Trump setting stage for Kent State 2.0

Veterans fear Trump creating conditions for another Kent State
War veterans worry escalating violence could be "politically advantageous" for Trump

By Charles R. Davis
News Editor
Published August 20, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) It’s not hysterical to think it could happen. It’s not conspiratorial to suggest it’s what they might actually want. And it cannot be dismissed as improbable, given the conditions on the ground and what we already know about the most powerful man in the world: the prospect of American troops, in American cities, opening fire on American citizens — and that blood on the streets could be viewed not as a tragedy but as plain good politics.

“It definitely keeps me up at night,” Janessa Goldbeck, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, a pro-democracy nonprofit, said in an interview with Salon. “I don’t want to speculate what’s in his brain, but just taking the evidence as it is — what he said during the Black Lives Matter protests; the fact that he’s taking this maximalist approach to deploying troops—he is eager to create escalatory situations.”

In 2020, President Donald Trump wanted it to happen.

“Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked, referring to people protesting the police killing of George Floyd, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who wrote in his memoir that he “had to figure out a way to walk Trump back.” Esper was fired for “insufficient loyalty” a few months later.

Second-term Trump, who has flooded Washington, D.C., with federal agents and National Guardsmen for the ostensible purpose of combating crime that is at a 30-year low, no longer has someone such as Mark Esper to tell him “no.” The likes of Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who describes Trump as “a total fascist”), and John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff (who warned that his former boss is an aspiring “dictator”), have been replaced by far-right ideologues and mediocre functionaries — White House adviser Stephen Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who are eager to demonstrate their loyalty and inflict pain on the president’s domestic enemies. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/20/veterans-fear-trump-creating-conditions-for-another-kent-state/