Trump didn’t break democracy. He just took the mask off.
Many regard President Trump’s latest defiance of the courts — this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations, a blatant assault on the rule of law and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs.
But, writes Vinnie Rotondaro, a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies, if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands.
The central truth we keep missing, says Rotondaro, is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation. The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades spent eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority. Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open.
Trump is now openly talking about “eradicating” the Houthis in Yemen — an aggressive military escalation that directly contradicts the MAGA-era promise of no new foreign wars. So much for populist anti-interventionism. In lockstep with Netanyahu’s Israel, Trump appears eager to resume the forever war posture. And once again, no one’s talking about congressional approval.
This is the cycle we’re caught in. Trump exposes the tools others helped create. He strips them of their moral veneer, revealing the ugly core. And rather than confront the system itself, liberals point at Trump as a singular villain — as if everything was working just fine before he came along
The laws of the land have never been distributed evenly. The idea being if you kill someone you get punished. In practice however death by cop happens for the prettiest of non violent reasons.
There are vast differences between real people and power, but the difference between Elon Musk and a dimwit are dwarfed by the differences between a dimwit and a beast.
That would not be the case with Trump.
At the very least, if there are enough males, the rest of the population would demand more liberal/Democrats power and rules. At the worst there would be civil war.
The sort of contest where whoever wins we all lose.
The massive corruption is being exposed just like the corruption at Wellington water where the corruption enabelar has hung onto his job along with his fellow corrupters lower down and in the businesses of the contractors .
Good points Malcolm.
Donald Trump is doing exactly what Joe Biden did in Gaza. The main difference is that he is not pretending to be nice about it, and he doesn’t try to demonstrate any degree of contrived compassion for the Palestinians.
Second, that someone who is like Trump (in all essential aspects) was always going to arrive at the head of the United States government, because the means by which the US strives to control the world and its own working people are demonstrably failing, and have been failing for at least a couple of decades.
Because getting tough with the enemies of the US hasn’t worked, the task now is to get tough with its friends and allies (with just the one obvious exception). Because social and economic liberalism has taken the US into a dead end, it is time for that also to come to an end.
To say that President Trump, or someone like President Trump, was a historical inevitability is not to say that he will be successful. He has none of the qualities of a great leader, and none of the wisdom of a serious thinker. He is simply a man of his times, and the times are most dire for the US.
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H. L. Mencken
Oh right, is Phil Goff your nana? I know it’s dangerous to say here on the oh so lefty I’m so correcty cartoon delecty weblog of pretty Bradbury but Donald Trump is first and foremost a realist. I doubt he’d want to be labelled as a serious thinker at this stage in the game.
Phil Goff has come down against Donald Trump and has clearly positioned himself on the side of the United Kingdom and its European allies. I have not done that. Nor have I disingenuously suggested that Donald Trump is appeasing Vladimir Putin. So the attempt to identify my views with those of Phil Goff is very wide of the mark.
Trump can only be considered a realist, if that is another way of saying that he is not an idealist. His problem, as I have suggested elsewhere, is that his political and economic strategy depends on major changes of attitude and behaviour within the US capitalist and working classes. In other words he can tilt the playing field in favour of US domestic capitalism through import tariffs, but unless both the US working class and the capitalist class jointly take up J D Vance’s call for a return to thrift, frugality, industry, sobriety and honesty, then US industry will not resurrect itself and the Trump tariff strategy will fail. A change of the kind that Vance is advocating is most unlikely to take place in the absence of a revolutionary mass movement or at at time when a blatant hedonist is occupying the Oval Office.
How can you “break Democracy” when the US fits all 13 criteria of being a Fascist state?
This was a plausible argument prior to the inauguration. Just like ‘COVID-19 is just a bad flu’ was a plausible argument within the first month of the pandemic. But you can’t honestly look at a President who is ignoring the courts – including now the Supreme Court – and deporting people with legitimate visas, and claim he’s just a continuation of BaU.