Andrew Sullivan: The Permanent Stain

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donbosco

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He's long been a gadfly on the right that can stray leftward and his prose tends to bite and sting...he's on target here.

The Permanent Stain
Trump's first year has been a triumph for autocracy in America. And it will last.

Andrew Sullivan
Aug 8

“If someone has the power of the presidency and also has the power to sue and take bribes, then he can do anything to anyone!” - Jesus, to the townsfolk of South Park.

It’s been over a decade now since Grendel emerged from the forest and the metaphors are understandably tired. But a sentence in a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”

Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.

The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even John “Signing Statements” Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has “elevated it to another level” (see AP graphic below):


And unlike, say, Putin, who capitalized on (and may well have orchestrated) an actual emergency — a terror attack — to make his first big move, Trump just declares non-existent ones real on Twitter — and presto! — they are real. He knows he doesn’t even have to bother to justify them. He rightly assumes that Americans have less resistance to bald-faced autocratic lies in 2025 than Russians did in 1999.

Trump’s mouthpiece justifies it this way: “President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

Meanwhile, America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.

Just this week, Trump unilaterally imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because he disagrees with the country’s judiciary’s indictment of his buddy Bolsonaro, and an extra 25 percent tariff on India (for a total of 50 percent), because India continues to buy Russian oil. “We are in a situation now where he is completely upset by India, and the 25 years of effort to build a relationship seems to be going down in 25 hours,” said Mukesh Aghi, president of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Trump was in a bad mood, it seems. Upset, because India didn’t realize he’d have a sudden realization that Putin had been manipulating him, and hadn’t adjusted its energy needs to Trump’s mercurial whims. So fuck India.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Trump has less than zero constitutional or legal authority to do any of this. Tariffs are constitutionally the Senate’s prerogative, and are applied for reasons to do with trade and industry. For a president unilaterally to use them as a club to coerce other countries on unrelated policies — on a whim unrelated to any Congressional mandate — is an impeachable offense. And yet what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.

Tyrants also need to delegitimize the rule of law, because it may occasionally rule against them, which is, of course, intolerable. So every judicial ruling against Trump is instantly deemed corrupt and political; and every ruling for him is pure justice. He has also used the full weight of the Justice Department to target his personal enemies, impugn honest judges, harass dissenters, and now to accuse a previous president of treason. At the same time, he has pardoned violent rioters, insurrectionists, and corrupt pols on the take. For the sole reasons that they’re on his side. He did so with his usual judicial care and moderation: “Fuck it. Release ‘em all.”

He has seized the pardon power and made a mockery of the justice system, promising immunity for criminals doing his will, and pardoning the violent thugs who attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2021. He has appointed an eager participant in the January 6 riots to the Justice Department (a man who yelled, “Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill 'em” to encourage rioters attacking police officers at the Capitol building), and named a Stop the Steal organizer, Ed “Reek” Martin, as his pardon attorney. This isn’t a strain for the justice system; it’s a giant fuck-you to any pretense of the rule of law.

And this is the man Trump just appointed (and the Senate approved) to be a lifetime federal judge:

[Emil Bove III] emphatically told prosecutors to be prepared to defy or evade court orders, such as the ones that would bar the administration from illegally deporting undocumented immigrants without due process; dismissed a corruption case against a sitting mayor not for sound legal reasons but for political leverage; targeted prosecutors under his command who refused to go along with his unethical instructions to drop cases for political reasons; fired federal prosecutors and oversaw purges of other officials who simply did their duty investigating crimes that happened to embarrass the president.

His appointment — and the Senate’s confirmation — is an open, aggressive declaration that the rule of law is now the rule of Trump.



Cont. at the link: The Permanent Stain
 
His most compelling point is that moderate inflation, trade deficits and wars in other parts of the world do not constitute emergencies.
 
His most compelling point is that moderate inflation, trade deficits and wars in other parts of the world do not constitute emergencies.
Yeah. I mean, he’s pretty much just articulating the amalgamated analysis of this board, since the supreme court’s declaration of a kingship. That Trump is an authoritarian autocrat is no revelation. It is not news that the constitution has been rendered a milquetoast and facile hand wave to morality and ethics, it’s just plain articulation of the blatant. This admin is literally threatening to repeal women’s suffrage.

Also, I will never give Andrew Sullivan credit; I’m constitutionally incapable.
 
He's long been a gadfly on the right that can stray leftward and his prose tends to bite and sting...he's on target here.

The Permanent Stain
Trump's first year has been a triumph for autocracy in America. And it will last.

Andrew Sullivan
Aug 8

“If someone has the power of the presidency and also has the power to sue and take bribes, then he can do anything to anyone!” - Jesus, to the townsfolk of South Park.

It’s been over a decade now since Grendel emerged from the forest and the metaphors are understandably tired. But a sentence in a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”

Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.

This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.

