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Americans aren't ready for Trump's police state [1]
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Date: 2025-07-09
Monday morning, less than a week after Republicans funded the world’s largest police state with Trump’s big beautiful nightmare, heavily armed and masked agents swarmed the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles.
Terrifying the peaceful soccer-playing community, ICE agents arrived on helicopter, horseback, military tanks, and armored vehicles with roof-mounted weapons common in third world countries. Embedded Fox News crews broadcast the whole operation as if it were a reality show. When it was over, Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino warned elected officials, “Better get used to us now, ‘cause this is going to be normal very soon. We will go anywhere, anytime we want in Los Angeles.”
It’s all Trump’s made-for-TV terror, except it has real-life consequences.
Trump signed his heinous bill into law in another overly produced, lavish, made-for-Fox moment funded by American tax payers. On the Fourth of July, cameras rolling, Trump raised his sharpie, perfectly choreographed to follow B2 bombers flying overhead in formation, at a cost to taxpayers of $2 million per. July 4 was the artificial deadline Trump imposed for Congress to pass the bill, to guarantee that no one would have time to read all 950 pages of it before they voted. Dubbed the cruelest piece of legislation in US history, Trump’s monstrosity will:
· Remove over $1 trillion from Medicaid, leaving 12 to 14 million Americans without health care;
· Extend already unaffordable, damn-near-theft tax cuts to wealthy Americans and corporations that don’t need them;
· Adjust Medicaid payments forcing many rural hospitals to close their doors;
· Slash Food Stamps and food assistance for approximately 42 million Americans, including children and senior citizens; while
· Increasing the already-bloated federal deficit by $3.4 trillion, an unprecedented debt level many economists consider dangerous.
Trump and his party are spending money like drunk sailors on leave, dampening the economy with a deficit to GDP ratio that will affect everyone’s interest rates, bond yields that control mortgage rates, the strength of the US dollar, and the cost of repaying our national debt owed to foreign governments, primarily China.
What about the political backlash, you ask? Too clever by half, republicans delayed cuts to Medicaid until after the midterms to protect themselves from consequences.
Republicans just created an American police state
Even worse than the misery awaiting America’s poor and working class, the bill specifically funds an unprecedented American police state like the one displayed yesterday in LA’s MacArthur Park. Draped in anti-immigrant language, the bill creates a standing army of masked ICE agents, and funds enough of them to move into and terrorize every city in the nation.
The bill includes a 265 percent annual budget increase to ICE’s current detention budget and $45 billion to build new immigration detention centers. This funding level is a 62 percent larger budget than the entire federal prison system, where 155,933 inmates are currently incarcerated, many for life. After cutting a trillion dollars from healthcare and Medicaid, Trump will soon spend more on ICE domestic apprehensions, masked-agent arrests, transportation and detentions than most nations spend on their entire military budgets.
Republicans are building a police state beyond the comprehension of most Americans. We’ve all seen the videos of ICE goons beating migrants in front of their children; any one of them could have been recruited from Trump’s applicant pool of pardoned felons. After Trump was somehow re-elected, he pardoned rioters convicted of violent felonies during his J6 uprising. Here, he at least gets a nod for sinister efficiency: J6 cultists who thrive on hate in service to Trump are standing back and standing by, needing something to do. They were already armed and looking for political violence, why not give ‘em an ICE badge? If they were recorded while beating capital police with vigor, or carrying a noose for Mike Pence because he honored the Constitution over Trump, all the better.
Trump’s $1 trillion defense budget will not end well
Trump now has $1 trillion—with a T— to spend on his defense budget. Anyone wondering how he’s going to spend it, after shamefully withholding military aid and weaponry Congress already approved for Ukraine, should consider Pete Hegseth. Trump’s SecDef recently testified before Congress and described how national defense, under Trump, is transitioning the military from a force fighting foreign threats into a “domestic affair,” testifying that,
“we’re entering another phase, especially under President Trump with his focus on the homeland, where the National Guard and Reserves become a critical component of how we secure that homeland.”
Juxtapose that promise over Trump telling reporters that the worst threat to national security is ‘the enemy within,’ ie, people who don’t support him, and it all comes into view. Pan wide for Trump’s wet dream gulag agenda: ICE facilities where migrants, political prisoners, critics, and journalists are baked alive, guarded by reptiles, or denaturalized and deported to war-torn South Sudan.
Republicans have empowered a lunatic
With this bill’s passage, Trump has now been handed the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in United States history.
This follows the Supreme Court making him the most unchecked and unbridled president in our nation’s history, both by allowing him to break criminal laws with broad impunity, and by blocking nationwide injunction orders that stopped him. The republican 6-3 majority on SCOTUS has now permanently knee-capped federal judges who were doing their best to stop Trump from doing his worst.
The broken man they are protecting wants aggressive, masked ICE agents and military tanks rolling on every city street. He wants violent resistance; violence will allow him to declare martial law and stay in power.
The six Catholic Supreme Court justices who deliberately empowered him will bear direct moral responsibility for the crimes against humanity about to commence.
If anyone doubted Trump’s death grip on the Republican Party, the police state we’re embarking on will remove all doubt. Republicans will now die with Trump, or democracy will die with them.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
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