In a sane world with any semblance of actual logic, I’d agree with you.
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This administration has made me realize just how many myths about checks and balances on presidential power I had bought into. Especially hilarious: my high school history understanding of “Nixon/Watergate: proof that the ‘system works’!” Except, naw, it wasn’t. He wasn’t impeached and it turns out that there is no system that constrains the president. It’s only politics which constrains him.
Unfortunately, I think it’s naive at this point to think alienating the majority of people in the country negatively impacts his election chances. After all, if nothing else, he’ll get elected by the same means that got him into power in the first place: appeal to racism, disenfranchise minority voters, get illegal help. He’ll carry the Republican states no matter what, and all he needs is a relatively small number of votes in a few swing states. There’s nothing to stop him, and now he’s probably feeling pretty untouchable, which means he’ll really double down on what happened before - e.g. use the office of the presidency to actually direct people to interfere in elections, etc.
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Um. Yeah, some of them, probably. Yeah.
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Democrats didn’t care in 2012 when Republicans warned them about giving the Executive Branch too much power:
sour grapes.
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I have bad news for you but I won’t spoil 2020.
There is a huge difference between issuing an executive order that may or may not be legal followed by acting like it is legal until (or unless!) the courts rule it is illegal, and this behaviors of “who cares what the courts say, just do it my way”
If you don’t see the difference, I’ll note one is “eventual consistence with the rule of law”, and the other is “screw the law”.
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Why do you think Trump can do better than he did in 2016?
One of his pluses was as a possibility of hope. That issue’s resolved. He has a track record now, one that gets worse every day. And Donnie being Donnie, nothing he’s capable of doing will help an economy was doing adequately before he had to show everyone what a big dick he has.
Seriously, he was outvoted by 3M+ votes. So he’ll do better in 2020 how?
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Our democratic institutions are much weaker than we think. Many if not most pols sell us out to thicken their wallets (obviously not that the private sector’s better).
Still. Donnie was a slick liar in 2016, he’s now a proven piece of shit, and getting worse every day. So why would any reasonable person expect him to do better in 2020?
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Is Trump demanding a massacre ?
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Donnie’s base is eroding. not that corporate media would or could tell you.
His approval has never broken 50% for longer than a couple of minutes — and usually per the less reliable polls. Meanwhile, he grows more unhinged every day.
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Seeing the difference (or engaging in actual intellectual discourse at all) isn’t on that one’s agenda, methinks.
Serious answer rather than just mere shitposting for the hell of it:
Between voter suppression, gerrymandering, failure to enforce or uphold the law and just outright willful ignorance, we’re worried he could con his way into another hellacious 4 years.
Then there’s the concern that many ‘establishment’ Dems seem to have no real vested interest in actually defeating him.
Therein lies the source of your confusion; many of my fellow citizens are nowhere near ‘rational’, and that’s a reality which is terrifying as fuck.
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This is a tedious (and likely ignored) admonition but one i’m cursed to point out: try not to assign too much significance to “approval ratings” even as the media ‘swoons’ over them. If one delves into the details of how they’re determined they wouldn’t even be given a C- in an undergraduate statistics class. They are typically done by phoning a thousand or so people, and asked a few typical “how do you feel about president trump today?” questions. Here’s ‘the thing’: who answers a phone call from an unknown caller ID number without letting it go to voicemail or fails to hangup the moment that it’s dead air switching to a phone bank? answer: statistically an older far less technically inclined person. Your crazy great uncle is determining how approval ratings are determined. (oh, and then they have the audacity to publish a margin of error which requires a truly random sample: 1/sqrt(1000) => 3.16%)
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Always two there are.
When he’s alone with John Bolton, he probably says “Yes, my master…”
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If Trump ‘officially’ gets called out on this, I figure his stooge mouthpieces will play the parsing game: “Well, he did NOT order them to disobey judges’ orders. He’s just telling them what to say if judges give them trouble.”
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Wrong. In VA it is an election year. We elect our state reps this year. It is pretty much always an election year for something. This is something the right figured out years ago and have been kicking our asses at. If you control local government, you are one step from controlling the next level up. We need to contest every-fucking-thing. School boards, town councils, hell, dogcatchers. Leaving it to just presidential years is killing us. Get out and campaign, rally and vote. Then, if they refuse to leave office, we need to talk about other options. Only then.
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I’m not advocating for any particular action, as long as it’s nonviolent. I would hope nonviolent civil disobedience on a crippling scale would be sufficient (I agree with most here that violence would likely be counterproductive in the extreme - however satisfying it might be at the time). But I am saying that when the law proves to be ineffectual and insufficient to counter brazen, flagrant lawlessness, and those in whom we’ve put our trust to maintain civil order have proven themselves craven, complicit, or unwilling to do more than theatrically clutch a few pearls, the only hope for redress lies outside of the law.
The ship can only tip so far before its self-righting tendency gives way to a capsize. We are perilously close to that point, if not already past it.
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I don’t disagree. The odds aren’t good that any such thing will help. But I don’t get the sense that counting on our institutions will either. So I’m not optimistic about where that leaves us.
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It never stopped.
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Impeachment is 100% a political process. Facts and the law have no influence in the matter.
In legalistic terms, there have been solid grounds for impeaching Trump from day one: the emoluments clause. But, as I said then: impeachment is not going to happen.
If you’re expecting the existing power structure to save you from fascism, you have failed to grasp what fascism is.
Freedom is something that you have to do for yourself.
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