Tuesday, April 04, 2017

LA Times Editorial, Part III, "Trump's Authoritarian Vision"

The third and latest installment of the Los Angeles Times four-part editorial on Donald Trump focuses on their president's "authoritarian vision."

He swooped into politics, he declared, to subvert the powerful and rescue those who cannot defend themselves. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

To Trump’s faithful, those words were a rallying cry. But his critics heard something far more menacing in them: a dangerously authoritarian vision of the presidency — one that would crop up time and again as he talked about overruling generals, disregarding international law, ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, jailing his opponent.

Trump has no experience in politics; he’s never previously run for office or held a government position. So perhaps he was unaware that one of the hallmarks of the American system of government is that the president’s power to “fix” things unilaterally is constrained by an array of strong institutions — including the courts, the media, the permanent federal bureaucracy and Congress. Combined, they provide an essential defense against an imperial presidency.

Yet in his first weeks at the White House, President Trump has already sought to undermine many of those institutions. Those that have displayed the temerity to throw some hurdle in the way of a Trump objective have quickly felt the heat.
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What’s uniquely threatening about Trump’s approach, though, is how many fronts he’s opened in this struggle for power and the vehemence with which he seeks to undermine the institutions that don’t go along.

It’s one thing to complain about a judicial decision or to argue for less regulation, but to the extent that Trump weakens public trust in essential institutions like the courts and the media, he undermines faith in democracy and in the system and processes that make it work.

Trump betrays no sense for the president’s place among the myriad of institutions in the continuum of governance. He seems willing to violate long-established political norms without a second thought, and he cavalierly rejects the civility and deference that allow the system to run smoothly. He sees himself as not merely a force for change, but as a wrecking ball.
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Remember that Trump’s verbal assaults are directed at the public, and are designed to chip away at people’s confidence in these institutions and deprive them of their validity. When a dispute arises, whose actions are you going to consider legitimate? Whom are you going to trust? That’s why the public has to be wary of Trump’s attacks on the courts, the “deep state,” the “swamp.” We can’t afford to be talked into losing our faith in the forces that protect us from an imperial presidency.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Trump betrays no sense for the president’s place among the myriad of institutions in the continuum of governance. He seems willing to violate long-established political norms without a second thought, and he cavalierly rejects the civility and deference that allow the system to run smoothly. He sees himself as not merely a force for change, but as a wrecking ball.

And how does this make him different from Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and any of the other GOP dipshits in Congress and the state legislatures?

Cap

The Mound of Sound said...

@ Anon, 8:53 - are you incapable of distinguishing news from editorial, that is to say objective, evidence-based fact from opinion? Never mind, the answer is obvious.

The Mound of Sound said...

What makes him different, Cap, is that he's president. He has an array of discretionary and unilateral powers that are not provided mere legislators. They have to toil at length to screw up their country - hearings, negotiations, votes, all that stuff. Trump can do it with the stroke of a pen.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that may be true, Mound, but the Preznit's going to have a tough time doing whatever he wants without congressional agreement on spending bills and a debt limit increase. Those could be a problem given the party unity shown during the Trumpcare fiasco. There was a time when civility and deference would have fixed that, but not in today's GOP.

Congressional Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers, have started believing the lies they told the Trumpenproletariat for decades. As Alex Pareene noted, "Congressional Republicans went from people who were able to turn their bullshit-hose on their constituents, in order to rile them up, to people who pointed it directly at themselves, mouths open." Trump, of course, is "a confused old man who believes what the TV tells him."