War and peace: As Trump pursues Gaza peace, he incites civil strife at home

A grim paradox: While Pres. Trump has proposed a 20-point plan to end the two year old war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, his administration is increasingly brazen in manufacturing pretexts to send military forces into American cities, and in falsely accusing Democrats of being “insurrectionists” and domestic terrorists.

The Trump administration is trying to “cause chaos, create fear and confusion, [and] make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send military troops to our city.”

“These Democrats are like insurrectionists,” Trump said Tuesday in the Oval Office.

Trump said Monday that he did not yet see the need to invoke the Insurrection Act. But he would do so in the future, he said, if the courts, and elected governors and mayors, blocked the administration’s efforts to send military forces into their cities.

“If I had to enact it, I’d do it,” he said. “If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”

Meantime, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller has used blood-curdling, hysterical language and lies to-- entirely falsely-- portray Democrats and judges that do not rule in the administration’s favor as supporters of terrorism, who must be “dismantled” by all instruments of state power.

“The Democrat Party has filled our legal and judicial system with radicals who protect leftwing terrorists,” Miller wrote on Twitter on Oct. 4.

“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller wrote in a subsequent post. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

(Miller’s tweet tirade came after a US federal judge who was in fact appointed by Trump blocked the Trump administration’s effort to call up 200 National Guard troops in Portland, Oregon. “This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law, U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, wrote.)

Miller’s language would seem to make Democrats and judges targets of vast new powers invoked by Trump in a national security memorandum last month.

On September 25, Trump issued a national security presidential memorandum/NSPM-7,