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[PTTG??]

Let's not rush to judgement.

[Naturegirl1999]

What?
Edit, just read the url and noticed this was the onion

[Dunamisdeos]

Good ol' onion. Fooling people momentarily for years.

Here's a real one though. Oh no.

[smjjames]

Let's not rush to judgement.

That one is kind of darker than I usually see in The Onion satire. Though I'm not a regular reader of it, they just tend towards the silly/absurd satire, but I guess sometimes you have to go to absurd absurdist lengths to satire Trump because Trumps admin itself is practically satirical.

[Naturegirl1999]

Good ol' onion. Fooling people momentarily for years.

Here's a real one though. Oh no.

I checked the url first this time, still the onion

[thompson]

Just saw a poll from the Washington Post I'm too lazy to link that puts support for [impeachment and removal from office[/i] at around 18% amongst self-identifying Republicans. That's pretty high, considering. I wonder how much longer the Republicans will try and maintain a united front on this?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Nah, that's about right. Trump has polled 80-90% approval from Republicans across his whole term. The higher bound is probably the group of Republicans who support Trump but also think he's dead weight.

[thompson]

Nah, that's about right. Trump has polled 80-90% approval from Republicans across his whole term. The higher bound is probably the group of Republicans who support Trump but also think he's dead weight.

There's a big difference between disapproving of a President and thinking they should be impeached and removed from office. As non-Trumpist Republicans realise they could be staring down the barrel of a Warren presidency with a Democrat-controlled Congress and quite possibly senate I'd imagine many will begin soiling themselves and demanding the party shift from denial to damage control.

The fun part is that Trump has probably gifted Warren the presidency. The Republicans should be able to save the Senate, but they won't want to wait too long to clean the slate, so to speak. Trump has very likely committed criminal offenses, and his enablers within the State Department will go down with him. Criminal investigations are a certainty under a Democrat Presidency. The enablers will likely be looking for plea deals and the like. It's a good time to be a lawyer.

[SalmonGod]

I saw that from a WH lawyer who was talking to a judge for some other thing though. I wonder how confident they actually are in that the ruling would be different now since it's all about constitutional power and balance between the branches. Not to mention it'd be the most ultimate political decision by SCOTUS at a time when they're trying not to appear political.

I'm guessing Unitary Executive Theory has something to do with it, if it is a claim being made out of genuine belief.

But also, Trump isn't a type of leader who wields power according to law.  He wields power via status posturing.  They might throw some legal jargon out there.  But it's just a formality.  The reality is a figure like Trump poses a lot of problems for US culture, which is highly authoritarian and doesn't think critically about the nature of power.  He and the people he surrounds himself with know this and will lean on it to the end.

Power is a product of belief.  If a person is able to make everyone around them behave as if they have power, then they have power.  Trump's been, by raw numbers, poorer than a beggar on the street at times in his life.  But he presents himself as a wealthy, powerful man.  Thus, he gets people to treat him as if he is, and he takes advantage of that to become actually so, even after going bankrupt and losing everything.  His whole life is based on this, and as such no matter how badly his mental state degrades, that is a behavior as deeply ingrained as breathing for him.

We like to pretend that power is granted by law, in turn legitimized by collective consent through democratic processes.  But this is a laugh.  It's common knowledge today that our democratic processes are broken.  Corrupted by primary meddling, corporate media collusion, campaign finance scandal, gerrymandering, massive voter disenfranchisement, electoral college, etc. 

But the charade of processes and titles is enough that it doesn't matter.  Even if the president is the president illegally, they're still the president.  Even if they're engaging in illegal behavior, they're still the president.  We have precedent for this with Bush, and nobody touched him.  He was and is undeniably a criminal, whose crimes cost at least hundreds of thousands of lives.  And there have even been attempts at citizen's arrest on him, even after his presidency was over, which were foiled by police.  Police preventing the apprehension of a criminal.

Because, according to the charade of processes and titles, Bush is higher on the ladder of social hierarchy, and it isn't anybody's station to enact repercussions against him.  It's not really about legitimacy granted by law or anything about that.  According to the law, he should be arrested and face consequences.  It's about posturing.  Status.  Perception.  If collective agreement puts someone higher on the totem pole, then someone lower on the totem pole will be prevented from leveraging the law against them.

So for anyone to do anything about Trump, simply stating the obvious isn't enough.  Whoever actually takes real steps towards correcting the problem has to either feel like they are of a station qualified to challenge the president, or they have to be of a character that cuts through the charade, and trusts they can convince others to see through it with them.  That is, convince law enforcement to not stop them from hindering the president, even if the president is a criminal.  The legislature can do whatever regarding impeachment.  But if Trump just says no and postures, then it's down to mass psychology.  Law enforcement and military are social atmospheres deeply entrenched in hierarchical thinking, demonstrably divorced from the actual letter or spirit of any other notion of legitimacy or spirit/letter of law.  If Trump simply says no and postures strongly enough about democrats being traitors and he's the real victim and he's the president so the law doesn't apply to him and so on, and enough surrounding executive leadership has been populated with like-minded fascists who support him, it is totally believable to me that the whole thing could amount to empty words.  At some point someone has to physically march into the white house and bodily drag Trump's ass out into the street.  Someone has to believe it's their rightful place to do that, and not be opposed by others who disagree.

