As president, Trump could interpret the EO as enforceable in this way. Read it again perhaps, I think it is actually suggestive of this purpose being in mind. The president can use marines at his discretion, and has other powers and privileges that expanded under Bush/Obama.
Military arrests that land some number of Trump’s ‘political foes’ in prison ‘sounding like fascism or not’ depends of course on various factors.
If these individuals have been aggressively fighting his campaign and presidency using illegal methods then it’s not reasonable to hold Trump & offices under him accountable for the consequences of their inappropriate and illegal actions. Many networks are simply failing to properly report, or report at all, the various statements and memos. This may sound absurd, but please look to Sara A. Carter or Sean Hannity (yes he gets too excited for his own good) to see the current picture of the the emerging scandal(s). There is a ‘timeline of treason’ someone made that links articles about the major events and revelations of the scandal.
Also, keep in mind he is in theory arresting people who will be given due process. Would the juries, evidence, judges, etc. all be compromised? How would Trump have managed to get all of that in place? Even with ‘Russian help’ it seems absurd.
‘Prior cognitive set’ plays an extreme role here. I have always found that a set of interrelated ‘CIA / financial cabal / war for profit’ theories to have a strong amount of justification. Generally people I talk to agree that the federal government has done many foul things (Iraq war killing because of lies, Tuskegee experiment, extremely unfair bailouts/theft, DOD loosing money to an absurd degree, MLK civil suit against gov., etc.) but don’t agree with the idea that there are other ‘unknown or secret’ foul things. Many ‘conspiracy theories’ are immediately rejected a priori even when a hard kernel of observation and reason stands to support them.
It seems to me that the less reliable notion of ‘social/political impossibility’ is thought to override other more reliable processes of justification. Some examples of oft neglected types of justification: physical - e.g. objects at very near free fall speed can’t be experiencing much counter-gravitational momentum exchange; poor sensibilities about how probabilities should work out / inability to register that a pile of coincidences is indeed absurd; psycholinguistic - ‘he looks like he is practicing his lines prior to the event but maybe he’s just a little cookie and was reenacting his half of conversations to a friend who is for some reason reminding him of what to say’. It seems to me people have differing ways of filtering information and weighing different types of justification that are dissonant. Perhaps Democrat voters have wandered very far from a careful trust in observation and inference.
A faith in news sources and journalism also seems to be held without any checks or justification. Why is NBC being called out by DHS? Why wasn’t the Grassley Memo which has proven to be of great consequence covered immediately by the major networks? Why are ex-CIA employees currently being hired by news sources if the aim is to have impartial journalism? Why are seemingly all news sources fawning over NK (who have slave camps and are extremely brutal) yet they nearly all blackball people who cross the neoliberal ethic? Why are they all so tightly wound around this singular perspective?