Every good dictator needs his groups of independent thugs who will do his bidding without question and serve as an extra-legal enforcement arm. This is why Trump got his Brownshirts within hours after taking the oath to be president on Jan. 20, 2025.
Brownshirts, or political goon squads, have been used by every tyrant and dictator in recorded history. They are the grassroots citizens who can be called up at a moment’s notice to terrorize the locals, lynch a questioning citizen to make an example for the rest of the population, or do the work local police or the state police cannot do without going through the time-consuming legal process.
Trump’s Brown Shirts are the 1,600 people he pardoned within hours of taking office. These are the same people who assaulted and killed police at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump wanted to prevent the Congressional certification of Joe Biden as president. The pardons include Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges. Both organizations are comprised of anti-Semitic, white Christian nationalists who support Trump’s policies.
The U.S. Justice Department then conducted the most extensive investigation in its history to prosecute the thugs who invaded and destroyed the Capitol. In the process, the inept US Attorney General Merrick Garland devoted resources that also could have gone into investigating Trump‘s commanding role in the Capitol invasion and the resulting damage and attacks on police. When Trump pardoned the thugs, he invalidated the massive Justice Department investigation.
When Garland waited almost three years to appoint a Special Prosecutor (Jack Smith) to investigate Trump, he gave Trump and his lawyers the needed time to delay any trial and even the release of the report on this and Trump’s handling of classified documents. As of today, the American people will never see how Trump instigated the invasion of the Capitol, worked to invalidate the election of Joe Biden, and hid classified documents.
This makes Garland zero for two in the most critical presidential
investigations since Watergate. Garland is zero for two in his Trump investigations, and he opened the door for Trump to get elected and to undo everything Garland and his Justice Department worked for over the past three years. This massive failure solidified Garland’s reputation as the worst AG in modern American history.
The Formation of Trump’s Brownshirts
With Garland’s significant help, Trump was re-elected. As he promised in many of his fever-dream speeches, Trump considers the Capitol insurrectionists “patriots” as they went on a rampage in “a day of love.” The deranged Trump now has an instant group of thugs that are now able to fan out across the United States to form mini-cadres of Christian, nationalist militia vigilante groups under the better-known banners of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, but at least 165 white nationalist groups are working now in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. These thug shock troops serve a valuable role to dictators like Trump. Mussolini had his Black Shirts, Hitler his Brown Shirts, and Trump his Proud Boys.
Secret police groups are nothing new. They have existed in 68 countries, according to this list from Wikipedia, and date back to every regime that wanted to preserve its power.
The formal definition of secret police is that “They protect the political power of a dictator or regime and often operate outside the law to repress dissidents and weaken political opposition, frequently using violence. They may enjoy legal sanction to hold and charge suspects without ever identifying their organization.”
Secret police have a placeholder in the state’s formal bureaucratic organizational chart. Thugs like the Proud Boys don’t, but they would have a dotted-line link to the more formal police and investigative arms in Trump’s reformatted FBI, Justice Department, military, and immigration police agencies.
Since the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are national organizations, they would have a tentacle-like reach and means of communication, thanks to the Dark Web. They could take orders to pursue any of Trump’s enemies anywhere in the U.S. They can now be paid via crypto, another of Trump’s new favorite toys to make money and evade taxes and traces of origin and disposal.
These groups could further infiltrate local police forces and the military, as they have done so already. This would complete the circle of bureaucratic formality, lawlessness, and criminality that is the basis for any fascist police structure.
However, Trump’s restructuring plans for the FBI, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security, and CIA could compromise these bureaucracies. Why would the FBI investigate a local Proud Boys cadre when they have the tacit OK of Trump and his FBI chief? These are the classic plots in scores of corrupt cop and double-crossing movie plots, but now they could easily play out in Trump’s perverted world.
Mainstream Media Avoid This Brownshirt Scenario
The fact that Trump created his Brown Shirt thugs in the first few hours after taking office won’t be discussed much in the mainstream media. The media does not like to make analogies to fascists, but that is becoming more difficult to justify. The media also ignores reports that “Elon’s maternal grandparents relocated from Canada to South Africa in the
early 1900s as they knew the Afrikaner government was a stronghold of support for Nazism outside of Germany.” Maybe they think this is unimportant or a coincidence. Instead, the mainstream media discussion will focus on the pardons, the minutia of their legalities, and how they mock the legal system and the pursuit of justice.
But the released criminals now have become Trump loyalists and fanatics for life. Criminal experts will affirm that it’s impossible to tell what fanatics and lone-wolf terrorists will do, but Trump just unleashed 1,600 convicted thugs into the general population. These misfits can be called upon quickly to assemble, disrupt, or attack anyone Trump designates.
This makes an unstable man like Trump, the same man who watched the January 6 insurrection on TV and refused to save his Vice President Pence, a perpetual danger to the U.S. His Brown Shirts can now make sure that he never leaves office. The fact that about half of Americans voted for a convicted felon is more unexplainable unless they are part of Trump’s chaotic, vindictive, destructive vision.
This question has never been fully answered, but most sane adults easily see Trump as a mentally unstable, greedy sociopath. He is not the person who would be appointed boss in any local business or appointed to the board of a large corporation. Still, his mentally unstable rants and actions are traits that appeal to half of American voters. That is the scariest part of all.
