The only way we're going to ever be rid of the Orange Menace is when he is six feet under. And I don't care how it happens - the fatal hamberder, a blow to the head with a 9 iron, died of old age forgotten in his solitary confinement in the Florence SuperMaX. Whatever.
Worth observing: he was saying a lot of the same things about Hillary Clinton in 2016. He told her on one of the debate stages he was going to appoint a special counsel to go after her, and when she tried to blow it off with a “well I guess we can all be glad that Donald Trump is not president,” he retorted “because you’d be in jail.”
*checks notes* He was president, and it didn’t happen.
Now, it’s possible he’d make this happen if he got back to the White House. Maybe he’d find a big enough hack for AG to do it. It’s also somewhat possible that it will be yet another thing he says that he knows is popular, but where he won’t be able to quite bend the institutions to his will again.
Should we bet anything precious on it? Should that be a reason let’s make him president again and find out? Heck no.
You obviously never heard of his signing of the executive order establishing "Schedule F" for senior federal employees at the end of November 2020 (one of the first things Biden did was revoke that). Removing all civil service protection, having them serve at the pleasure of the president, removing as many as possible from senatorial confirmation, no route for appeal when fired, etc. Plus Russ Vought and the America First Foundation have compiled a list of "dependables" to be appointed to those positions the first week. If there is a "next time" they are ready for it, having learned their lessons. They will start where they left off last time.
There will bwe no next time for Trump Presidency. We always seem to forget the silent majority. Remember the over 80 million people who voted for Biden?That's the silent and often forgotten majority
Yes, Democrats won in 2020 not by taking votes from Trump but by bringing out people who hadn't voted in 2016. We still need to follow the advice of the smartest politician I ever knew, my former boss, Willie Brown: "Run like you're 10 points down till the polls close and then celebrate."
Oh, I know. I just think the chances that would’ve survived judicial review and been allowed to continue into an actual mass purge are approximately nil. Could he have churned more bureaucrats than the usual president does? Sure. But there are a lot of structures and guard rails in place to make sure the federal bureaucracy is insulated somewhat from petty politics. It’s literally designed to have experts around who serve through multiple administrations. He could’ve lit a few fires here and there, but the turf warriors in the offices would’ve put them out, and he would’ve eventually lost interest.
Between regular institutional resistance to implementing such a thing, government unions that were already challenging it in court under civil service protections laws, and the likely capricious nature with which the rule was going to be implemented, it is very unlikely this would’ve gone into effect. Given that he didn’t attempt it until after he’d lost the election, it’s somewhat likely that he wouldn’t have even attempted to do as much as he did if he’d won, and was attempting to leave a sour-grapes, scorched earth government hollowed out of most of its personnel for when Biden took over.
If I understand you correctly, you think that the courts would stop the implementation. I'd like to think that that would be the case, but given the corruption we see throughout the judiciary with R appointed judges, I have no confidence in them.
If Trump were to be re-elected, he would surround himself with totally corrupt people (like he has throughout his lifetime) not like the people he appointed at the start of his first term, and they will simply do whatever they want -- pretty much "Stop us if you can." And since no one in the Republican party will oppose anything he does, it would be up to Ds in congress to stop him, and I don't see any way that they could.
The current 2024 campaign bluster about all he WILL do flys in the face of what he promised to do in 2016.
The Secessionist-in-Chief had in-the-bag Attys-General in Sessions and Barr in place to handle a Clinton investigation.
Considering there was created the Special Prosecution for the "Russia, Russia, Russia" issue, why didn't he with the "very, very large brain" not demand his AG to create a Special Prosecutor for a "Hillary's a Bitch" investigation?
Oh. Second place where he’s absolutely a threat, and probably not just speculatively: he absolutely will end the federal investigations into himself and likely pardon a large number of the 1/6 insurrectionists. That will create a huge permission structure for future presidents to break the law and their supporters to get violent when the candidate they support loses. THAT is a more immediate and certain reason to make sure he never gets back to the White House.
"... and likely pardon a large number of the 1/6 insurrectionists."
If I were 1/6 insurrectionists, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a pardon. His history is pardoning his friends and those he thought were important to him personally, and few if any of the insurrectionists fit that definition. Maybe the top two or three guys, but the rest will be left to rot.
