Trump Takes Word of a Dictator Over Us Intelligence Again
Donald Trump Is Becoming an American Dictator
Resist
by ANDREW DOBBS
U.Southward. president Donald Trump intends to be a dictator. By this I mean that he wishes to individually dictate law and individually control the levers of the country through a mixture of legal and extralegal mechanisms with no effective external restraint. The actions he is taking are all in pursuit of this goal, and he is already well on his way.
Trump infamously promised in his convention speech that he alone could fix the country's issues, and that's how he intends to govern — alone.
There are a finite number of institutions that can stand in the way of a president. Up to this point, most presidents haven't wanted to exist dictators, and and so they accept respected these institutions enough to capitulate when the rules of the game indicated that they, the presidents, had lost to them.
But Trump is the kid that trashes the Monopoly board when he'due south losing. I of the most important lessons we have learned so far is that many of the things nosotros assume presidents volition practice are merely convention and good class — they aren't actually required.
Trump tells us all to get fuck ourselves when we enquire to see his tax returns. It's why he hasn't relinquished his business organization interests, either.
One voluntary convention that looks like its days may be numbered — printing briefings. The press is venerated every bit the noble establishment charged with belongings the powerful accountable. In point of fact information technology has lost a lot of respect and brownie over the years, culminating in Trump himself — a tabloid-trash headline-grabber that the news media but couldn't help just empower because its bottom line mattered more than its civic duties.
Trump attacked this challenger first, knowing that it was both the nearest to plummet and the nigh influential. A solid shove or 2 could bring downward the press and brand the rest of his contests easier.
The printing lives and dies by way of admission and if Trump eventually cuts off the printing briefings — i of those elective conventions that we just assume every president has to do — there will be a very serious question as to why a New York Times bureau reporter in Washington, D.C. is whatsoever improve than a kid with a weblog that follows the president on Twitter.
Principled reporters volition be left to compete with amateurs — and increasingly unable to justify their expense to on-the-brink publishers. Sycophants, on the other mitt, will be lavished with sectional access. The media ecosystem thus turns toxic.
Trump hasn't gotten there even so, but he waved that weapon in the press' face with Press Secretary Sean Spicer'south absurd anti-press conference the weekend after the inauguration, in which he berated the media for simply stating facts. Trump and his administration are fucking with the epistemological underpinnings of news birthday. Add together to that a breathy threat of hostility and access-denial to come up and Trump is at a profound advantage against this antagonist.
The printing has had plenty of work to practise, nonetheless. Most of the media's stories have revolved around executive orders and other directions to the federal bureaucracy, very much in line with what nosotros predicted earlier Trump was sworn in.
Agency staff is some other potential limitation on presidential power — if staffers buck him and refuse to follow orders or ho-hum-play things or otherwise sabotage his desires and demands in ways large and small … then his dictates never get translated into actual activity.
To prevent agency resistance, Trump has executed an administrative blitzkrieg on federal agencies. Republicans have long hated environmental protection and the expectation that they non toxicant their ain children, so Trump paralyzed the EPA past presidential fiat.
Past making an example of a couple of agencies he cowed the rest of them into falling into line. At present the entire trillion-dollar, one thousand thousand-and-a-half-strong federal workforce either speaks with one voice — Trump'southward — or shuts the fuck upward. Just inquire Badlands National Park'south Twitter director how thorough the micromanaging is.
The pièce de résistance was that Trump ordered, by prescript, his infamous edge wall to be congenital. No argue, no haggling or negotiation, no consideration of alternatives. One of the largest federal civil-engineering projects in U.S. history became a fact by Trump's give-and-take lonely. Alone.
Now Trump may exist able to slip the bill to United mexican states like he's promised. He can fix tariffs and possibly even withdraw the United states from NAFTA — all by his lonesome, it seems. Add to this his unilateral establishment of a religious test for entry into the United States nether certain circumstances, and it is articulate that things nosotros all assumed were part of the constitutional order are really field of study to the president's arbitrary whim.
Congress is the institution our textbooks taught the states is supposed to stop such a president, but lawmakers seem to be completely useless in this regard. Besides their repeated surrender of powers to the executive over many years, Trump's policy actions have put him in a position to boss them, as well — and by extension the political party bases that put the members into office.
Apparently the biggest threat in Congress comes from the majority — Trump'due south increasingly enthusiastic Republican Party. Trump's brilliant motion hither was to kick off his policy blitz not with classic Republican red meat such every bit revenue enhancement cuts, but with the global abortion gag rule and two big strikes against and then-called "free trade" agreements.
With one mitt he rewarded the most indispensable cadre of the GOP base, the chemical element nigh capable of giving him trouble if they had any principles other than their bigotry. And with the other hand, he forced the party's powers-that-exist to nod and smile while he eviscerated orthodox Republican policy.
The notion that a Republican president would impale a major trade agreement and put another — NAFTA, no less — on life support in the outset week of his administration would have been an absurdity at any other indicate in the final 60 years.
