Are Tyrants Always This Fragile?

Trump sent Marines into Los Angeles to silence peaceful protest. But history says when leaders turn the military on their own people, it's not a show of power—it's a confession of weakness.

“We are human,” said 21-year-old Frida Aguilar, a nursing student who joined the protest in downtown Los Angeles earlier today. She held a sign that read “My future shouldn’t depend on ICE quotas,” her voice rising over the low thrum of military trucks crawling up Temple Street. Around her, hundreds marched in defiance of a newly imposed city curfew—and the presence of more than 4,700 uniformed federal troops, including U.S. Marines, dispatched without the governor’s consent.

Throughout history, authoritarians and dictators have often treated the military as their own personal ego-soothing machinery—rolled out not to protect the people, but to punish them for daring to disagree. You know, the thing they turn to instead of therapy.

From China to Egypt to our own backyard, the use of national forces against domestic protest has never been the show of strength these fragile narcissists think it is. Rather, it’s been a red flag. The kind that flutters right before the tyrant falls—which, funnily enough, Trump literally did this week, on the stairs leading to the presidential plane that, no matter where it takes him, there he still is, a weakling.

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Is it ever wise for a tyrant to sic the military on their own people?

The short answer? Nope. It always ends badly. For the dictator.

Yes this week, Donald Trump did exactly that. Because he’s either too stupid to understand history or he’s too impulsive and delusional to think his actions through. Probably all of the above, all at once, like some disgusting TikTok casserole made by pouring Velveeta, Skittles, and slightly stale pasta into a flowered Pioneer Woman baking dish.

After days of peaceful protest against violent and unnecessary ICE raids and mass detentions—not of “criminal aliens,” but of sick children, exhausted God-fearing busboys, and anyone who helped fill a quota—Trump responded not with listening, but with rabid, bombastic escalation, designed to please those permanently planted on plush recliners in front of Fox News.

He federalized the California National Guard like a constipated John Wayne deputizing the town drunk in a Hollywood western so they could go shoot a buncha messicans. He flew in the Marines with the aplomb of a robed lunatic conducting Wagner to an assembly of S&M G.I. Joe dolls in his basement.

He bypassed the governor. He ignored the mayor. And he put American troops in American streets—not to protect the nation, but to suppress American people who don’t enjoy hurting others for sport.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

Because when tyrants reach for the military to silence peaceful dissent, pretending the protestors are violent because malignant narcissists view any kind of dissent as personal assault, history doesn’t call that strength.

It calls it The Panic of The Weakling.

And it is always, ALWAYS, the first sickening strains of the prelude to a fall.

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🧭 Five Times Authoritarians Used Troops on Their Own Protesters—and Paid the Price

Beijing, 1989 — Tiananmen Square

Students marched for democracy. Deng Xiaoping sent in tanks. Thousands died. China has tried to erase the event ever since—but the image of a single man staring down a line of tanks still haunts the world’s conscience. Because bravery belongs to those who speak truth to power at risk of their very lives, not those who use power to promote lies while eating McDonald’s on the heavily guarded golf course.

Panama, 1989 — Manuel Noriega’s Downfall

Facing growing dissent, military dictator Manuel Noriega cracked down hard—disappearing activists, beating journalists, and sending troops to terrorize civilian neighborhoods. When opposition protests grew anyway, he declared himself “maximum leader” and shut down the election results. Within weeks, the U.S. invaded, and Panamanians danced in the streets as his own troops surrendered. Noriega fled to a Vatican embassy, was smoked out with death metal, and later convicted on drug and money laundering charges in U.S. courts.

Bangkok, 2010 — Red Shirts Uprising

Thai protesters demanded elections. The government responded with bullets and snipers. Over 80 civilians were killed. The prime minister was later indicted for murder. His political career never recovered. More proof that, yes, despots are always stupid.

