Trump's Little Carl Schmitts

 

     Carl Schmitt would've fit in perfectly with this Reich of an administration.

     Schmitt was a Nazi philosopher and legal theorist who provided Hitler and his Third Reich with the legal foundation for his authoritarian rule. His papers and theories were crucial to forming the post-Weimar government. A virulent anti-Semite, his theories eventually proved so unpopular even the Nazis found him too objectionable to keep around.

     He had spent much of his life being an apologist for Nazi authoritarianism, successfully convincing people that it was given a bad rap. He railed against liberal cosmopolitanism and democratic government and held that a dictator was absolutely necessary to achieve the aims of the state. After the war, he was captured by Allied forces and held for a year. After resisting every attempt at deNazification, he was finally expelled from legitimate academia. A typical Nazi sociopath, he was absolutely unrepentant for his support of the Third Reich.

      Trump is constantly surrounded by mini Carl Schmitts who tell him what he can do and nobody to tell him what he cannot. This is why he loses in federal courts so much, because of the idiots who tell him that he can basically do whatever he wants. And why shouldn't he? He got a free pass from the Nazi Supreme Court last year when they gave him blanket immunity for "official acts". In 23 cases brought to the Supreme Court by Trump, they sided with him in 21 and their increasing use of shadow dockets also almost universally support his agenda.

     Some of the bullet points of Schmidt's long career follow.

     First, he believed that "there is no law, there is just power." This mode of thought is represented in Trump's never-ending rage at jurists, some of them his own appointees, who rule against him. Time and again, after losing in court, Trump and his goons defy the court's order and commits contempt of court with impunity (Look at Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his extraordinary rendition to CECOT in El Salvador). Or they'll do a workaround so technically, maybe, they're not in violation of a court order.

     His entire life, Trump has harbored a contemptuous regard for the rule of law except when he can wield it against his enemies (Such as Letitia James, James Comey and, soon, Sen. Adam Schiff and Amb. John Bolton). In other words, like Hitler before him, Trump sees the criminal justice system as an instrument of his noxious, vindictive will.

     Schmitt also believed in the plenary powers of the dictator, something Stephen Miller said on TV just days ago before he suddenly froze up like an old Nazi Enigma machine. But Miller is far from an outlier. Trump has surrounded himself with some of the worst psychopaths that America has on tap. Every day, they twist themselves into pretzels to strenuously claim that Trump is following the letter of the law in invading American cities and killing people on fishing boats. Miller is unique only in that he's claiming that Trump's absolute authority means he doesn't have to follow the law. In Miller's view, there is no law, only Trump's power.

    They surround him and protect him like Thanos' loyal foot soldiers, completely oblivious to the fact that he couldn't care less about any of them.

     As Schmitt proposed, Trump is also doing away with participation in the political process. We see this in his denying Congressionally-allocated funding in violation of federal law and bypassing Congress at every available opportunity, including letting DOGE run roughshod over our government without Congress officially recognizing or giving them funding.

      Last year in May, JD Vance was interviewed by Russ Douchehat of the NY Times (Lord only knows what they were thinking when they hired him) and Vance actually said this: “The thing that I kept thinking about liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these guys have all read Carl Schmitt — ‘There’s no law, there’s just power.’”

      The incipiently-demented Trump is an idiot, too stupid to know where the levers of power even are and what they do. He has psychopaths whispering in his ear every day, every night, telling him what they want him to do. If it hurts liberals, foes and brown people, he'll rubber stamp it. Then he gets to sit and preen behind the Resolute Desk, his powdered chin and neck wattles jutting out, frowning at everyone looking executive, large and in charge when in reality he's not.

     But, mysteriously, Trump never gets so demented that he loses his touch for committing evil or making a buck.

     Hitler was guided purely by ideology. Sure, he stole but after his death, his will revealed he made most of his money from the royalties of Mein Kampf. Some sources have estimated that Trump and his family have made as much as $20 billion off his cryptocurrency scheme and his coin, $Trump.

     The scariest thing about Trump is that he really doesn't give a shit about anything but money, retribution and staying out of prison.