Yeah. The one potential caution I’d throw about that is that, over time in his (first?) term, he was starting to learn how to get rid of the people with spines and replace them with more shameless yes men. (As we’re now seeing, it does actually get worse than Barr.) Now... the chances he’d be able to find such people who’d be remotely competent to execute on what he wanted without the courts throwing things out are... remote. And it’s absolutely not a thing we should be taking chances on. We really are kind of in uncharted territory here.
BUT. We’ve also fought an actual schismatic civil war. We’ve seen MUCH worse things than Trump in our nation’s history, too many to go into here... and we’re still here, “one nation” even if it’s maybe looking a little shaky on “indivisible.” I’m nowhere near saying this is going to be the last gasp of white supremacists and kooks, because frankly, have you seen Trump’s voters lately? But they’ve been here since the beginning. While there’s some genuinely scary people out there, a hundred years ago we would’ve had something closer to a full blown race war already by now. (The Klan and their sympathizers killed quite a few more Americans then than al Qaeda did on 9/11.) A movie like “Birth of a Nation” or “Gone With The Wind,” making open apologies for Confederates and their unrepentant Klan descendants, will not be made and accepted today like they were then. We ARE making progress. We’re scared now because this is the first time it’s been this open and in our face.
Now... obviously our nation won’t last forever. We’re going to have our trials and tribulations. It’s even possible that we’ll eventually really have another schism between red and blue states... but even that wouldn’t ever really work, because blue and red aren’t even entirely cohesive now. The only real difference now between blue and red states is that the blue ones’ densely populated islands of blue cities to outnumber oceans of red rural areas, and the red ones’ don’t. The red areas can’t live without the blue ones’ money, and the blue ones can’t live without the red ones’ food production.
Unfortunately, most of the ideologues have lost sight of that balance.
The chances seem poor, yes. That said, they aren’t zero. A recession, a bad health scare on Biden’s part, lots of things aren’t really foreseeable that could change Trump’s fortunes. I wouldn’t have expected an FBI investigation over an email server to put him in the White House the first time, either.
4 years of Trump would be 4 years of him getting back at all who opposed him and 4 years of him trying to re-write the constitution to remove term limits and let the Senate appoint the President or some other fascist idea like that. Let the President appoint the next President? Sure... Why not? He would do nothing else, not a bit of actually helping to run this country. I think most people know this so I doubt he will ever be elected again. The ones who were curious about him now know what he really is about. Himself. Period. Trump wanted to pardon the insurrectionists but he was told it would be political suicide. Given 4 more years he would order people to commit crimes against his opponents with the promise of getting a pardon. That would be a true hellish situation.
What’s the point of being The President if you can’t have it be your Supreme Court, your DOJ, your Fed, your boxes, your Department of Defense, your Kevin. If you could grab em by the Pussy when your just a star, you can have it all when you’re The President. You can have G8 meetings in your hotels too, wait, there’s more......
What Donald Trump envisions is an autocracy. Nothing more, nothing less. That's why he uses possessive terms with respect to the various arms of the government: "My military". "My Justice Department".
If we as a nation are indeed stupid enough to send him back to the White House, we will lose what is left of our democracy.
I think you may be overlooking the whole apocalyptic, book of Revelation, end times aspect of the seal being broken. At least that was my first thought.
Three Democrats have GOT to get Biden reelected and take back the House! DJT is not on touch with reality and the Republicans in the House and the Senate don't care. They don't even have an agenda anymore. They just want more power and more money.
Yes, it is scary what he says in his note, however, he says a lot of things he either has no idea how to implement, and/or he never intends to implement - he just wants to get a rise out of his opponents, and ensure they are talking about him.
This being said, as we know from Geoffrey Berman, DJT was, in fact, through AG Barr, influencing who was prosecuted or investigated, or not, in some instances. So, he may feel he could actually do this. HOWEVER, based upon his MO, I believe he would appoint a toady as AG, and then say something out load, with the AG in the room, or over twitter or whatever, "If someone was really smart, they would really look into the Biden Crime Family." He will make it clear this is what he wants, without actually asking for it. This way, he has deniability. Just like a Mob Boss, or as his mentor, Roy Cohn, would prescribe...
