This is a good discussion. A key issue the speakers point out is that the military clearly does not back Trump and that military leaders obviously regard him as an incompetent moron and a nuisance. I would add that the Deep State has worked diligently with the media and the Democrats to get rid of Trump. The QAnon-types are largely correct about that. The Left’s fear that Trump is on the verge of becoming a fascist dictator is undermined by the lack of support for Trump in the Deep State. A counterargument might be that Trump has tried to staff the federal administration with cronies and yes-men, and turn federal police agencies into a personal militia. There are elements of truth in those claims, but Trump has been very inept in such efforts. It’s clear that the upper strata of the power elite (the top industrial-technological-financial-nuclear-military-intelligence sectors) are very anti-Trump, as is the wider network of the international power elite.

The scenario that Noah Smith describes is what I suspect a “civil war” in the US would look like, with left-wing and right-wing militias fighting each other, while the military remains uninvolved, although the police and federal agents would likely be involved (as they have been in the present civil unrest). On the ground, a civil war would be a bloody mess like Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. However, it is certainly possible the Deep State and military-industrial complex would merely stand by and let this happen because a civil war in North America is not necessarily antithetical to their interests. What they are about is building a global financial-technological-technocratic empire under their control. They do not necessarily oppose civil wars within individual countries.

In fact, they are perfectly happy to turn individual nations or even entire regions into failed states as a means of preventing actual opposition to global power elite rule from happening (Iraq, Syria, and Libya are obvious examples). The US power elite would consider a domestic civil war in the US to be preferable to a culturally unified country in which class conflict is the basis of political mobilization. The very last thing they want is for “the people” to put aside their other differences and engage in a collective struggle against the corrupt US ruling class.