But Trump has contradistinct the very grounds of U.S. politics to the extent that all the contexts are now uncertain and the entire process disorienting in the extreme. The fact that Republicans are now celebrating protectionism with nary a word of protest from any quarter ways that essentially any policy could flip on them, and and then the only point of reference they accept is doing what Trump wants of them.
The Gag Dominion and the Muslim Ban in particular have secured the undivided support of the political party's grassroots for Trump, so congressional capitulation is non only the merely coherent path, it's the only politically safe one. The GOP Congress will be to Trump what the Reichstag was to Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein's quango of representatives was to the Iraqi despot — a rubber postage.
It's really this phony imprimatur of legal authority that volition make Trump a dictator and not an autocrat.
Every bit for congressional Democrats, the less said the ameliorate. What exactly take they done to fifty-fifty slow downward Trump or guild annihilation but impotent protestation? The protectionist prescript won praise from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an human action of absolute betrayal to whatever shreds of the socialist tradition he nevertheless had claim to — abandoning any reference to the global working class most at risk under these trade regimes and empowering a reactionary strongman for no reason whatever.
One-time white men from the union aristocracy gave Trump even more cover and even Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren approved Trump's nominee Ben Carson for secretary of housing and urban development, a role for which he has no credentials beside being from a urban center. She showed upwards to the Logan Airport protests, but this only highlights the incoherence of liberalism in this crisis.
Instead the Democrats have demonstrated a lack of whatsoever principles beyond their own sense of intellectual superiority and a vague wish that the president were nicer. Unless something changes dramatically, at that place is no chance that they volition ever beat out Trump at the ballot box — even if Trump keeps his voter suppression at a minimum. Which he won't.
The press, the federal hierarchy, Congress and the opposition party — Trump has fabricated serious blows towards neutralizing them all in a very curt period of fourth dimension. What'south left?
First there are the courts, and Trump is already on the path to some collisions here. A well-respected liberal skillful-government group and several noted law professors filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump is in violation of the emoluments clause of the U.Due south. Constitution, though the adjust is a decided long shot.
More probable to be a problem are the legal challenges certain to be filed against his executive orders. Many of these orders are beingness rushed with insufficient legal review, ensuring that some of them are likely illegal.
How Trump responds when the courts say — like they did with Obama — that his deportment overstepped his powers will be a crucial test. At this betoken submitting to court decisions is essentially a custom — the courts have no ability to force him to comply.
One early on test was not encouraging. Even after federal judges blocked elements of Trump'due south order disallowment entry into the country by travelers — including refugees, light-green bill of fare and visa holders — from certain Muslim nations on January. 28, Customs and Edge Protection agents continued detaining travelers, anyhow — in blatant defiance of judicial authorisation.
Before those cases can make their way through the organization, Trump will face another element with similarly momentous consequence — the military. Trump has been butting heads with the CIA and the deep state — a unsafe circumstance we've already covered. Trump fifty-fifty brought a laughing gallery with him when he spoke to CIA agents at the agency's wall of laurels.
However the CIA is pocket-size when compared to our gargantuan war machine.
There'south already been a conflict betwixt senior armed forces leadership — forth with civilian management and congressional overseers — and the Trump White House over torture, which Trump says "works." Every single military adept on the subject says the opposite.
Still, the U.Southward. military has aligned itself with torture regimes in the by. A much greater test volition come when in that location is a substantive policy or even legal dispute betwixt Trump and his generals. Certainly his removal of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the National Security Quango and his date of fascist political hack Steve Bannon instead will non encourage a lot of good faith from those quarters.
At that point there are no good options — either the military machine resists civilian oversight and Trump loses ground to generals with a new political agenda, or Trump switches out principled officers with toadies in uniforms. When that happens the jig will be upwardly.
Note that Trump has already threatened the nation's tertiary-largest city — Chicago — with martial law. If my presumption is correct and Trump wants to be a dictator there is certain to exist a conflict with the brass. And if he wins … he's won it all.
Well actually in that location's still ane force Trump will have to argue with. The American people. If whatsoever one of the above contests goes against the president, his very disrespect and ambition volition put him in a precarious position — he can't afford to lose.
The mass mobilizations in his first days as president show that in that location is a constituency ready to take to the streets to oppose him. A loss to them will threaten his rule altogether.
He isn't afraid of standard-issue marches in permitted areas on the weekends, however. These were of import and beautiful, but they were more for encouraging and sustaining people than they were for threatening Trump's power. The spontaneous demonstrations at airports this weekend were a step forward, just they all the same stopped short of disrupting commerce.
Still, 1 foot in front of the other is the cardinal.
If Trump defeats the press, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, the Democrats, the courts and the military machine and there is no mass-disruption of concern every bit usual, a big-scale obstacle of the ability of the ruling class to operate commonly, then Trump will be a dictator.
If Trump falls, it will exist because people decided to fight. It will be considering unlike Trump, we are never alone.
Stay defiant.
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Source: https://medium.com/defiant/donald-trump-is-becoming-an-american-dictator-8a65f36afe14
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