Like many folks who study how fascist governments operate, I've been quick to warn people that given the blatantly illegal methods by which the Trump regime has targeted migrants, foreign visitors to the United States, and student anti-genocide protestors legally in the country, it was only a matter of time before Downmarket Mussolini tried to expand those tactics to target dissidents born in the United States. After watching the US Attorney General call Tesla vandalism "domestic terrorism" yesterday, and reading Trump's unhinged social media rants about shipping folks caught vandalizing Tesla cars or dealerships to El Salvador, I think it's safe to say we're already here.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-tesla-el-salvador

'Delusional' Trump Threatens to Send Tesla Vandals to Prison for 20 Years... in El Salvador

"People that get caught sabotaging Teslas will stand a very good chance of going to jail for up to twenty years, and that includes the funders," Trump stated overnight, adding in all caps: "WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!"

Several hours later, Trump took up the issue again on his TruthSocial platform, saying: "I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20-year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla. Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!"

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill said the threat, which follows on Trump's highly controversial deportation of alleged gang members to El Salvador last week, should not be taken lightly.

"Remember that this is where his discussions with El Salvador began," said Ifill in response to Trump's rantings on Friday. "The migrant detentions there are the dry run. He wants to ship U.S. prisoners to El Salvador. We cannot sleepwalk through this."

Well folks, smoke 'em if you got 'em because I'm pretty sure this bloviating nazi windbag is serious. Given the pattern we've been observing by which Trump's musing are treated as "objective" reality by his fascist minions, and how the regime then transforms that (un)reality into enforcement action regardless of the law, I don't think it's a good idea to wave this off as 'Trump being Trump." Just yesterday regime Attorney General Pam Bondi was publicly making the argument that what is, legally speaking, mere vandalism, is actually a "wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties," and that line was then parroted by a variety of regime-loyal mouthpieces in the larger discourse. This process of laying the ground work to transform fascist unreality into a presumed mandate to act is precisely the tactic we saw the Trump regime employ to justify kidnapping student anti-genocide protest leaders residing legally in the United States, render over 200 prisoners to a slave labor dungeon in El Salvador without due process, attempting to either seize control of, or destroy Columbia University, manufacture consent to annex Canada, and even attempt to shutter the US Department of Education. Furthermore, given the regime's continued insistence that invoking the word "terrorism" is a magic spell that allows them to ignore US law and our constitutionally-protected rights, you'd have to be some kind of rube to assume Bondi's media performance yesterday, and Trump's late night social media rant, aren't a coordinated effort to manufacture consent to escalate the regime's war on resistance to include American protestors and dissidents opposing the administration's fascist fuckery.

Of course it almost goes without saying that what Trump is proposing here, the rendition of American citizens to a slave labor prison in El Salvador for the high crime of vandalizing some cars, is highly illegal and a blatant violation of our legally-enshrined civil rights, but that hasn't really stopped the Trump administration from plowing ahead with its war on protest and resistance so far. Furthermore, decades and decades of bipartisan demonization of "criminals" and protestors, particularly those engaging in direct action, likely ensures that many Americans aren't going to notice this fascist repression, or care very much if they do. Naturally, the Trump regime is relying on that attitude prevailing in the larger public consciousness, which is why they're employing a boiling frog strategy of going after people they say are "gang members," "terrorists," "illegals," "antisemites," "troublemakers," and "criminals," first.

As I've noted in the past, whether or not the Trump administration is *successfully* able to get away with blatant violations of the law while enacting his fascist war on our civil rights is unknowable in the present, but the pre-existing pattern of regime behavior in the Trump 2.0 era makes it pretty clear that if Trump says it, he at least means to *try* and do it; which makes all of this an ominous warning for everyone.