Former President Donald Trump is now openly fantasizing about deputizing death squads against Americans.
During a September speech in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump called for there to be a “violent day” in which police would have free rein to be as brutal as possible without consequences. Politico reported that Trump’s campaign insisted it wasn’t a new policy proposal, though American police officers are typically only supposed to apprehend lawbreakers, whereas actual punishments are meted out by the court system.
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know?” Trump told the crowd, adding that he wanted just “one real rough, nasty” day in which police could act with impunity against citizens.
This imagery is somewhat reminiscent of the horror film franchise “The Purge,” which is based on a dystopian not-too-distant future in which a far-right fascist government has declared all crime to be legal across America for a 24-hour period one day a year. However, what separates Trump’s vision from The Purge is that the only ones given power to act with lawlessness are, paradoxically, law enforcement officers.
In a vacuum, Trump’s call for a temporary period of violence could be chalked up to his mercurial nature and penchant for making off-the-cuff remarks while working a room. But when taken in the context of his past statements and his worst impulses being curbed by institutionalists in his first administration, the former president is well-positioned to act with impunity in a second term.
What makes a second Trump term uniquely terrifying is that — given the implications of the Supreme Court’s Trump v. United States decision guaranteeing all presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution for anything deemed an “official act” — there would be little in the way to stop him. And now that he’s polling within the margin of error of Vice President Kamala Harris in the seven swing states likely to decide the Electoral College majority, Trump is essentially a coin flip away from unleashing the massive resources of the federal government on the citizenry in the same vein as other authoritarian dictators around the world.
Trump is itching to turn police into death squads
Last month, Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng reported that while Trump was in office, his subordinates had to routinely dissuade him from calling for mass executions for gang members and drug lords “to send a chilling message about the scope of his power.” One unnamed former Trump administration official recalled that the 45th president of the United States had a “particular affinity for the firing squad.”
“Fucking kill them all,” Trump said on one occasion. “An eye for an eye.” Rolling Stone’s sources said the ex-president would insist “you just got to kill these people,” and that “they need to be eradicated, not jailed.” When Trump encountered pushback, he would reportedly counter that “other countries do it all the time.”
Dickinson and Suebsaeng reported that Trump’s “violent fantasy” of mass executions was privately referred to as the “American death squads idea” among White House staff. His impulses were curbed only through the intervention of White House officials who promised him they’d “look into” the idea before waiting for him to move on to something else.
It’s unlikely Trump would stop at gang members and drug kingpins should he decide to make the use of death squads an official policy. The theme of the former president’s third bid for the White House is vengeance, and he made that clear in his first campaign speech of the 2024 cycle in Waco, Texas. In the spring of 2023, he told a crowd of supporters: “I am your warrior, I am your justice … for those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution.”
The former president’s retribution campaign would likely target not just leftists (who he calls “vermin”), but his more conservative critics as well. After a report emerged in which then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called his counterpart in China to assure him that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election would be unsuccessful, Trump suggested Milley should be executed.
Journalists would also almost certainly find themselves in the crosshairs of a second Trump administration. Not only because the former president repeatedly called journalists “the enemy of the people,” but because of more recent promises from people likely to hold influential positions in the White House. Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to then-acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, said on a 2023 episode of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast: “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.”
“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections, we’re going to come after you,” Patel said.
There would be no check on Trump’s most depraved inclinations should he win the November election. One key element of the far-right Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint — which was authored with the help of approximately 140 of Trump’s former staffers and advisors — is the passage of an executive order known as Schedule F, which would drastically increase the number of political appointees serving at the pleasure of the president from approximately 5,000 to more than 54,000. Georgetown University public policy professor Don Moynihan wrote that the 54,000 figure is “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”
Moreover, Heritage has already been hard at work pre-screening potential Trump administration appointees ready to put in key policy-making roles throughout the executive branch should the former president win a second term. As Occupy.com previously explored, these potential new presidential appointees are primarily being evaluated not on their knowledge of the law or their policy experience, but rather how loyal they are to Trump and the MAGA agenda.
In the early days of a possible second Trump administration, one scholar of authoritarian regimes around the world warned of a “blitzkrieg” of executive orders like Schedule F. New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat told Rolling Stone that the flurry of executive orders Trump would sign in his first 100 days would effectively position him to rule as a “dictator on day one,” as he has repeatedly promised on the campaign trail. When combining these executive orders with tens of thousands of loyalists put in place throughout all federal agencies eager to carry out the president’s orders, this would allow Trump to effectively circumvent Congress and govern by fiat.