They can do nothing because it is their intention to do nothing. If they won't even issue arrest warrants for people literally defying Congressional subpoenas then they are just proving they have no power. They could actually impeach him and Trump would just say "no", MSNBC would complain for a week and a half, and that'd be the end of it.

As usual, MSH gets it, but I felt it deserved more exploration than this.

I don't just call myself an anarchist because of how I would like the world to be one day.  Anarchy is also just the way the world is, because power is an illusion.

[smjjames]

The thing though with telling SCOTUS to fuck off these days is everything Andrew Jackson didn't have, which means that any pushback is going to be large and swift. Trump isn't the type to wield power according to law, true, but for all the complaining about judges and stuff, they've pretty much been following court decisions when those have been made. So, while I can see him complaining loudly, I still see him complying when it comes to the courts.

Plus, him doing that to any SCOTUS decision would put the GOP in even more of a bind.

[Doomblade187]

Now if only Congress would issue arrest warrants that they legally can and need to counter obstruction.

[Lord Shonus]

Comparing Jackson's situation to that of today is more than a little disingenuous. Jackson presided over a still-new government that was still feeling out the de facto functionality of the de jure framework. While the principle of judicial review had been established in 1803, it had relatively few opportunities to crop up between then and Jackson's time because most of the political disputes of the era were ones that didn't readily spill over into the courts. Defying the Court (particularly when the weight of public opinion was in favor of Jackson's actions) did little to erode the legitimacy of the Jackson administration.


In 2019, things are very different. We have two centuries of judicial review, and the Court has slapped down both the Presidency and the Congress on multiple occasions. Defying the Court would erode Trump's legitimacy quite a bit - not just among the public but more importantly among the upper levels of the Executive branch itself. Quite a few of the top Executive officials have already clashed quite publicly with the President, and a Court order is all the legal protection needed for "I disagree, but you're the boss" to turn into "That is an illegal order and I am not required to follow it" - particularly if the public is opposed. 

[SalmonGod]

Plus, him doing that to any SCOTUS decision would put the GOP in even more of a bind.

In 2019, things are very different. We have two centuries of judicial review, and the Court has slapped down both the Presidency and the Congress on multiple occasions. Defying the Court would erode Trump's legitimacy quite a bit - not just among the public but more importantly among the upper levels of the Executive branch itself. Quite a few of the top Executive officials have already clashed quite publicly with the President, and a Court order is all the legal protection needed for "I disagree, but you're the boss" to turn into "That is an illegal order and I am not required to follow it" - particularly if the public is opposed. 

Everyone's been repeating stuff about the GOP putting themselves in binds for the last several years, but they're still in power, still blatantly disregarding the law, even running heinous concentration camps right inside our own borders now.  It's basically Guantanamo 2.0 and nothing's being done about it.  Everyone keeps just taking it as a matter of faith that the next bad thing they do will cross some line and consequences will magically erupt from the rule of law aether.  But it never happens.  As we saw with Standing Rock, it's not even just the president.  State leaders will use their domestic police forces to conduct a military invasion, and a democrat president will play "wait and see".

In the long term, demographically, yeah, they're in trouble.  But right now, they've stacked the Supreme Court, the conservative base is broadly in lockstep, and Trump's fans only view it adoringly as a reinforcement of his power when he flaunts criminality and disregard for norms.  The Republican establishment turning on him would be meaningful, and they may temporary clash with him on various things, but the only thing they'd gain from aiding in his removal is to put Pence in power.  It's more likely that whatever public clashes take place are purely for the optical purpose of being able to claim distance from Trump's legacy when it's over, while continuing to reap the benefits of his impunity in the meantime.  And all precedent in recent history points to nothing happening, as I still maintain that the Bush administration's legacy is even worse than Trump's so far in terms of material and civil rights consequences, but nothing ever happened to him.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that nothing will ever change and it's all hopeless.  Just that change isn't going to come from repeatedly believing that every new development is THE moment that suddenly the establishment is going to get its shit together, grow a spine, and do the right thing.  We've crossed a great many moral event horizons over the last 20 years.  If we don't learn from it and adjust our expectations, we'll just be stuck in this endless cycle until angry Zoomers finally rise up and enact an ageist cleansing as retribution for their barren future.

[thompson]

I'd argue that power exists in hunter-gatherer societies as well. Power does flow from the barrel of a gun (or stone axe), after all. I suspect the earlier comment on power being illusionary might come down to the definition and implied scope of "illusionary", but I'd rather avoid semantic discussions and will interpret the debate so far in terms of the meaning I think was intended.

