Fort Lesley J. McNair, north gate

Russ Baker

In the last few days, drones have reportedly been spotted over Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington, DC, where Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth live. Officials are worried, and so am I, though for different reasons.

Did you know our secretary of state and secretary of defense live on an army base?

And they’re not the only ones.

Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, and other senior Trump officials have moved into military housing. Tulsi Gabbard and Russell Vought are browsing the available housing, but have not moved yet. One more senior official, unidentified, has been advised to move by security officials.

The official excuse is that they face threats from a range of purported foes, including, we are told, cartels, foreign adversaries, and protesters.

But I can’t help feeling we’re not getting the real story. And, frankly, what that might be chills me.

Why does a king (and his courtiers) go into his castle and pull up the drawbridge?

Because they see themselves as besieged — or are planning to do something they know will cause them to be besieged.

Harvard professor Steven Levitsky — an expert on threats to democracies — made this sobering observation:

It is something you never see in a democracy. Government officials live on military bases or other sort of fortified zones [only] in authoritarian regimes.

In authoritarian regimes.

Coming at a time when fair elections are openly threatened and our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms challenged at every turn, when we see this group withdraw to a hardened inner sanctum, we’d better be paying close attention.

But thus far little attention has been paid to this matter, and what it may mean.

Plenty of factors do come to mind as potentially precipitating even more dramatic action on the part of Team Trump. You can surely think of many, but here are a few:

1. Cringeworthy descriptions of Trump’s vile behavior emerging from the Epstein files and into the light with every new day.
2. The consequences, potential and immediate, of Trump’s Iran war: the fear of a draft, the rising body count, and the mind-boggling expenditures. The Pentagon’s now put in for an additional $200 billion, with more requests to come if things drag on. As Hegseth said, “Obviously, it takes money to kill bad guys.” He doesn’t talk about how many lives it will cost.
3. The specter of economic collapse, perhaps triggered by the jobs-crushing regulation-free rollout of AI.
4. The threat of a nationalized election, overturning our 250-year tradition of local control of state and local elections.

Any one of the above could — or, at least, should — spark such outrage that even the most indolent of MAGAs might eventually grab torches and pitchforks and join the masses storming the castle wall.

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Via https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-officials-flee-into-the-bunker/ar-AA1Zdg5i