The Battle of Lafayette Park has shown us how Trump would like to handle the current unrest in the United States — he will have a tool, like Wm Barr, unleash violence upon the demonstrators if they don’t do what Trump wants. Trump already has I.C.E. and the F.B.I. deployed around the country, and now I read that Trump wanted 10,000 troops in the streets to suppress the rebellion, not much short of the number of soldiers we have in Afghanistan.  

King George’s soldiers managed to kill only 5 colonists at the Boston Massacre of 1755. Napoleon’s soldiers used “a whiff of grapeshot” to kill some 300 rioting royalists in 1795. Czar Nicholas II’s soldiers shot more than 500 demonstrators in St. Petersburg in 1905. And no one knows how many the assault rifles and tanks of the Chinese army killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. 

Is Trump trying to live out his monarchical/dictatorial fantasies by emulating despots of the past? I might think so, but Trump is wholly ignorant of history, of world history and of American history. If he knew more about our country he is trying to destroy, more about its Constitution and traditional separation of civilian and military, maybe he would have not been so quick to try to use our Army against us.