What I fail to understand is how people eat up all of this and love him, see nothing wrong with this. The country will be in serious trouble and the end of democracy. He can not be in the Oval Office ever again.
I don't see anything that stands out in this latest statement, given the pattern of hundreds before. Whether or not Mr. Trump in any way understands the safeguards that the Constitution, statutes, and tradition have created in our political system, these dissolve in the face of his emotions and self-regard. As for whether he would act on a threat like this once in office, as comments here discuss, I think it would depend entirely on whether he felt pursuing it was in his interest at that moment, and that can't be predicted.
Rather than eternally pick out these statements, delivered in Mr. Trump's endless moments of peak anger, I think more attention should be paid to ways to break up the permission structure that allows millions of friends and neighbors to dismiss these pathological displays of political narcissism, a structure which includes dismissals of their seriousness. I'm not sure there is a way to break up that structure, but nothing could be more important than continuing to try, and I think it's clear by now that focusing on Mr. Trump himself and the norm-breaking things he says neither sheds new light for us or penetrates the darkness that has surrounded ordinary Trump supporters.
Chris, you had a column the other day forswearing outrage porn. . . .
Chris - Love your stuff. Just curious, how much of the stuff Trump spews on TS do you think is what he really believes vs how much do you think he puts out there just because he know it'll resonate with his "true believers"?
Wanted to just say a broad thank you to the commenters out there. These comments are interesting and informative -- I am learning!
The only way we're going to ever be rid of the Orange Menace is when he is six feet under. And I don't care how it happens - the fatal hamberder, a blow to the head with a 9 iron, died of old age forgotten in his solitary confinement in the Florence SuperMaX. Whatever.
Worth observing: he was saying a lot of the same things about Hillary Clinton in 2016. He told her on one of the debate stages he was going to appoint a special counsel to go after her, and when she tried to blow it off with a “well I guess we can all be glad that Donald Trump is not president,” he retorted “because you’d be in jail.”
*checks notes* He was president, and it didn’t happen.
Now, it’s possible he’d make this happen if he got back to the White House. Maybe he’d find a big enough hack for AG to do it. It’s also somewhat possible that it will be yet another thing he says that he knows is popular, but where he won’t be able to quite bend the institutions to his will again.
Should we bet anything precious on it? Should that be a reason let’s make him president again and find out? Heck no.
It’s more in the... “just saying” category.
You obviously never heard of his signing of the executive order establishing "Schedule F" for senior federal employees at the end of November 2020 (one of the first things Biden did was revoke that). Removing all civil service protection, having them serve at the pleasure of the president, removing as many as possible from senatorial confirmation, no route for appeal when fired, etc. Plus Russ Vought and the America First Foundation have compiled a list of "dependables" to be appointed to those positions the first week. If there is a "next time" they are ready for it, having learned their lessons. They will start where they left off last time.
There will bwe no next time for Trump Presidency. We always seem to forget the silent majority. Remember the over 80 million people who voted for Biden?That's the silent and often forgotten majority
Yes, Democrats won in 2020 not by taking votes from Trump but by bringing out people who hadn't voted in 2016. We still need to follow the advice of the smartest politician I ever knew, my former boss, Willie Brown: "Run like you're 10 points down till the polls close and then celebrate."
Oh, I know. I just think the chances that would’ve survived judicial review and been allowed to continue into an actual mass purge are approximately nil. Could he have churned more bureaucrats than the usual president does? Sure. But there are a lot of structures and guard rails in place to make sure the federal bureaucracy is insulated somewhat from petty politics. It’s literally designed to have experts around who serve through multiple administrations. He could’ve lit a few fires here and there, but the turf warriors in the offices would’ve put them out, and he would’ve eventually lost interest.
Not clear exactly who you think would stop Trump's implementation of "Schedule F". Please expand.
