Bill Maher, the liberal host of Real Time, a talk show where he satirizes current events, a show with half a million viewers, said that the Trump government was getting Americans used to seeing a masked police force, people snatched off the streets, and troops in the streets of Washington, D.C., He described it as a “slow moving coup” and suggested that even if Democrats won the 2026 elections, they might not be able take office, comments widely reported in the national news media. The liberal journal Foreign Policy asked, “Is Trump executing a self-coup?” and provided evidence that indeed he appeared to be doing just that. Already back in February, The Guardian ran an editorial titled, “Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos.”

Today evidence that Trump may try to carry out a military coup is piling up. Trump is going to war—with Americans. He has mobilized the National Guard to patrol Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and also sent 700 marines to L.A. He now plans to call out the guard in Chicago, though both Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson say the guard it not needed. Trump was planning to send troops to Portland, Oregon, saying “it looks like a war zone,” but a federal judge has at least temporarily blocked those plans, saying protests there were small, not particularly violent and that there was no danger of rebellion.

Trump uses protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to justify dispatching he guard or soldiers. It is estimated that there are fourteen million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and they now live in a police state. For them a coup has already occurred. The 5,600 armed and masked agents operating throughout the country, now detain about 60,000 people a day. Some 400,000 immigrants were removed or, under government pressure, self-deported in September. Congress this summer voted for $76.5 billion in new money for ICE which is hiring 10,000 new deportation agents.

Trump knows that in Democratic states, ICE’s arrests in fields, factories, and schools will provoke protests, and then he uses those protests to justify sending in the National Guard or troops.

Trump is now also going after the “enemy within,” that is, his political opponents. In a presidential memorandum on September 25 titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Political Violence,” Trump responded to the accusation that he was a fascist saying, “This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In his remarks to an unprecedented gathering of 800 U.S. generals and admirals called to a special meeting on October 1, he said that the cities run by the radical left Democrats—San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—were “very unsafe places, and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He said, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

So, it looks like we may face a coup, but if we do, many cities and states and millions of people will resist.

Dan La Botz