Now, it's true that Trump went "Full wannabe tinpot dictator."Yeah, Akiva is right on this one.
— Mike Dunford (@questauthority) June 15, 2021
"Better than the last one" is better read as the Acting AG saying that the lunatic thing that the White House Chief of Staff wanted him to investigate was less lunatic than the last one that the COS sent over.https://t.co/2wlOeoJHU0
It's not entirely clear, however, that:The extent to which Trump went full-on wannabe tinpot dictator after the election is hard to overstate. I'm surprised the Orange Frootloop didn't put on medal-covered suitcoat and award himself The Smallfingers Longtie Award for Ultimate Presidenting before the end.
— Mike Dunford (@questauthority) June 15, 2021
In that sense Nixon was much more dangerous, because John Mitchell was in his camp, and because "Saturday Night Massacre." Which is not, in the end, what did Nixon in; although it should have been. Some of what stopped Trump was this:We came within a whisper of complete election/government collapse. It’s not hyperbole. It’s fact. It only failed because those perpetrating to coup were such incompetent fuckwits. The fact they were insane and clumsy doesn’t make it any less true or sinister. https://t.co/6Vza4WAFs1
— Jeff Timmer (@jefftimmer) June 15, 2021
And no small part of it was lawyers unwilling to do his crazy work; and here we can't ignore the refusal of courts, from the Justices down to trial courts, who refused to bend to Trump's demands. The President is not a King, after all.When he sat down to write it, Jeffrey Rosen knew we would one day be reading this email. pic.twitter.com/n37eLKYnTv
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) June 15, 2021
Yup. It's pretty much lawyers all the way down. Trump never understood that; but the lawyers did.It is “hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers,” says Yale Historian @TimothyDSnyder
— #RedDogDemocrat 🇺🇸 Melanie🏴☠️ (@Lonestarmomcom) June 15, 2021
My point exactly. But it should be noted, there were a lot of lawyers in the way of that. Ultimately the rule of law comes down to the people who decide that's important to uphold.The DOJ emails illustrate why Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) June 15, 2021
The lawyers were the only thing standing in the way of an authoritarian power grab https://t.co/9Cc2wWmUdY
I wouldn't take any comfort in the idea that Nixon had his AG on board while Trump sort of didn't. What Nixon didn't have on board was the willingness of Republican Senators to risk their own elections in exactly the way the current Republicans, by far, were full in for Trump destroying democracy. Even those who were officially against that are full in on Republicans destroying democracy - there is, I believe exactly one of them who has indicated she might vote to protect elections, NOT Susan Collins. Modern Republicanism made Trump's attempted putsch possible and almost guaranteed its success and it's clear they intend that the next election will give that same result - I don't see the lawyers or Supreme Court as a reliable barricade against that. Nor do I see any progress on thwarting it. Democracy, this far into the life of the United States shouldn't depend on the skin of our teeth to avoid Hungarian style fascism.
ReplyDeleteI learned in graduate school that we (humanity we) are always one generation away from losing all historical and cultural knowledge. Fail to preserve the documents, fail to pass on the knowledge: it vanishes, Poof! Were it not for the Arabs, Aristotle wouldn’t even be distant memory, he wouldn’t even be a ghost. It would be as if he’s never lived. If we weren’t constantly preserving and passing on the Septuagint and Masoretic texts? As dead as the dinosaurs, without even a fossil record left behind. The effort at being human (to put it as broadly as possible) can never flag because, if it does, the chain is broken, and it’s as if there never was so much as a chain.
DeleteDemocracy in America always comes down to we, the people. That is, frankly, both its strength and its weakness. We avoided catastrophe in the Depression by the skin of our teeth because we had FDR in office, not Hoover for another 4.
So it ever goes.
Scary to think about that. I do think the present day circumstances is sort of like the early FDR administration when the courts weren't going to let him save the country, though the Congress was on less shaky democratic ground back then. The media perhaps too. Though there was a lot less electronic media and a lot more diversity in print. Maybe anxiety is the normal mental state in this life. I've had to cut back on listening to MSNBC and other media where everything is always pitched to get listeners to tune in or click on. I just can't live like that at my age, now.
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