donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,072
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
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
