Trump has caused an identity crisis for American militias

"You have to ask, 'Are the militias primed for violence?'"

CASEY MICHEL AUG 8, 2018, 8:00 AM

America’s militias never expected to be here.

No one did, of course. Donald Trump was never supposed to reach the presidency. The powers that be — the powers that were — were supposed to prevent something like that from happening. The ones pulling the strings, those the fever-swamp conspiracists assumed were actually in charge, simply wouldn’t allow someone like Trump to access such power.

But then, in late 2016, Trump won. The man who was never supposed to be anywhere near power was sitting, eating, tweeting in the White House. Trump, the man backed by so many on the far-right, was president of the United States.

And America’s militias, with Trump from the beginning, didn’t know what to do. “For the first time in its 25-year history, the militia movement had a presidential candidate that they love,” Mark Pitcavage, a senior researcher with the Anti-Defamation League, told ThinkProgress. “This had never happened before.”

Suddenly, the government the militias had long feared and railed against was controlled by their man. Like that, they were forced to look for a new reason for being, a new group or movement to target with their ire.

https://thinkprogress.org/how-americas-militias-became-a-problem-in-search-of-a-cause-74221828e45e/

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“A paramilitary response to a Trump loss? We should be thinking about it, the sooner the better,” Jackson added. “If a Trump loss is in the cards, those of us who don’t want to see paramilitary violence should start thinking about it sooner or later. The last thing we want is to be blindsided.”

So maybe that’s where we are — maybe America’s militias, having spent the past 18 months looking for a cause, are simply waiting for the crisis to come, a crisis that’s now years in the making. After all, America’s militias never expected to be here. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know where they’re going.