- Trump to his top military leaders today.
Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.
This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.
Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.
Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.
In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.
Put aside the absurdity of a man elected by red states sending military troops into the cities of blue states as one of his first acts of office. That's dictatorship 101 right there and unprecedented.
This also gets to the heart of MAGA confusion about the world. The chief reason that global trade has allowed for such unprecedented prosperity is that it has allowed for unprecedented levels of specialization. I worked with product development teams for decades and many were making incredibly complex products, like nanotechnology, computer chips, medical devices and drugs. In the nearly 30 years I did that I saw a fascinating thing play out: the portion of a project plan that was to be worked by an outside company rather than an inside department rose from roughly 10 to 20% to closer to 33 to 50%. Specialization hit a level that fewer and fewer companies could sustain affordable expertise in most of their processes and skills. The specialization that Adam Smith wrote about in 1776 - "one man draws out the wire, another sharpens it ..." was interpersonal. People along the same factory line each specializing on one step in production. The specialization today is literally different companies making different parts and doing different steps. Adam Smith's specialization played out on one factory line; today's specialization plays out across the globe with hundreds of companies coordinating to make a single product.
Why mention specialization in reference to sending troops into cities? Only people as clueless as Trump and his head of DoD, former Fox commentator Pete Hegseth would think that how you would deploy guys with guns for war has anything to do with how you would deploy guys with guns for policing. Police and military are specialists. They have very different objectives. Very different goals and constraints. And the tactics that might make you a great police officer could get you killed in war; the tactics that might make you a great soldier might get civilians killed in policing.
Then of course, I could be completely wrong. Trump may indeed be aiming for something akin to military occupation in the blue cities that tend to vote 4 to 1 against him. And if so, further evidence that the man cares little about the safety of American people or the economy and his presidency has everything to do with how he feels.
In either case, this is not normal governance for a democracy. This is the kind of thing his buddies Xi, Putin, MBS, and Kim do.
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