I am inclined to agree that Bush was worse than Trump, but the difference is that Bush followed the (de facto) "rules" while Trump is completely unprincipled. Pinning a specific crime on Bush would be difficult as even if he was behind some specific misconduct the branches of the government that oversaw it have likely operated in that fashion since the second world war and would never rat him out. I suspect this is why it has taken several months for an eyewitness to Trump's alleged extortion attempt to come forward, despite how blatantly criminal the alleged conduct was. Breaking the law is the norm in US foreign policy. Trump was just dumb enough to attack a core US political institution (elections) without the pretense of a higher cause.

[SalmonGod]

I meant that power is illusory in the sense of social power, as relates to political or economic institutions.  Superficial displays of status are invoked which are designed to make people believe someone has power, and thus by that belief they have power.  A fraud like Trump can merely look and act the part of someone important, if a few are convinced and thereby are influenced to behave according to the fraud's will, then that becomes a manifestation of real power.  When that power is witnessed by others who weren't previously convinced, they may be so yet, and the effect compounds.  And what we have today is someone who rode that dynamic all the way to the white house.

Yeah, power can manifest as force, but I'm not referring to the power dynamic between two people in direct physical violence.  When you fear the power that may flow through the barrel of a gun in the name of a political leader, that power that leader has over you is an illusion.  You believe in that power because an agent of the leader might shoot you if you defy it.  But the agent isn't an extension of the political leader's body.  They're an individual subject to the same belief that they will face consequences if they don't do what's expected of them and shoot you.  And it's doubtful they believe the consequences they face would be directly at the hands of the political leader.  It would be in turn at the hands of another agent.  And so on.  If collectively any of these people don't believe, then the power doesn't exist.  It's like living in fear of a hologram.

Let's all learn from Rodriguez-SAN!

Now I know you're thinking that politics and the law are different, because of the consent of the governed expressed through representational and electoral processes.  That's important, and it can be an ideal thing if it's genuine.  But if it's genuine, it doesn't represent the power of one person over another.  It represents the collective agreement between a group of people about what they want.  Even in the case of compromise where some people aren't getting exactly what they want, if the process of reaching compromise was executed completely in good faith, then the result should still be what everyone wants as the best option given the circumstances.  As such, everyone acting according to such agreement is more doing what they want to do, not only what they feel they must in order to avoid consequences.  It's not a power structure, it's an agreement structure.  Reality is of course messier and sometimes expressions of force between people are necessary to achieve good things, but it's always pissed me off how anarchism alone out of all political ideals faces such expectations of idealism.  Representational democracy is just as much constructed based on ideals that are undermined by the messiness of reality, yet no one invokes that to refute it.

Now part of what I was getting at that's tough to express and I think I failed at is the influence of those who WANT to believe in the illusion.  This is authoritarianism, and sometimes fascism.

Trump's fans don't just empower Trump because they fall for the charade.  It's also because they like his style of charade.  This is extremely important to authoritarian mindsets.  They love for social hierarchy to be clear cut and strongly expressed.  For everyone to have their place in a pecking order that's easy to understand, which is all a charade as described above.  But they love the process of acting out that charade, even if it's not to their personal benefit.  They love the simplicity of it.  This mindset loves a leader who convincingly expresses power for power's own sake and nothing more.  When Trump brazenly lies or defies norms or otherwise acts like Trump, those who want to believe in legitimacy by collective agreement see him as a fraud.  But authoritarians see true power.  Someone who's above the collective agreement bullshit and wields power according to its truth - the charade.  Deep down, I think they understand what I'm talking about better than most, but they don't care because it's what they want.  And they only pretend otherwise to put up a front of plausible deniability about their true nature to confound those who would rather believe in the legitimacy of collective agreement, no matter how farcical in reality (as much of our society has been for a long time via the power dynamics of our economic system and the issues with our electoral and legislative processes).

These people will be important as things play out.  Because if enough pure authoritarians are in the right places when collective agreement decides Trump is out, then that's where it might turn into empty words.  Trump and the Republicans have been shirking collective agreement for years.  Simply saying "no" to laws and norms to get their way.  It's how they got their recent supreme court nominations, for example.  Liberals just assume that the system's power is magically inherent and when it decides something, that it's supposed to happen.  When someone with high enough authoritarian power simply says no, they're not very good at responding to that.  All they do is complain impotently and fail to process what's really happening, as the authoritarians blithely go about their business.  Thus we still have those supreme court justices.  Thus Bush and Trump both took office as president despite serious issues with the legitimacy of their elections (anyone else remember Florida 2000?).  We've seen it over and over.  The question is how far it can go.  Maybe some of the liberals in government aren't completely BSOD'd and actually understand what's going on, but they're afraid that if they respond to an authoritarian figure within our supposedly collective agreement-based power structure, that it will weaken the illusions both are propped up on and thus the fabric of society.  But the alternative is this cycle of shit carrying on forever.