Yup. Basically that and the president being the executor of laws and having a standing army that he is chief of … effectively makes him a king. Especially since Congress is bought and paid for and won’t impeach him.
No electoral mandate can make illegal actions legal, or abrogate the law. The refusal of the congressional majority to enforce their authority under article 1 is what is causing this constitutional crisis.
(Also, Trump did not run on these policies -- he's implementing policies he explicitly repudiated when he lied about not being affiliated with the Project 2025 manifesto.)
I don't want to let the voters off the hook, but continuous, ongoing responsibility for this unfolding economic and political disaster lies with the people who hold institutional authority, and are refusing to use it to comply with the law as it stands.
I agree that the actions are unconstitutional. A House acting constitutionally would impeach, and a Senate acting constitutionally would convict.
I also agree that Congress is self-serving and corrupt.
The part I disgreed with in my earlier comment was specifically the link between Congress's corruption and their inaction.
For 8+ years the left has been putting forward comments like "if only republican voters knew ..." This far in, I think the simpler explanation is that they do know, and approve of Trump doing it.
>Also, Trump did not run on these policies -- he's implementing policies he explicitly repudiated when he lied about not being affiliated with the Project 2025 manifesto.
Where do you think Project 2025 came from? Trump may not have run on the specific, enumerated list of items in the Project 2025 agenda, but everything in that agenda falls in line with Trumpist goals and right-wing Republican ideals, and it had deep connections with the Republican Party establishment and Trump's own network. It was published by the same group that selected Trump's Supreme Court nominees. It didn't simply emerge from the aether.
The narrative that "this isn't what Trump voters voted for" is being pushed hard right now for understandable reasons. That may be true in some cases, but it's also true that this is exactly what a lot of Trump voters voted for. At worst, they simply didn't expect the consequences of their actions to affect them, but they knew what they wanted to happen to everyone else.
To take Trump at his word that hes not affiliated with with the folks behind Project 2025 is to be willfully ignorant. Many of his team were involved in the drafting of those proposals.
Do we think for one second he has any grand vision about governing? Hahaha. Nope. That he outsourced to the heritage foundation. TikTok? He was originally saying it’s a Chinese spy app and it should be sold to US interests or banned. Then he gets tens of millions (hundreds?) in campaign contributions and thinks it’s benign.
He can be bought. And that’s bad. Because many of our enemies have deep pockets. And many of his voters are willfully ignorant to all his and his administration’s flaws.
Look, I'm aware that he's a liar and his track record from his first term should have made that pretty apparent to the voters at large. I'm just saying that the idea that "people voted for this" and therefore he has some kind of mandate for the current agenda is dumb when he explicitly said his policy was something else.
You're right. I distinctly remembered hearing about all that DOGE nonsense a long time ago, but I checked my sources and I can only spot stuff after the election.
I'm not defending the premise that Trump has a mandate at all - I don't even believe in the concept of a "mandate" in that context, it's just propaganda.
I'm arguing against the premise that Trump publicly denouncing Project 2025 really means no one who voted for him saw any of this coming.
> As dumb as it is, Trump ran on these policies and is delivering.
90% of the voting public pays little attention to policy (not saying this is a good thing).
A good portion of people that voted for Trump voted for him because he promised to hurt Those People. And just like Trump 1.0, it's going to end up hurting them as well (per /r/LeopardsAteMyFace):
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
In general, the Executive branch, the Intelligence Community, Congress, the Courts, the Populace are all responsible for keeping the President's Office accountable, both officially and extra-officially. Officially, via legal and direct means. Extra-officially, by means of protest, mounting cultural as well as mediatic pressure, etc.
In our, as Trump's actions have greatly affected the international community as well, situation what's most concerning is the initial, slow but eventually complete and absolute breakdown of public discourse.
Truth is irrelevant, poise is impractical, facts are an obstacle, outrage and drama are the new assertive communication. It's all about Me and My Emotions, us versus them.
This has been the case increasingly, for years, on both sides of the political aisle. Everyone compartmentalizes everyone into the sub-groups they are a part of, until everyone is so compartmentalized that they are completely alone because there are no similarities left for any common ground whatsoever. Such is the dystopic portrait of a society in complete disarray.
Under those circumstances, everything is legal, simply because there's noone to enforce the commonly agreed upon Rule of Law.
Only clears federal crimes, though. If the states can start pinning stuff on people then Trump only has pressure he can put on, like he's doing with Romania right now to try and help the Tate brothers escape (╯ఠ益ఠ)╯