The President and his followers love to call people terrorists. Who is a terrorist? Someone who threatens or uses violence against civilians to accomplish political goals.
But the President is labeling anyone who does not support him a terrorist. Left-wing groups and their donors are being accused of being domestic terrorists and “agitators and anarchists”.
The President has a deep fear of organizations who do not support him and falsely considers any left-leaning association to be part of a criminal conspiracy.
He has asked his Justice Department to prosecute members of these groups and anyone who funds them. He fantasizes about an anti-fa*cist group that no one in law enforcement seems to be able to locate, despite his administration claiming before Congress that it is the leading domestic terrorist threat.
He is desperately afraid of a wide variety of people – voters, judges, prosecutors, protestors, liberals, women, black people, foreigners, Democrats, smart people, and many more. The list is almost endless, consisting of about half the population of the US and it is increasing in size as his overall approval rate falls below 40%.
Why is he so afraid? Does he think they can hurt him or kill him or steal his money?
These are things a normal terrorist would do with guns or explosives and violent conspiratorial plans.
But the President is not afraid of any of these things. What is it he is most afraid of? What can be taken from him?
The answer is they can take away his power.
What he values most is power, high status, and adulation.
He calls them terrorists because he is afraid that they will take his power away, just as they did in the 2020 election. He suffered terribly as an ambitious leader without a nation to control, and a dramatic actor without an admiring audience (note that he is still a member of The Screen Actors Guild).
Losing the election was a form of exile for him.
So, when he calls people terrorists, he is not using the term in its dictionary meaning. He has redefined it to mean anyone that might steal what he values most – his power.
Now if the President took, for example, Gavin Newsom to court and charged him with terrorism because he is a competitor who could win the Presidential race and take the President’s power away, the judge would certainly rule against him and perhaps censure him for bringing a frivolous case to court (the President and his prosecutors have lost a large majority of cases for similar reasons).
The president is fond of making weird accusations of people committing non-existent crimes, like repeatedly screaming “election interference” when he was in court charged with various civil and criminal offenses during the election.
The job of the courts is to prosecute criminals and of course this will interfere with their lives, as does prison. Whether it interferes with an election is irrelevant.
But watching him breathlessly charge others with the non-crime of “election interference” would have been hilarious if his supporters did not believe that running for office was some sort of inalienable right that no court or person could take away.
His obsessive fear of loss of power does not make his competitors and critics into criminals. Those who vote against him or judges who rule against him are neither terrorists nor criminals, but that is the peculiar and confused way he sees them.
His obsession with power makes it a binary choice. Either you support him or you are persecuting him.
He wants a police state in order to deport people he does not like — those who immigrated from sh*thole countries to the US. He wants to assert the power he has gained in a grand drama of masked police confronting protestors, just like he wanted a big military parade to demonstrate his power.
Grand parades, grand ballrooms, military-style arrests of residents, questionably legal attacks on Iran, Venezuela, teargassing and arresting protesters, threatening Greenland – these are his reward for having the power of the presidency. They are dramatic displays of his coveted power.
When people protest and resist these deportations and police state tactics, they challenge his power making him look weak, which might lead to some loss of power and respect.
They are thus terrorizing him from his neurotic, power-obsessed point of view.
His cabinet knows about his obsession and his desperate fear. They have pragmatically adopted his bizarre definition of terrorism, and will try and use the Justice Department and some law, any law, to prosecute the “terrorists” that they believe threaten his and their power.
Many of his immigration police seem to have also adopted his view of terrorism, and appear to believe that anyone who protests (challenges the President’s authority) is evil and a terrorist.
If protesters are killed, great. These police have done the President a great service by demonstrating his power to the world. The power to kill or jail one’s enemies is perhaps the greatest demonstration of raw power by the President to his loyal followers.
This fear of losing power applies to people in the present but also to those in the past, like James Comey and Letitia James, who threatened to “steal” his power. It further applies to Biden who “stole” the election which took his power away. Part of having power in the present is the ability to avenge those who took it away or threatened to in the past
So, expect many more false accusations of terrorism like the ones directed at Renee Good.
As a popular song from the past states, “Paranoia strikes deep. Into your mind it will creep.”
This pervasive fear has become a collective emotion adopted by many MAGA adherents. They have also redefined the term terrorism just as the President has done. With his loss of power comes their loss of the “greatness” that the President promised them. They might sink into a mire of irrelevance without him.
As we can see from the January 6th riots, this obsessive love of power and the desperate fear of losing it makes the President and his ardent supporters dangerous and unpredictable people as it moves them ever further towards the dark side.