“It’s not just a change of methods, it’s a change of political system — a vast expansion of the powers of the executive, so that Trump will be able to rule as an autocrat,” Ben-Ghiat told Rolling Stone.
The only remaining roadblock preventing the former president from assuming dictatorial powers in his first 100 days would be the courts. But as the 6-3 Trump v. United States decision showed, the federal judiciary will be unable to bring Trump to heel so long as he declares his actions to be “official acts” carried out in his capacity as president. If he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against citizens on American soil — as he has already promised to do — and carry out mass executions by firing squad, nothing could be done to prevent it.
Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor (D-Obama*) confirmed the ramifications of the Trump v. United States ruling in her official dissent. She cautioned that the decision would allow a president’s power to be used “for evil ends,” and laid out several worst-case scenarios in which a president could flagrantly break the law and suffer no consequences.
“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune,” Sotomayor wrote. “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
Trump would emulate the world’s most ruthless dictators
One hallmark of authoritarian regimes like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, and the Philippines when former President Rodrigo Duterte was in power, is their tendency to view police not as independent enforcers of the law, but as their own personal army to punish their enemies as they see fit. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg even once famously used similar phrasing in 2011 to describe the New York Police Department as “my own army” while cracking down on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Trump has openly expressed admiration for these dictators, once lavishing praise on Xi for becoming “president for life” and telling a room of Republican donors that hopefully the U.S. could follow suit one day. This wasn’t just an offhand remark: Trump has frequently indicated a preference for a dictatorial style of government and made a habit of befriending the most notorious dictators.
He famously congratulated Putin for his lopsided reelection victory in 2018 even though he was briefed ahead of the call with the Russian leader: “Do not congratulate.” The former president has also publicly congratulated Erdogan for his reelection in 2023, which came after the Turkish leader — who has jailed even more journalists than China — dramatically expanded the powers of the presidency and has ruled as a dictator.
And even though Trump became the first president to officially cross the border between North and South Korea at the DMZ and shook hands with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, he notably did little to intervene on behalf of American college student Otto Warmbier. The University of Virginia scholarship student was detained in North Korea and sent home permanently brain damaged due to what U.S. officials said was likely prolonged, intense torture. He died in a coma shortly after his arrival back home.
In Rolling Stone’s report on Trump’s “American death squads,” the ex-president was known for being fond of Duterte’s death squads in particular. The Guardian reported that Duterte’s government killed at least 6,000 people in an extrajudicial murder campaign aimed at drug dealers and drug users. However, that figure is likely much higher due to many more unsolved murders attributed to roving gunmen on motorcycles presumed to also be part of Duterte’s death squads. The 79 year-old is currently being investigated by the International Criminal Court for potential crimes against humanity.
To say that the 2024 election is effectively a coin flip is not hyperbole: Polling in the states whose electoral votes will determine which candidate crosses the 270-vote threshold — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — shows Trump and Harris are both neck-and-neck.
Both the 2016 and 2020 elections were decided by just tens of thousands of votes combined across a handful of swing states. In 2016, Trump won 270 electoral votes with the help of less than 80,000 total ballots across Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And in 2020, Biden cracked 270 electoral votes by winning Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by less than 50,000 combined ballots.
When breaking down those states by county, this means that Hillary Clinton could have won Michigan by simply turning out just 140 more voters per county in each of the Mitten State’s 83 counties. She could have carried Wisconsin by turning out 375 more voters in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. And she could have taken Pennsylvania by turning out 58,000 more voters across the Keystone State’s 67 counties. While that’s a higher number than either Michigan or Wisconsin, it’s worth noting that in Allegheny County alone — which houses Pittsburgh — there are more than 1,300 polling places. That means Clinton could have reversed her fortunes by turning out a few more voters in each precinct in the Democratic stronghold.
There’s less than a month to go before Election Day. You can check your registration on vote.gov, and make a plan to vote on Tuesday, November 5. Every single ballot cast will be crucial in determining whether we have four more years of democracy, or if we surrender our country to an authoritarian, corrupt, power-hungry fascist driven by bloodlust and vengeance.
*Occupy.com has chosen to designate Supreme Court justices based on the president who appointed them and that president’s respective party, in order to provide further context to their rulings.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
