The Quantico Constitution

Here’s a guess: you’re probably not worried about Venezuelan drug runners. If a few of them are incinerated by American authorities, that’s the price they pay for running drugs. After all, they were in American waters. They were also official enemy combatants. And the president has been empowered since forever to kill anyone the hell he wants. Would a president as scrupulous as Donald Trump summarily execute off-limits foreigners? Not the Donald Trump I know.

But wait! Actually, none of these things are true. We may be outraged by the behavior of Venezuelan criminals, but they were not running drugs in international waters. Neither are they enemy combatants. And despite the President’s famous claim about Fifth Avenue and the killing of any pedestrian he chooses, he is not entitled to murder anyone. That would make him a big, bad criminal, kind of like the killers and rapists he talked about as a candidate.

The killing of Venezuelans is instead something else, part of a general campaign of violence, featuring new uses for the lethal instruments of the state. Trump has always believed in flooding the zone. The utility of releasing so much water is that we can’t bail fast enough to keep ourselves from drowning. The propellors in this round are Project 2025 and Trump’s desperate need to distract us from the Epstein Scandal. Sauron will do anything to keep those files under wraps for fear that they will turn his base against him. If Marjorie Taylor Greene is now a critic, he knows in his heart that Epstein revelations could disable him.

That’s how we come to Memphis and Portland. That’s how we come to the stand-off in Chicago. And it helps to account for last week’s gathering at Quantico where the president and his Mini-Me, Secretary Brylcreem, announced a new way of thinking about the American military. In front of stony-faced generals trying their best to hold it in, Trump said that he needed military force to defeat the enemy within. That meant Democrats opposed to his tyrannical behavior who were themselves traitors to the American way. Like the Mexicans murderers and rapists before them, they were at war with legitimate American authority, and their cities had been turned into zones of chaos and violence.

Not only that, but suppressing them forcefully would be a positive development for the military, itself. For Trump, blue cities are a potential training ground where the military can learn a new kind of warfare. He asked that they be thought of as laboratories for strategy, promising sites for research and development. And he was ready to declare the state of emergency that would, for him, authorize the assault.

If you are alarmed by all of this, welcome to the club. The yellowed document of our ancestral founders that has held the country together for centuries is about to be replaced by another covenant. Let’s just call it the Quantico Constitution. I may hate what it says, but I like the alliteration. Regrettably, that won’t blunt its lethal effects.