A Dictator For the Next 1000 Days

 

    (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

During last year's election, alarm bells sounded throughout the nation at 300 decibels when Trump told Sean Hannity that he would be a dictator only on Day One. One can only imagine how many MAGAts' heads would've popped in outrage if Obama had said that on the campaign trail in 2008 or 2012 or Biden in 2020. Or Kamala last year.

    Trump's first 100 days in office, a fake milestone if ever there was one, will happen on Wednesday. If we're going to recognize this manufactured milestone, then we must be truthful and clear-eyed about it and I don't have to wait until Wednesday to put out this post for the sake of day-to-day accuracy. On Wednesday, America will be a worse country than it is now and it will be even worse by Thursday.

     If anyone reading this wants to accuse me of liberal alarmism and mere hyperbole, then that's their right. But I think I stand on pretty firm ground when I say there has not been a single day when this shit show of an administration has made it possible for our country to be a better one than it was the day before.

     As I and others had noted when Trump made that shocking pronouncement to Hannity, no dictator would be content being one just for a day. After all, look at all the threats he'd made against his perceived enemies on the campaign trail, calling people "vermin" and vowing to set up concentration camps for all the people he wanted to arrest. That's something even this hyperactively evil administration can't do in a day.

     In these first 98 days, it has already become impossible for even the most dedicated, anal retentive person to come close to cataloguing Trump's countless crimes against democracy. And those are just the crimes we know about. As the old saying goes, "If you think you're cynical, trust me- you're not cynical enough."

     And, just as Hitler had made good on all his threats catalogued in Mein Kampf, every threat that Trump made at his countless rallies is being solidified into reality. His first day in office was a masterclass in authoritarianism, when he signed nearly 100 executive orders aimed at curtailing Americans' civil rights, rollbacks of regulations and other things guaranteed not to make America great again.

     Since then, things have steadily gotten worse, turning America not into something great, but a landscape that would make the most nightmarish dystopian novel look like Little House on the Prairie.

 

 When a Fiat Collides With the Omnibus of Democracy

Thanks to the Supreme Court giving Trump sweeping powers to commit any crimes he wished, provided they were considered part of his "presidential duties" (without specifying what those were or who got to be the arbiter what "presidential duties" are), Trump has been running the country by the closest thing we have to royal fiat. There's no discernible daylight between the ancient divine right of kings and how Trump views the presidency. He acts as if his vindictive, jaundiced will is legal and moral justification and no one has the right to criticize much less oppose him.

    Not too long ago, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee and poster boy for the Federalist Society, wrote a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration over its detaining, arresting and deporting US citizens and legal residents without due process:

     "If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning."

     Very good questions that have already transcended the merely rhetorical. Last Friday, right after Judge Wilkinson issued his opinion, ICE had illegally deported three children, all US citizens, in blatant violation of the 14th amendment, aged 2, 4 and 7 when their  mother was renditioned back to Honduras (she's actually from Cuba). The four year-old had cancer and had, until recently, been getting treatment for it. ICE had sent her back without any cancer medication nor any input from her doctors.

     As Adam Serwer once famously titled an article in the Atlantic, "the cruelty is the point."

    And these totalitarian renditions are hardly an outlier. In Chicago earlier this year, immigration courts violated the rights of 22 immigrants, one of whom being a US citizen, with the arrest warrants hastily produced retroactively. Then there was the case of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20 year-old US citizen who was arrested during a traffic stop in Florida and was held for days even after his mother produced his birth certificate proving he was born in Georgia.

    And, most notoriously, there was the recent arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee which came within hours of the arrest of a former New Mexico judge and his wife. And then, of course, there's the infamous case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was arrested in Maryland and renditioned to El Salvador despite living here legally under protected status. Two federal courts, including the SCOTUS (which, in a stunning ruling, ruled 9-0 to return Garcia), demanded the Trump administration facilitate Garcia's return.

      Trump's response? He thumbed his nose at virtually all of them.

 

The Orange Hulk 

In what's virtually a case of life imitating art, the current "president" has been running roughshod over the government like an orange hulk only without the Hulk's usual charm and intelligence. And just to give a vague idea of Trump's rampant criminality, over 120 courts at the county, state and federal level (including, again, the SCOTUS) have tried to rein in Trump from illegal arrests and deportations to firing federal workers. At least two of those judges, Boasberg and Paula Xinis, have already begun investigations into whether to launch criminal contempt of court charges against Trump's lawyers.

     In a matter of weeks, Trump's already gone after governors, corporations, media outlets, universities, judges, lawyers, law firms, advocacy groups and even ActBlue, which helps fund Democratic campaigns. In a dispiritingly large number of times, knees were bent and heads bowed. One law firm gave Trump $100,000,000 in free legal representation. ABC bought him off with a $15,000,000 bribe, even though any lawsuit Trump would have brought against them, ABC would've won.

   Trump is nakedly running a protection racket. If anyone runs afoul of him, it's "Nice company/network/university/law firm you got here. Be a shame if something... happened to it."

  But there's hope. More than 400 university presidents signed an open letter criticizing the administration for cracking down on universities like Harvard and trying to stifle free speech by threatening to cut off their federal funding, which is a violation of the First Amendment. Hundreds of law firms have filed an amicus brief, or a friend of the court, supporting Perkins Cole's opposition to Trump's threats.

    Yet that's not enough. Not nearly. Former presidents, vice presidents, Cabinet officials and others have to rise up against the fascist nightmare that this nation's rapidly turning into. Democrats in Congress may be relatively powerless to stop this power grab but that's not to say they're entirely powerless and without options. Democrats need to do more than hold rallies. Yeah, what AOC and Bernie are doing is great but can any of us honestly say that their rallies have changed a damned thing?

     Change starts with awareness and awareness begins with telling the people what's going on under their noses. That starts with holding daily press conferences, telling the people what crimes have been committed by this criminal junta on each and every day in their good names, with their tax dollars. It starts with letting voters know how much the Republican party hates their own voters, how much they loathe democracy. They need to be told how spineless they truly are in not standing up to this criminal syndicate masquerading as an administration.

     But the Democratic Party doesn't have the heart for that or any meaningful opposition. And we may not even survive the next 100 days, much less until the 2026 midterms. And if Democrats want that blue tsunami that everyone's praying for, they need to show Democratic voters they deserve the majority in Congress. It all starts now because we're running out of time, fast.