Between regular institutional resistance to implementing such a thing, government unions that were already challenging it in court under civil service protections laws, and the likely capricious nature with which the rule was going to be implemented, it is very unlikely this would’ve gone into effect. Given that he didn’t attempt it until after he’d lost the election, it’s somewhat likely that he wouldn’t have even attempted to do as much as he did if he’d won, and was attempting to leave a sour-grapes, scorched earth government hollowed out of most of its personnel for when Biden took over.
If I understand you correctly, you think that the courts would stop the implementation. I'd like to think that that would be the case, but given the corruption we see throughout the judiciary with R appointed judges, I have no confidence in them.
If Trump were to be re-elected, he would surround himself with totally corrupt people (like he has throughout his lifetime) not like the people he appointed at the start of his first term, and they will simply do whatever they want -- pretty much "Stop us if you can." And since no one in the Republican party will oppose anything he does, it would be up to Ds in congress to stop him, and I don't see any way that they could.
Excellent point, Eric.
The current 2024 campaign bluster about all he WILL do flys in the face of what he promised to do in 2016.
The Secessionist-in-Chief had in-the-bag Attys-General in Sessions and Barr in place to handle a Clinton investigation.
Considering there was created the Special Prosecution for the "Russia, Russia, Russia" issue, why didn't he with the "very, very large brain" not demand his AG to create a Special Prosecutor for a "Hillary's a Bitch" investigation?
Oh. Second place where he’s absolutely a threat, and probably not just speculatively: he absolutely will end the federal investigations into himself and likely pardon a large number of the 1/6 insurrectionists. That will create a huge permission structure for future presidents to break the law and their supporters to get violent when the candidate they support loses. THAT is a more immediate and certain reason to make sure he never gets back to the White House.
"... and likely pardon a large number of the 1/6 insurrectionists."
If I were 1/6 insurrectionists, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a pardon. His history is pardoning his friends and those he thought were important to him personally, and few if any of the insurrectionists fit that definition. Maybe the top two or three guys, but the rest will be left to rot.
He will NEVER get back into the White House again.
I've learned never to say never. There were many who said he would "never" be president once.
Yeah. The one potential caution I’d throw about that is that, over time in his (first?) term, he was starting to learn how to get rid of the people with spines and replace them with more shameless yes men. (As we’re now seeing, it does actually get worse than Barr.) Now... the chances he’d be able to find such people who’d be remotely competent to execute on what he wanted without the courts throwing things out are... remote. And it’s absolutely not a thing we should be taking chances on. We really are kind of in uncharted territory here.
BUT. We’ve also fought an actual schismatic civil war. We’ve seen MUCH worse things than Trump in our nation’s history, too many to go into here... and we’re still here, “one nation” even if it’s maybe looking a little shaky on “indivisible.” I’m nowhere near saying this is going to be the last gasp of white supremacists and kooks, because frankly, have you seen Trump’s voters lately? But they’ve been here since the beginning. While there’s some genuinely scary people out there, a hundred years ago we would’ve had something closer to a full blown race war already by now. (The Klan and their sympathizers killed quite a few more Americans then than al Qaeda did on 9/11.) A movie like “Birth of a Nation” or “Gone With The Wind,” making open apologies for Confederates and their unrepentant Klan descendants, will not be made and accepted today like they were then. We ARE making progress. We’re scared now because this is the first time it’s been this open and in our face.
Now... obviously our nation won’t last forever. We’re going to have our trials and tribulations. It’s even possible that we’ll eventually really have another schism between red and blue states... but even that wouldn’t ever really work, because blue and red aren’t even entirely cohesive now. The only real difference now between blue and red states is that the blue ones’ densely populated islands of blue cities to outnumber oceans of red rural areas, and the red ones’ don’t. The red areas can’t live without the blue ones’ money, and the blue ones can’t live without the red ones’ food production.
Unfortunately, most of the ideologues have lost sight of that balance.
We're not going to see anything again as Trump will NEVER be President again.
The chances seem poor, yes. That said, they aren’t zero. A recession, a bad health scare on Biden’s part, lots of things aren’t really foreseeable that could change Trump’s fortunes. I wouldn’t have expected an FBI investigation over an email server to put him in the White House the first time, either.
