Trump Is Building His Own Paramilitary Force
About this episode
Journalist Radley Balko, author of 'Rise of the Warrior Cop,' argues the Trump administration is building a paramilitary force loyal to the president: tripling ICE's budget while hollowing out traditional crime-fighting agencies. Balko and Klein trace the tactics — manufactured crisis deployments in Los Angeles (National Guard and Marines), workplace raids and racial profiling driven by deportation quotas, masked agents as instruments of fear, and DHS messaging with explicit white-supremacist appeals. They discuss the accountability vacuum (limits on civil suits, attacks on immigration lawyers and big law firms), the spectacle of operations like the MacArthur Park sweep, the purge of the military chain of command, and the D.C. takeover. Drawing on Ernst Fraenkel's 'dual state' theory of fascism, Balko warns of an authoritarian trajectory and argues civil society — protests and institutional resistance — is the remaining check.