel or a Bongino to lead federal law enforcement because you want their politics—which happen to align with your politics—to dictate law enforcement decisions. It is also why you would select Ed Martin, who advocated for January 6 defendants, as D.C.’s top prosecutor. In between sending letters to Democratic critics of Elon Musk over so-called “threats” to DOGE, Martin has declared that the DOJ acts as “President Trumps’ (sic) lawyers to protect his leadership” against “entities like the [Associated Press] that refuse to put America first.”

Again, the politicization is the point: Martin is sending a clear signal that the rule of law, bound by the Constitution, is no longer in effect. Loyalty to Trump is now law enforcement’s guiding star. Case in point: Rep. Cory Mills, a Republican congressman from Florida, allegedly physically assaulted his mistress in D.C. last wee…

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