• Trump personal takeover of US military
• Attempted to use military to overturn 2020 election
• Likely election losses in 2026
• Supreme Court and right wing legal theories
• Popular resistance and U.S. labor movement

In an unprecedented move, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is calling together hundreds of the top military commanders from around the world for an unexplained meeting. This meeting follows his having fired the military’s Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs) back in February. The JAG’s are responsible for advising the military commanders of the legality – or the opposite – of any action they are told to carry out.

These events should be seen in the context of Trump’s approval ratings have now slipped to a new low of 43% on average, coupled with the fact that Republicans have been doing badly in recent by elections. Trump cannot afford to lose control over either house of congress, but if things keep going in this direction he is threatened with losing control of both the House and the Senate, and this is before the effect of his tariffs is fully felt. The Financial Times writes: “I think a big thing is that [Hegseth] is going to exhort his senior officers . . . tell them that he expects loyalty” and for “them to carry out the president’s programme, without dissension and that if they can’t do that, they should retire,” said Mark Cancian, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think-tank

How he plans to deal with his slipping support is seen in his now bringing criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey, with announced plans to bring more charges against other political enemies. That is just the first step.

Never forget that Trump wanted to call out the National Guard to seize the voting machines after he lost the 2020 election. Foremost in stopping him at that time were the top military commanders. Trump is now doing what he can to ensure that those commanders don’t stand in his way again. His steps regarding the U.S. military – and make no mistake, it is him giving the orders, not Hegseth – must be seen in that light. The Democrats will be screaming bloody murder… and then go to court. But any court cases will ultimately be heard by the Trump-controlled Supreme Court.

“Unitary executive” legal theory
As today’s Wall St. Journal editors explain, the Supreme Court Trump majority has already in effect taken the position of the “unitary executive” theory. That is the legal theory that the president controls the entire executive and can order any branch of it to do whatever he likes. The WSJ editors support that theory… now that Trump is president. The next step will be adopting the “independent state legislature” legal theory. That is the theory/interpretation of the Constitution that the state legislatures have complete control over elections, including presidential elections. That means that Trump-controlled state legislatures could throw out any election whose results they don’t like.

If Trump & co. do throw out the 2026 elections, there will of course be protests, and probably pretty large ones. Trump & Co. will either be able to ignore them – as they have recent ones – or crush them through a completely controlled military. Or so he plans. The only force that can organize a movement to stop the Trump dictatorship train from continuing to roll down the tracks is the unions. They are presently controlled by a bureaucracy whose cowardice is only matched by their extreme short sightedness. As Oaklandsocialist pointed out when we commented on the Murder of Charlie Kirk and the coming repression, a series of midwest unions have endorsed the lying demagogue Vivek Ramaswamy for Ohio governor. Ramaswamy makes Trump seem the very model of serious, thoughtful honesty in comparison. Yet there was not a word of alarm – not even concern – from the entire rest of the labor movement.

The labor movement still has it in its power to shut down transportation in the U.S. That includes the airline industry, railroads and shipping as well as local urban transportation in many large cities. Anybody who expects the unions as they are presently controlled to do so is living in an alternate reality. Now is the time for any real working class resistance to Trump to start to direct itself to union members and encourage and help them organize within their unions to build a working class opposition to the dictatorship that threatens us all.