Re: Trump Thread
Border traffic rate's been down long-term.Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh
As far as paying Trump little heed, this article argues that loss of public interest in the presidential bully pulpit is (part of) a bad sign for our institutions:
As Donald Trump bellowed, smirked, and grimaced his way through two high-profile speeches this week, the public ignored him, even as he swung between contrasting poles. That a power vacuum is forming at the top of the American political system can no longer be denied. The people, it seems, are tuning out the president—a sensible enough reaction to Trump’s dysfunctional and embarrassing term in office, but also one that runs the risk of undermining a cornerstone of America’s democracy.The response of America to both Trumps—the puppet politician who is just repeating what his military advisers are telling him and the demagogic racist—was essentially the same: meh.There’s more than one man’s vanity at stake. What Trump may not realize is that after all the campaigning is over, a president’s influence comes not from any gyrations of his charisma but from the accumulated legitimacy of the office. The presidency is a quasi-monarchical institution, and so citizens are taught to respect the commander in chief, no matter what the party. The American political system as it exists needs a president the people can respect, if only to keep this legitimacy from withering away.And that’s a problem. The office of the president isn’t just a collection of its duties, such as signing legislation or setting foreign policy; it is the focal point that keeps other visions of concentrated leadership, some deeply authoritarian, from creeping into the foreground.
Now that the United States no longer has a functional president, the public is turning its expectations elsewhere. Some are looking to the generals; others are looking to the streets.Writing in collaboration with his colleague Robert Costa on Monday, Rucker argued that “high-ranking military officials have become an increasingly ubiquitous presence in American political life during Donald Trump’s presidency, repeatedly winning arguments inside the West Wing, publicly contradicting the president and even balking at implementing one of his most controversial policies.”
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman called the speech the president’s best yet[...]Rucker and Haberman are of course savvy enough to know that Trump was reading words others have written, which the president himself almost certainly doesn’t believe. So their praise of the speech carries a hidden message: Thank God, they are saying, that the generals are in charge and that Trump is following orders.
It’s understandable that some Americans are turning to the generals, since the alternative is watching Trump botch the final decisions of life and death that we usually trust a president to make. Still, the truth is that any rule by the generals that stretches beyond their established role can only be deeply anti-democratic. The military is supposed to offer policy choices to the president, not the other way around. Trump is ceding presidential power to his military advisers, and this subtle move toward authoritarianism is winning bipartisan support.As Congress neglects its constitutional duties and elites cheer on Trump’s band of military men, political conflict is likely to move to the streets. This could be a good thing; it could also be a very bad thing. In street activism lies hope for progressive reforms to democracy, but when such activism is also symptomatic of a total loss of faith in existing democratic institutions, it can work in the service of authoritarianism. What makes this situation truly dangerous is that the president seems intent on encouraging his own form of street theater.Democracy does not work with a power vacuum for a president. As Trump makes a mockery of his office, he has left America to drift in two fundamentally anti-democratic directions, with the military exercising ever greater power as neo-Nazi street protesters form militias of their own. People of good faith around the country may be trying desperately to counter both, but this is fundamentally a political crisis that has to have a political solution. The president is unfit to serve, and until Congress comes to its senses and remembers its constitutional powers, this is what we can expect: a weakened president subservient to the military egging on armed fascists as they take to the streets.
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