Romania, 1989 — Ceaușescu’s Last Stand

Dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered troops to fire on peaceful protesters in Timișoara. Dozens were killed. But instead of silencing the uprising, it ignited it. Within four days, the military turned on him. Within a week, he and his wife were captured, tried, and executed by firing squad on live television. The regime collapsed almost overnight.

Khartoum, 2019 — The Sit-In Massacre

Thousands of Sudanese citizens, many of them young, had staged a weeks-long sit-in demanding civilian rule after the fall of dictator Omar al-Bashir. The military responded with unspeakable violence: over 100 protesters killed, dozens raped, and hundreds dumped in the Nile. But instead of breaking the movement, the massacre galvanized it. A nationwide general strike brought the economy to a halt. Within weeks, the military was forced into a power-sharing agreement. The regime staggered. The people endured—and the world was watching.

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So Why Los Angeles, and Why Now?

Because Trump sees protest as threat, not patriotism, just like he and his human kidney bean in a child’s church suit, Stephen Miller, see brown and black people as subhuman and inherently violent, despite all rational evidence to the contrary. Racists in power always panic when the crowd starts chanting decent things they can’t understand (compassion, kindness, humanity), much less control. And racist, xenophobic fear, when dressed in a uniform, always mistakes obedience for justice. Even if that uniform is just shit-stained khakis and a red ballcap.

The people in the streets today aren’t radicals, terrorists or any of the scary buzzwords Miller and Trump spew. They’re students, nurses, teachers, journalists, street vendors, parents, grandparents, husbands, wives. Americans. They’re human beings—exercising the rights to free speech and assemly guaranteed to them in the Constitution.

Their signs say things like “Family is not a crime” and “Stop the raids. Start the healing.” They are unarmed. They are not the threat to America. The federal response of the incoherent old man who sharts on the Constitution every goddamned day is.

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Let’s Tell the Truth About the Border

The United States has spent generations destabilizing Latin America:

• Toppling governments in Guatemala, Chile, and El Salvador

• Supporting death squads and coups through the Cold War

• Pushing NAFTA on Mexico and destroying local agricultural economies

• Flooding border towns with U.S.-owned factories that paid in scraps

And when families displaced by those policies show up seeking survival? We build walls. We cage children. We militarize border patrol. We forget that many of these families are here because of us.

You can’t torch someone’s home, then act scandalized when they knock on your door. You can’t draw a border through ancestral land and accuse the people already living there of trespassing.

The narrative of “a border invasion” is untrue, just like the “illegal criminal” narrative is untrue. Migrants commit crimes at much lower rates than US-born people, but monsters like Stephen Miller cherry-pick and fixate upon a handful of crimes committed by a minuscule portion of the migrant population, while ignoring all the same or worse crimes committed by white US citizens, to drum up racialized hatred.

This isn’t a migration crisis, because there is no invasion at the border and there is no evidence of inherent criminality about brown-skinned migrant; if anything, it’s the exact opposite. American’s crisis, rather, is a moral one.

And every uniformed body in downtown Los Angeles today proves it.

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So What Happens Next?

When leaders turn their troops on civilians, they don’t cement their power—they crack its foundation. What follows isn’t peace. It’s backlash:

• Legal and social blowback: Courts step in. Public support collapses.

• State resistance: Governors push back. Lawsuits fly.

• Moral exposure: The world sees who you really are—and so does your own nation.

• Movement momentum: Protesters grow bolder, not quieter.

• Historical shame: You don’t get remembered as strong. You get remembered as scared.

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Hope Is a Verb With Teeth

If you feel powerless, don’t. The people in the streets today are reminding us that democracy is not fragile—it’s ferocious. It survives dictators and crackdowns. It loves through their fear and hatred. It survives the bewildered, confused Marines on Olvera Street, who are wondering why the hell they’re supposed to protect America from kindhearted nursing students who want people to be nicer to each other.

Remember this, my friends: Tyrants may command armies. But only the people get to write the ending.

And we are not done yet.