I have watched, with disgust and anger, as the current president works at normalizing the presence of armed, anonymous agents and military forces on the streets of peaceful American cities according to his dictates. This is authoritarian action 101.

The behavior of his masked ICE agents isn’t the removal of dangerous criminals and rapists; it is aimed at intimidating everyone who doesn’t bend the knee to his whims. He is removing the lowest level of paid workers in the U.S. economy to create more economic chaos on top of his ridiculous tariff war.

The farm economies of the Midwest find that the market for their product continues evaporating even as the cheap labor they require to bring in the crops has been eliminated. The crops are plowed under or left to rot in the fields because they cost more to harvest than they can bring in at the commercial distributors. That means farm failures are rising at the same time as rising prices for food because of the tariff war. I don’t see any army of devout MAGA followers rushing in to fill the gap.

He is also trying to make the blatant use of quasi-military and military forces as a national “police” in cities and towns normal, although the tactic is clearly not needed and actually illegal to any impartial observer. In my view he is using our tax dollars to train and arm a private army that he can use for the next phase of Making America Great — for Billionaires.

John Seksay
Augusta