Noam Chomsky on Trump’s Troop Surge to Democratic Cities & Whether He’ll Leave Office if He Loses

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Barely 100 days before the presidential election in November, this week President Trump announced he is sending a surge of federal officers into large Democrat-run cities like Chicago. This comes after Trump first sent federal agents to Portland, Oregon, where the camouflage-clad paramilitary agents attacked antiracist protesters, even snatched activists off the streets in unmarked vans. On Wednesday night, when federal forces fired tear gas at protesters in Portland once again, among those hit was Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as Portland’s police commissioner.

The response to Trump’s outrageous and likely unconstitutional deployment of federal agents has been resoundingly critical. Oregon Governor Kate Brown denounced the “secret police abducting people,” and the Oregon Attorney General has now sued several of the federal agencies involved. In the streets, a contingent of women has grown nightly, protecting protesters by forming a wall of moms. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden described the federal agents as “essentially fascist,” and warned, “If the line is not drawn in the sand right now, America may be staring down the barrel of martial law in the middle of a presidential election.”

Well, for more on this and much more, we spend the rest of the hour with Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned political dissident, linguist, and author, laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

He spoke with Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Shaikh and I on Thursday. We reached him at his home in Tucson, Arizona, where he is sheltering in place with his wife, Valeria. I began by asking Professor Chomsky to respond to the surge of federal agents Trump is promising to unleash on the country.

NOAM CHOMSKY: President Trump is desperate. His entire attention is—there’s one issue on his mind; that’s the election. He has to cover up for the fact that he is personally responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans. It is impossible to conceal that much longer. Just compare the United States with Europe or even Canada; it’s becoming a pariah state to the point where Americans aren’t even permitted to travel to Europe. Europe won’t accept them.

His chances of victory depend on his doing something dramatic. He was trying very hard to set up military confrontations that you mentioned, martial law. It’s moving toward martial law. He might even be able to try to cancel the elections. There is no telling what he would do. He is completely desperate. This is like the actions of some tin-pot dictator in a neo-colony somewhere, small country that has a military coup every couple of years. There is no historical precedent for anything like this in a functioning democratic society. If he could send Blackshirts out in the streets, he would be happy to do that.

Exactly how this will eventuate is very hard to say. The courts are unlikely to do anything. We may even get to a point where the military command has to decide which side they are on. The man is desperate. He is psychotic. He is in extreme danger of losing his position in the White House and will do anything he can to prevent it.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Chomsky, what you just said echoed the concerns of Senator Ron Wyden that we may be headed—the U.S. may be headed towards the imposition of martial law. You’ve just called Trump psychotic, previously having referred to him as a sociopath. And pointed to the differences between—the massive differences between Biden and Trump when we had you on earlier this year, saying about Biden that he is pretty empty, you can push him one way or another. And you’ve also said that this is the most crucial election in human history, literally. Now, in a Fox News interview just on Sunday, Trump refused to commit to accepting the outcome of the 2020 election.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’m not a good loser. I don’t like to lose. I don’t lose too often. I don’t like to lose.

CHRIS WALLACE: But are you gracious?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You don’t know until you see. It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.

CHRIS WALLACE: Are you suggesting that you might not accept the results of the election?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I have to see. Look, Hillary Clinton asked me the same thing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you comment on that and what your concerns are in the event—I mean, you’ve just said that in fact the elections somehow could be canceled. Could you talk about under what conditions Trump might be able to do that? And in the event they are not canceled, what are your concerns, depending on the outcome of the vote, what Trump might do?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, there are various maneuvers that theoretically they might undertake. One might be to try to throw the election to the—to refuse to accept the vote, to make sure that the Republican governors don’t authorize their own electors. This is routine and automatic, but technically, they could refuse. Could throw it into the House where there is enough Republicans in the House to essentially turn the election into the kind of farce that you find, as I said, in some tin-pot dictatorship. That is one possibility. Another possibility is he might just try to call out the military to impose martial law.

The point is, he cannot lose. First of all, he is psychologically incapable of losing. Secondly, if he loses, if he leaves the White House, he may be facing serious legal problems. Now he has immunity, but there is a whole swamp around him. He has tried to keep it from being investigated. He fired all the inspectors general when they were beginning to investigate it. The federal attorney for the Southern District of New York, that’s Wall Street and so on, the most important, started looking into it. Fired him, replaced him with a flack from the private equity industry. There is nothing he would not do to try to maintain office. Virtually nothing you can think of.

