If you’re ineligible to run for president….
If Donald Trump wants admission to the dictators’ club with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and Kim Jong Un, he’ll have to prove himself worthy. That’s his plan.
You laugh? Just you wait. Right now he’s busy being prosecuted.
The former and would-be president’s antics on the witness stand Monday in his Manhattan financial fraud trial were as Michael Cohen predicted. Question his net worth and he’ll lose it. Trump was so fixated on maintaining his Richie Rich image that according to press accounts he never once mentioned the 2020 election being stolen from him. It’s that important to him.
Trump rambled. He blustered. He bragged. He insulted the judge and New York Attorney General Letitia James. New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron multiple times urged Trump’s attorneys to get their client under control. It was as useless as expecting a fussy two-year-old to behave in a fancy restaurant.
Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks said of Trump’s courtroom misbehavior, “This is why we need cameras in the courtroom. Hearing reporters describe Trump’s testimony and loss of control is no substitute for seeing it for ourselves. Let elected and appointed officials know you want cameras in all his trials.”
“Part of what Trump accomplished,” Aaron Blake noted, “was setting a tone for his other cases, including the criminal ones. Nothing will come easy when you go after Trump.”
He’ll get even if you try. He’s planning on it already, the Washington Post reported:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
The 14th Amendment may make Trump ineligible to run for president. But the Constitution says nothing about running for dictator.
“It is time to be very, very afraid,” wrote Post associate editor Ruth Marcus.
Slouching towards Lower Slobbovia
Trump already has an enemies list, “including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley,” say the Post’s anonymous sources. FBI and Justice Department officials are among his targets too, says another. And “Joe Biden,” of course, for having the temerity to beat him in 2020. And Biden’s family.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
Trump plans to go full Queen of Hearts if not biblical. “This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Stubbornovsky the Last said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
The New York Times reported in July that Trump plans to “alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
What may be most alarming is the lack of alarm among Americans in general, much less mobilization. Trump’s MAGA foot soldiers? They hunger to be led by their man-child-king. The rest seem blissfully unaware that the Party of Trump has abandoned democracy save for going through the motions.
From Salon:
“This is the nightmare scenario that to millions of Americans is unfathomable but realistically possible,” Bennett Gershman, a former New York prosecutor and law professor at Pace University, told Salon. “It is also the scenario that millions of Americans look forward to with glee and the opportunity for retribution against the enemies of Trump.”
What’s a little pogrom if the tree of Trumpism needs watering?
Don’t it always seem to go…
Tom Nichols frets in The Atlantic:
The coalition of prodemocracy voters—I am one of them—is shocked at the relative lack of outrage when Trump says hideous things. (The media’s complacency is a big part of this problem, but that’s a subject for another day.) For many of us, it feels as if Trump put up a billboard in Times Square that says “I will end democracy and I will in fact shoot you in the middle of Fifth Avenue if that’s what it takes to stay in power” and no one noticed.
Trump hasn’t taken out billboards, but at his rallies and press events he’s shouting it all as loud as he can, and the people around him are making plans to carry out his wishes. Meanwhile, millions of voters are folding their arms like shirty children and threatening to sit out the election because they don’t like their choices. Some are threatening to withhold support, in particular, for Joe Biden if they don’t get their way about student loans, climate change, or policy toward Israel. They are living in a booming economy that is outperforming any other developed nation since the start of the pandemic on many measures—and they are miserable and angry about it.
Many voters resent hearing all of this. They think they are being bullied into a binary choice between two candidates they do not like, and so they engage in wishcasting: If only someone could beat Trump for the GOP nomination (no one will); if only Biden would step down (he won’t); if only America didn’t rely on the Electoral College (it does); and so on. Trump and Biden are headed for a showdown unless illness or death intervenes. Even if Trump goes to prison, the Republican Party has become so fully corrupted that he could likely still run and get the nomination anyway. And the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere, either.
Trump aims not to make the mistakes he made in his first term. He’ll make new ones. It’s not clear he’s capable of learning from his old ones, but his antidemocratic acolytes have.
“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” said Project 2025 director Paul Dans. “We want conservative warriors.”
Guess who they’re going to war against?