This week Trump openly praised Erdoğan’s expertise in “rigged elections” while simultaneously ordering all U.S. military leadership to gather at Quantico with no stated purpose.

…he quipped during a White House meeting that his counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” a U.S. official told the Post. “All of it is weird.”

Complimenting Turkey’s President while planning a sudden “weird” military gathering could be:

• Assessment: Who shows reluctance or concern?
• Warning: Demonstrate consequences of disloyalty to this man who wants to be king
• Preparation: Ready to move against officers if they remain loyal to the constitution

This has the hallmarks of telegraphed intentions, as Trump is known for being unable to hide his thoughts. The open praise for Erdoğan’s election manipulation expertise is especially relevant to any highly unusual military consolidation. Such a particular combination of events suggests we may be witness to the late steps of American military dictatorship through a massive power consolidation effort.

When Turkey “summoned” it’s military in 2016 over 45,000 officials, police, judges, governors and civil servants were arrested or suspended, including 163 generals and admirals (45% of the military leadership): 1,524 out of 1,886 staff officers were purged (81%), and one-third of the entire officer corps.

Some experts who read these signals, such as retired U.S. Army Commanding General Ben Hodges, have called attention to examples much further back in history.

July 1935 German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.

Of course what really comes to mind is just two years later in the 1937-38 purges by Stalin, the textbook case of authoritarian consolidation.

Stalin used meetings and conferences to systematically eliminate military leadership, removing three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, eight of nine admirals, 50 of 57 army corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders.

The most competent leaders were especially targeted. Marshal “Soviet Bonaparte” Tukhachevsky, for example, found his usual parade spot blocked by security guards on May Day, was demoted 10 days later, then arrested and thrown into Lubyanka Prison. Stalin called an emergency meeting to justify eliminating his best leaders, branding the strongest and most intelligent military officers as mere “puppets” to be executed. The entire military leadership was forced to participate in prosecuting and then murdering their own colleagues.

What’s particularly notable about Stalin’s method is how he used gatherings to identify targets, conduct secret trials where defendants were tortured into confessions, immediately sentenced to death, and shot within an hour. Within two years, over 30,000 military officers had been executed, shipped to the gulag, or dismissed from service.

Perhaps a more direct parallel comes from the 1979 Baath Party purge in Iraq. Saddam Hussein convened an emergency party meeting on July 22 where he calmly read names from a prepared list while armed guards escorted each named official out of the hall. The remaining members were forced to applaud each arrest, creating complicity through participation.

Within days, 68 high-ranking officials had been executed, including five Revolutionary Command Council members and 21 cabinet ministers. What made this purge especially effective was how Hussein used the meeting itself as both assessment and trap by observing who hesitated to applaud, who showed concern, who might harbor divided loyalties.

The gathering that promised party unity became the mechanism for its complete subjugation. Hussein’s method demonstrates how a single well-orchestrated meeting can identify, isolate, and eliminate institutional opposition while forcing survivors to become active participants in their colleagues’ destruction.

Trump’s actions thus suggest potential elimination of constitutional military leadership in favor of personal loyalty to a dictator. Once military leadership is replaced with his loyalists, other institutions fall rapidly in sequence. The venerable Posse Comitatus guardrail, theoretically preventing the military from extrajudicial killing of domestic civilians, could become meaningless in a month.

In related news, Trump’s sudden expansion of ICE mirrors Mussolini’s transformation of the “Blackshirts” from an irregular mob into legitimate state apparatus of violence.

Mussolini rapidly expanded his paramilitary forces with state funding while demanding personal loyalty over institutional oaths. Similarly, Trump has allocated $175 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE agents who California’s governor warns appear to have “sworn an oath to Donald Trump, not the Constitution.”

Trump has conscripted FBI and DEA agents into ICE operations while granting them “Total Authorization” to use “whatever means necessary”, the exact extralegal authority Mussolini gave his Blackshirts.

And last, but not least, Trump’s appointment to lead the military was himself barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Pete Hegseth as an “insider threat”, due to hate group tattoos such as the words deus vult. Hegseth quit the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, publishing his grievance in a book he called The War on Warriors.

Rapid assembly of a Blackshirt-like ICE, combined with the simultaneous military assembly by Hegseth at Quantico, means the news reads like a classic authoritarian playbook: build loyal militant enforcement apparatus while rapidly neutralizing potential opposition within existing security institutions, in a war on warriors.

History shows clearly, from multiple angles, that once military leadership is replaced with personal loyalists and a parallel enforcement apparatus is established, representative government dies. The fact that Trump repeatedly and openly admires dictators for their authoritarian tactics, and has telegraphed a Turkey/Iraq-like summons to the military, suggests we are watching his implementation of a well-established playbook to destroy freedom.