The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even John “Signing Statements” Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has “elevated it to another level” (see AP graphic below):


And unlike, say, Putin, who capitalized on (and may well have orchestrated) an actual emergency — a terror attack — to make his first big move, Trump just declares non-existent ones real on Twitter — and presto! — they are real. He knows he doesn’t even have to bother to justify them. He rightly assumes that Americans have less resistance to bald-faced autocratic lies in 2025 than Russians did in 1999.

Trump’s mouthpiece justifies it this way: “President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

Meanwhile, America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.

Just this week, Trump unilaterally imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because he disagrees with the country’s judiciary’s indictment of his buddy Bolsonaro, and an extra 25 percent tariff on India (for a total of 50 percent), because India continues to buy Russian oil. “We are in a situation now where he is completely upset by India, and the 25 years of effort to build a relationship seems to be going down in 25 hours,” said Mukesh Aghi, president of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Trump was in a bad mood, it seems. Upset, because India didn’t realize he’d have a sudden realization that Putin had been manipulating him, and hadn’t adjusted its energy needs to Trump’s mercurial whims. So fuck India.

Let’s be perfectly clear: Trump has less than zero constitutional or legal authority to do any of this. Tariffs are constitutionally the Senate’s prerogative, and are applied for reasons to do with trade and industry. For a president unilaterally to use them as a club to coerce other countries on unrelated policies — on a whim unrelated to any Congressional mandate — is an impeachable offense. And yet what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.

Tyrants also need to delegitimize the rule of law, because it may occasionally rule against them, which is, of course, intolerable. So every judicial ruling against Trump is instantly deemed corrupt and political; and every ruling for him is pure justice. He has also used the full weight of the Justice Department to target his personal enemies, impugn honest judges, harass dissenters, and now to accuse a previous president of treason. At the same time, he has pardoned violent rioters, insurrectionists, and corrupt pols on the take. For the sole reasons that they’re on his side. He did so with his usual judicial care and moderation: “Fuck it. Release ‘em all.”

He has seized the pardon power and made a mockery of the justice system, promising immunity for criminals doing his will, and pardoning the violent thugs who attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in 2021. He has appointed an eager participant in the January 6 riots to the Justice Department (a man who yelled, “Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill 'em” to encourage rioters attacking police officers at the Capitol building), and named a Stop the Steal organizer, Ed “Reek” Martin, as his pardon attorney. This isn’t a strain for the justice system; it’s a giant fuck-you to any pretense of the rule of law.

And this is the man Trump just appointed (and the Senate approved) to be a lifetime federal judge:

[Emil Bove III] emphatically told prosecutors to be prepared to defy or evade court orders, such as the ones that would bar the administration from illegally deporting undocumented immigrants without due process; dismissed a corruption case against a sitting mayor not for sound legal reasons but for political leverage; targeted prosecutors under his command who refused to go along with his unethical instructions to drop cases for political reasons; fired federal prosecutors and oversaw purges of other officials who simply did their duty investigating crimes that happened to embarrass the president.

His appointment — and the Senate’s confirmation — is an open, aggressive declaration that the rule of law is now the rule of Trump.



Cont. at the link: The Permanent Stain
Barack Obama Applause GIF by Obama

Andrew Sullivan is far from blameless in all of this, but this piece is spectacular. They won’t do it, but I challenge any of the conservatives who post here to disagree with any part of this commentary by one of your fellow conservatives.
 
Blah, blah, blah. Words, words, words. Digital ink spilled by the e-bucket telling us how terrible Trump and how he's destroying America.

Except that all thinking people know that already and don't necessarily need to be reminded. (Although this is a good, well-written summary of Trump's evil.)

Sullivan says that democracy is folding. He's wrong, although not by a lot. Democracy has not yet folded. The Republican Party has folded. Conservatism has folded. Those directly targeted by Trump have folded. But democracy still has a chance although the odds are looking worse by the day.

And if democracy is to survive, it will have to be conservatives and Republicans who step up to save it. Democrats are a minority party in our government and don't have the numbers to do anything except offer significant assistance on their own. It will need to be both Republicans leaders and rank-and-file Republican Senators & Representatives who decide to put country over party and, in some cases, country over their own careers in order to pull us back from the end of democracy in this country. It will have to be Republican donors and "media" who tell the masses it's ok to oppose Trump because he's an evil tyrant and it will have to, ultimately, be Republican voters who end his reign at the ballot box.

So, at this juncture, I don't really care to read another conservative tell me how bad things are; I can see that with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. What I need is a Republican who can convince other Republicans to actually put actions to their concerns and get those in the Republican Party to put a stop to Trump. Anything else is from these panicked conservatives is, to borrow a phrase, "a tale told by an intellectual, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

To Sullivan's credit he did give me my first full belly laugh of the day. To have the ability to type this and not be so embarrassed as to immediately delete it was strikingly funny to me:

"Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology."

