I’m editing this in order to add this morning’s statement by the president, which makes his criminal intention transparently clear.

“I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.” The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

We now have a federal department whose very name calls up remembrance of Hitler speeches, with their voluminous evocations of blood and soil. Homeland, itself is not a American idiom, not grounded in our traditions, and in the present environment it evokes all our worst memories, all our past sins against decency and fairness: slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, the trail of tears. The department was hurriedly cobbled together in the fevered aftermath of 9/11 with a clear intent to target Muslims (who are to this day stigmatized as terrorists by many of us) and has since been strengthened with each omnibus bill to fund the US military.

Now we are faced with the assertion by acting DHS chief, Chad Wolf, that he has the authority to shut down protests in American cities in open defiance of the Bill of Rights and the Posse Comitatus act of 1978. Acting on a pretext previously exploited by gangster consigliere William Barr, about which Barr bragged at the time, Wolf’s brazen assertion is just the latest claim on the part of our criminal executive to reset established democratic norms. If challenged, we can expect the usual reply of rogue authority: “So, sue me!”

I don’t think it was the intention of either George W. Bush, who presided over the founding of DHS, or Barack Obama, who strengthened it, to unleash anything like the present Stasi-like terror on our city streets, but such has become a perhaps unintended consequence of both their actions. Obama expressed reservations in signing an omnibus defense authorization act allowing indefinite detention of citizens, but he signed it, claiming that if a future executive were to abuse that authority congress could reign it in.

But here we are, a few steps away from martial law during a pandemic our rogue executive, with the willing help of Republicans like the governor of my state, is abetting for all it’s worth in the sacrifice of human lives, on the eve of an election  whose security the senate Republican majority is refusing to protect whilst simultaneously hamstringing the U. S. Postal service in order to suppress the vote. I have received my absentee ballot for the coming Missouri election. My beloved at this writing has not received hers. We have called the board of elections, and the board of elections is blaming the post office. Indeed, we have it on the authority of our mail carrier that an order has come down through the chain of command to slow mail delivery.

I dislike conspiracy theories, but there are as yet no signs that congress or the judiciary will reign in these flagrant abuses of authority, clearly designed to aid in a criminal regime’s effort to perpetuate itself. A new Democrat administration should act to abolish DHS on its first day, a necessary first step towards restoring the rule of law.