Friday, November 29, 2019

Living Rent Free In Your Head

Dahlia Lithwick is seeing monsters under the bed again.  Now she's afraid Trump will never leave office because, basically, Trump; oh, and our long national nightmare, from which we will never awaken.  That's about as much reason as she brings to her argument, which never says exactly how Trump will maintain his office in perpetuity and the face of an electoral defeat, but she's sure he will.

Actually, the problem is not: will Trump leave office? The question is: will his claim to the office be recognized as legitimate?

Unless the election results in a Bush v. Gore standoff, how does the Supreme Court get involved? They threatened their legitimacy then; how much worse would it be if they supported Trump's likely (and still groundless) claims of voter fraud and millions of non-citizens voting against him?

Will Congress recognize his claim? The House won't; what about the Senate? This won't, after all, be up to the military; unless there is a military coup first. Trump may imagine he's bought that with the SEALs, but even the troops under Gallagher thought he was dangerous. 4 ex-SEALs does not a revolution make.

If Trump loses, he loses legitimacy, too. Without that, what authority does he have? What shield, even, does he have from prosecutions? Barr may not charge him, but nothing would stop New York state from doing so. Will Marines protect Trump from arrest? Will U.S. Marshals? Trump can scream all he wants, but if no one listens? I mean, this is the guy our soldiers will follow into constitutional anarchy?

“We flew 8331 miles to be here tonight for one simple reason, to tell you in person that this Thanksgiving is a special Thanksgiving,” said Trump. “We’re doing so well. Our country is the strongest economically it has ever been. We’ve never done so well. We have the greatest economy anywhere in the world. So it is nice to know that you are fighting for something that is doing well as opposed to something that was not doing well just a number of years ago.”

“Our stock market has reached the highest level ever in the history of the exchanges, all three,” continued Trump. “If you look, all three. It is incredible. It is incredible what is happening. Just broke a record. I think it is close to 130 days. So we’re less than three years and 130 times we’ve broken the all-time record. And to me that didn’t mean an all-time record, it means something different. It means jobs. It means 401(k)s. People come up to me with their 401(k)s and they say, ‘You’ve made me look like a genius. Thank you very much.’ They are up 78 percent. They feel good.”  
One sentence about how he got there, the rest is gobbledygook about people coming up to him because that's what people do the the President all the time, the Secret Service just lets it happen.  Or maybe it's the people at Mar-a-Lago, except I doubt any of them has a 401(k). (and Afghanistan is just under 7000 miles from D.C., FWIW).

If that didn't rouse our troops to proclaim Trump Most Excellent President-for-Life, surely this did:
Yeah, I don't think so, either.  But I'm sure Trump's an expert on space; his head seems to be full of it.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)