And then to follow it up with this absolutely sent me over the edge:

"conservatives killing the Constitution they love..."

In an article where the author complains about the mendacity of the leader of the Republican Party, for a conservative to try to sneak those whoppers by us is unintentional satire of the highest level.
 
To Sullivan's credit he did give me my first full belly laugh of the day. To have the ability to type this and not be so embarrassed as to immediately delete it was strikingly funny to me:

"Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology."

And then to follow it up with this absolutely sent me over the edge:

"conservatives killing the Constitution they love..."

In an article where the author complains about the mendacity of the leader of the Republican Party, for a conservative to try to sneak those whoppers by us is unintentional satire of the highest level.
That caught my eye as well. He is attempting to excuse his role in how we got here by defining conservatism as simply caretakers of "constitutional democratic governance." And then attempting to wallpaper over the role conservatives have played in the current "dysfunction and ideology" they themselves created.
 
That first line does point to the Burkite conservatives -- at least in portraying them in the most positive light possible and ignoring their elitism, which of course, is the historical source of most dysfunctional ideology in constitutional democratic governance in modern times.
 
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Andrew Sullivan is far from blameless in all of this, but this piece is spectacular. They won’t do it, but I challenge any of the conservatives who post here to disagree with any part of this commentary by one of your fellow conservatives.
TBH, I saw this pathway in 2015, and arguably as the culmination of the devolution from conservative to Tea Party to alt-right to MAGA/Trump. I became a de facto ex-Pub years ago.

Most everything Sullivan writes is patently obvious for those not in a cult. It's not anything Hillary, Biden, Kamala didn't warn about...the remainder of Dems never got their message and milquetoastiness together. Much of middle America hid its head in the sand. Did we need more proof than J6, handling of COVID, and the litany of insane clown posse tweets over the last decade?
 
TBH, I saw this pathway in 2015, and arguably as the culmination of the devolution from conservative to Tea Party to alt-right to MAGA/Trump.

Everything Sullivan writes is patently obvious for those not in a cult. It's not anything Hillary, Biden, Kamala didn't warn about...the remainder of Dems never got their message and milquetoastiness together. Much of American hid its head in the sand. Did we need more proof than J6 and the litany of insane clown posse tweets?
I’m not saying any of it is new. But this articulation of it is especially compelling, in my view. And as many flaws as he might have, it’s really important to see things like this from unquestionable conservatives like Sullivan. It’s why I’m curious to see if any of the “conservatives” here will take it on. I’m not at all surprised they haven’t yet.
 
That first line does point to the Burkite conservatives -- at least in portraying them in the most positive light possible and ignoring their elitism, which of course, is the historical source of most dysfunctional ideology in constitutional democratic governance in modern times.
Hard to trust them, but also very hard to see a path out of this without them. I suspect Ram and calla see themselves as Burkian conservatives. Or at least they did ten years ago.
 
Hard to trust them, but also very hard to see a path out of this without them. I suspect Ram and calla see themselves as Burkian conservatives. Or at least they did ten years ago.
Trump is the opposite of Burkian conservatism.

My family tree was mostly made of Republicans from NY - we knew who Trump was - a narcissistic real estate mobster with an Archie Bunker worldview in a more expensive wardrobe.
 
Trump is the opposite of Burkian conservatism.

My family tree was mostly made of Republicans from NY - we knew who Trump was - a narcissistic real estate mobster with an Archie Bunker worldview in a more expensive wardrobe.
Right. Was talking about Sullivan as a Burkian.
 
I’m not saying any of it is new. But this articulation of it is especially compelling, in my view. And as many flaws as he might have, it’s really important to see things like this from unquestionable conservatives like Sullivan. It’s why I’m curious to see if any of the “conservatives” here will take it on. I’m not at all surprised they haven’t yet.
There's no question that Andrew Sullivan is an effective writer with a touch of elegance - what National Review and Buckley types used to display.
 
There's no question that Andrew Sullivan is an effective writer with a touch of elegance - what National Review and Buckley types used to display.

I think you're overestimating Buckley and the National Review. For all his claims about cleaning up postwar conservatism, he had a long correspondence with George Lincoln Rockwell, one of the founders of the American neo-Nazi movement. And his so-called elegance is overrated. Just because he went to Yale doesn't mean he wasn't a piece of shit. Check out his 1957 NR editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" or his 1986 NYT editorial about AIDS, which concludes as follows:

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

You have got to be kidding! That's exactly what we suspected all along! You are calling for the return of the Scarlet Letter, but only for homosexuals!

Answer: The Scarlet Letter was designed to stimulate public obloquy. The AIDS tattoo is designed for private protection. And the whole point of this is that we are not talking about a kidding matter. Our society is generally threatened, and in order to fight AIDS, we need the civil equivalent of universal military training.


I'm sure Sam Tanenhaus covers all this in his recent biography of Buckley.
 
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