4 years of Trump would be 4 years of him getting back at all who opposed him and 4 years of him trying to re-write the constitution to remove term limits and let the Senate appoint the President or some other fascist idea like that. Let the President appoint the next President? Sure... Why not? He would do nothing else, not a bit of actually helping to run this country. I think most people know this so I doubt he will ever be elected again. The ones who were curious about him now know what he really is about. Himself. Period. Trump wanted to pardon the insurrectionists but he was told it would be political suicide. Given 4 more years he would order people to commit crimes against his opponents with the promise of getting a pardon. That would be a true hellish situation.
What’s the point of being The President if you can’t have it be your Supreme Court, your DOJ, your Fed, your boxes, your Department of Defense, your Kevin. If you could grab em by the Pussy when your just a star, you can have it all when you’re The President. You can have G8 meetings in your hotels too, wait, there’s more......
What Donald Trump envisions is an autocracy. Nothing more, nothing less. That's why he uses possessive terms with respect to the various arms of the government: "My military". "My Justice Department".
If we as a nation are indeed stupid enough to send him back to the White House, we will lose what is left of our democracy.
And, it will be entirely our fault.
Totally agree.
Re: Mirror Gazing
The Defendant-In-Chief once again goes overboard with his unceasing self-reveals.
It's obvious the Victim-In-Chief has contracted the dreaded "Jeb Bush Low Energy Disease" vis-a-vis his "creativity."
He is now simply chunking out headlines about himself to swap-in Biden's name with his own.
I think you may be overlooking the whole apocalyptic, book of Revelation, end times aspect of the seal being broken. At least that was my first thought.
If the seal is really broken, get a pinniped specialist on it right away!
I'm sure some of his evangelical followers will take that message away.
There is a very apparent evolution to his statements (rants to be less elegant): by leaps and bounds he is describing a monarchy.
If his name and the context were removed from your analysis, what's left would be almost a textbook description of a tyrannical King.
Three Democrats have GOT to get Biden reelected and take back the House! DJT is not on touch with reality and the Republicans in the House and the Senate don't care. They don't even have an agenda anymore. They just want more power and more money.
*the, not three 😄
Chris
Facts about DJT - he lies.
Yes, it is scary what he says in his note, however, he says a lot of things he either has no idea how to implement, and/or he never intends to implement - he just wants to get a rise out of his opponents, and ensure they are talking about him.
This being said, as we know from Geoffrey Berman, DJT was, in fact, through AG Barr, influencing who was prosecuted or investigated, or not, in some instances. So, he may feel he could actually do this. HOWEVER, based upon his MO, I believe he would appoint a toady as AG, and then say something out load, with the AG in the room, or over twitter or whatever, "If someone was really smart, they would really look into the Biden Crime Family." He will make it clear this is what he wants, without actually asking for it. This way, he has deniability. Just like a Mob Boss, or as his mentor, Roy Cohn, would prescribe...
What I fail to understand is how people eat up all of this and love him, see nothing wrong with this. The country will be in serious trouble and the end of democracy. He can not be in the Oval Office ever again.
Trump's totalitarian ambitions are shockingly yet predictably clear.
I don't see anything that stands out in this latest statement, given the pattern of hundreds before. Whether or not Mr. Trump in any way understands the safeguards that the Constitution, statutes, and tradition have created in our political system, these dissolve in the face of his emotions and self-regard. As for whether he would act on a threat like this once in office, as comments here discuss, I think it would depend entirely on whether he felt pursuing it was in his interest at that moment, and that can't be predicted.
Rather than eternally pick out these statements, delivered in Mr. Trump's endless moments of peak anger, I think more attention should be paid to ways to break up the permission structure that allows millions of friends and neighbors to dismiss these pathological displays of political narcissism, a structure which includes dismissals of their seriousness. I'm not sure there is a way to break up that structure, but nothing could be more important than continuing to try, and I think it's clear by now that focusing on Mr. Trump himself and the norm-breaking things he says neither sheds new light for us or penetrates the darkness that has surrounded ordinary Trump supporters.
Chris, you had a column the other day forswearing outrage porn. . . .
Chris - Love your stuff. Just curious, how much of the stuff Trump spews on TS do you think is what he really believes vs how much do you think he puts out there just because he know it'll resonate with his "true believers"?