This is a major crisis. There is been one or other form of parliamentary democracy for 350 years in England, and 250 years here, and nothing like this has happened before. We are dealing with a figure who is out of the political spectrum for functioning democracies. And he has a political party behind him which by now has just turned into cowardly sycophants. They are terrified to cross His Imperial Majesty. He has got a popular base of heavily armed, angry white supremacist militias. There is no telling what he would do. I think the country, by November, may be a different country. And A different world, given U.S. power.

But that is kind of the immediate issue. The reason why this is the most important election in history has nothing to do with this. Four more years of Trump’s climate policies and nuclear policies might simply doom the human species, literally. We don’t have a lot of time to deal with the environmental crisis. It is very serious. Every prediction that has been made by scientists has been too conservative. Each time it comes out worse.

I won’t run through the details but it is a major catastrophe looming. We have some time to deal with it. Four more years of Trump might well take us to irreversible tipping points. At the very least, it will make it much harder to confront this growing crisis. There is no stopping the polar ice caps, the ice sheets from melting, the Amazon forest from being destroyed. Large parts of the world might become simply unlivable. We are talking about potential sea rises of maybe one or two feet by the end of the century. Much more, later. This is all totally catastrophic. You can’t conceive of how human society can survive in an organized way.

At the same time, Trump is dedicated to destroying the arms control regime. Last August he terminated the Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty, which helped control the potential for nuclear war growing from a European conflict. Now he has dismantled the Open Skies Treaty that goes back to Eisenhower. That is gone. He has imposed frivolous demands to try to delay negotiations on the new START treaty, which the Russians have been pleading for for a long time. This is due for renewal in a few months. It may already be too late to renegotiate it, the last of the arms control treaties. He is now threatening to carry out nuclear weapons tests, tests that would undermine the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, almost 30 years. The United States never ratified it, but it has lived up to it.

All of this opens the door wider for other countries to react the same way. The arms industry is of course euphoric. They’re getting huge new contracts to develop major weapons to destroy all of us. This encourages others to do the same. So there are new contracts down the road for hopeless means to try to defend ourselves against the monstrosities that we’re helping to construct. This is Trump, racing toward this, apparently enjoying it. You can’t describe it in normal—the term you used, sociopath, is perfectly accurate. Whether this can be contained within the constitutional structures of the United States, we don’t know.

Something similar to this happened in the United Kingdom a couple of months ago. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, prorogated the Parliament, closed the Parliament, so that he could ram through his version of Brexit. This was regarded by British legal experts as the worst crisis in 350 years. Well, in Britain, the Supreme Court nullified it. It is unlikely to happen here.

I might say that there is another country that is trying to mimic the United States, Brazil, with another ridiculous dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who’s trying to be a clone of Trump. He was being investigated by—he and his family involved in all kind of sordid criminal activities, came under investigation. He fired the investigators. But that was blocked by the courts in Brazil. Not here. When Trump fired them all, purged the executive, nothing from the courts. Nothing from the Republicans in Congress. Brazil at least has a thin barrier to another military dictatorship. The United States is in worse shape. This is pretty serious. There’s been nothing like it. There are no precedents that have any real relevance.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Chomsky, you’ve mentioned again now the lack of safeguards there are in the U.S. to the possible imposition of martial law. But even in other countries around the world where martial law has been declared, it requires minimally the compliance of those who are in charge of the military. Do you see those in the U.S. going along with Trump in the event that he chooses to attempt to declare martial law?

NOAM CHOMSKY: As I say, there is no precedent for this in any minimally functioning democracy. There are countries, many of them, where the military has taken over, often with U.S. support or even initiative, because we wanted to overthrow the civilian government. And nothing like this has happened since—aside from the fascist regimes and war regimes, totally different conditions. There’s just no precedent.

There was, as you may recall, a couple of weeks ago press reports with headlines about how Trump is expanding his purge of the executive, which has almost been cleansed of any controls or dissident voices. He’s extending this to trying to purge the military. Well, there were speculations at the time that the purge of the military might be preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.

The military so far has been refusing. Pulled out the 82nd Airborne from Washington after Trump wanted it in there. They have been rejecting the proposals from the White House for more force and violence. That is why he is resorting to forces outside the official military in his current campaign to set up violent confrontations in Democratic-run cities, the plan right now. What the military would do, we don’t know.

If you look for precedents in Third World dictatorships, it would depend on how those at the colonel level react, people close in contact with troops. But we have no precedent for anything like this. There’s nothing like it. This is a unique situation in modern history, in the modern history of the democratic, more or less democratic societies.

AMY GOODMAN: MIT Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky, linguist, author, activist.