Replies to post #501143 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[zab]

America once again elects trump, the man who has failed at everything, by stealing everything, including his way of stalling the Judicial System from putting him jail. Once again, Americans must start preparing to protect themselves from trump. He will do his very best to destroy the very country he was elected to protect. Trump's hatred of everything that makes America great.

[fuagf]

Trump triumphant: How his White House will be different this time

" [...]There’s No Denying It Anymore: Trump Is Not a Fluke—He’s America
The United States chose Donald Trump in all his ugliness and cruelty, and the country will get what it deserves."
[....]Kamala Harris Never Had a Chance
[...]Donald Trump’s victory .. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a62826427/trump-wins-presidential-election-2024/ .. lays bare the troubling-to-the-max truth that Vice President Kamala Harris never had a realistic shot to become the next president, that millions upon millions of Americans had predetermined to vote, at all costs, on behalf of white power/supremacy. That it mattered little-to-not-one-motherfucking-iota how much the vice president’s backstory affirmed the so-called American dream, or how excellent or qualified or experienced she was, or the fact that she has a clean criminal record and no bankruptcies. Her landslide loss made plain the truth that there was no policy she could propose to persuade a majority of white people, that it didn’t matter how much she preached about unity and peace and hope, that it mattered none the number of times she flashed her bright smile or how charismatic she was on SNL, that I was naive as fuck to think any of that would have ever been enough. Trump’s decisive win proves that most white folks, and those who covet proximity to them (the worst white supremacists are the ones who aren’t white, says my former colleague Dr. Shanee Wallace), were in fact single-issue voters whose single issue was ratifying a great myth of whiteness: The worst white man is more worthy than the best of anybody else.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175357246
Nov 1, 2024 - Trump's "enemies within" list
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175326564"

Related: There aren't enough Dearborn MI's to account for the following
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-election-results-map-shift-red/
Trump's victory in 2024 was driven by improvements in support in a vast majority of counties nationwide —
more than 9 in 10 — according to data from counties where at least 95% of votes have been counted
as of Friday. Trump's improvements crossed regions, and included urban, suburban and rural gains.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175359113

From below: "Back in the mid-1990s, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship .. https://theweek.com/speedreads/664505/study-finds-1-6-americans-have-favorable-opinion-army-rule .. would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, it had risen to one in six.

After fours years in the wilderness, Donald Trump’s restoration presidency also threatens to be a retribution presidency.

By Nick Bryant for ABC’s Long Reads

4 hours ago

In January 2017, when Donald Trump delivered his first inaugural address, passages read like a declaration of war on Washington.

“Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another,” he intoned, as his insurgent presidential campaign reached its triumphant fruition, “we are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the American people.” From the outset, however, there was the suspicion that America’s 45th president wanted power to be vested primarily in an American personage: Donald J. Trump. His boast, after all, at the 2016 Republican convention had been: “I alone can fix it.”

In the planning of those inaugural festivities, Trump had revealed a penchant for authoritarian flourishes. “Make it look like North Korea,” he reportedly declared at one of the planning sessions, “tanks and choppers.” Afterwards, he tried to create the false sense that record-breaking crowds had listened to his inaugural address, even though aerial photographs showed Barack Obama had attracted a larger throng. When these outlandish boasts blew up into the first controversy of his fledging presidency, White House aide Kellyanne Conway talked of “alternative facts,” an ominously Orwellian-sounding phrase.

Immediately after entering the Oval Office in 2017, Trump signalled power would flow through the tip of his Sharpie pen by signing executive orders intended to bypass Congress — a device at his disposal commonly used by his predecessors. Quickly, however, Trump realised that the swamp, as he referred to the nation’s capital, was not so easy to drain. When the courts repeatedly blocked what become known as “the Muslim ban”, a series of executive orders restricting entry into America from predominantly Muslim countries, Trump launched a verbal assault on the federal judiciary. Much to his annoyance, Congress failed to repeal Obamacare, the signature achievement of his predecessor’s presidency, even though Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate. White House aides, and other federal officials, often did not carry out his orders, sometimes in the hope, we later learnt from fly-on-the-wall memoirs, that he would forget ever having issued them. Repeatedly, then, Trump was thwarted and frustrated, something he is determined to avoid when he makes his return to the White House on January 20, 2025.

Senior former administration officials, who sought to restrain Trump during his first term in office, have placed on the public record concerns over his autocratic leanings. Retired general Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the legendary Washington Post journalist, Bob Woodward, that Trump was “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”. Another former general, John Kelly, Trump’s one-time White House chief of staff, said his former boss fitted into “the general definition of fascist”, and “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government”. This time, however, these kind of figures who were labelled the “grown-ups in the room” will not be such a constraining presence. It’s a key reason why Trump 2.0 could have more authoritarian overtones than Trump 1.0.

[...]

The debate over the job title for this new role underscored its exulted status. “His Elective Highness” and “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and “Protector of their Liberties” were early contenders. His Supremacy, His Mightiness, His Magistracy and even His Majesty were considered. George Washington, however, favoured a job description which sounded republican rather than regal: the President of the United States of America.

Even so, the founders had created an “imperial presidency”, a term popularised by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s lawlessness first came to light. But Schlesinger was referring not just to Nixon but the awesome powers vested in the presidency from the start.

This made presidential power open to abuse.

[...]

What makes Donald Trump’s victory so weighty is not just its magnitude. Not since George W. Bush 20 years ago has a Republican won a majority of the nationwide popular vote. It is that some 72 million Americans, more than of half of the electorate, have clicked on the terms and conditions of a second Trump term after witnessing what happened at the end of his first. They watched January 6 unfold. Some are doubtless aware that Trump is alleged to have expressed support for the MAGA mob when chants broke out of “hang Mike Pence,” his then vice-president. Trump has been charged in four separate cases, and already been found guilty on all 34 counts in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn star, Stormy Daniels. Yet now, tacitly or explicitly, Trump’s anti-democratic behaviour has been validated democratically. His personal victory is almost certain to be emboldening. Victory could be interpreted as a mandate granting him more authority to be authoritarian.

This would not mark a dramatic break with US history. The country has had authoritarian presidents in the past. American strongmen, moreover, have often been placed on plinths and pedestals. George Washington could easily have abused his high office, given he was the subject of so much idolatry. Yet this American Cincinnatus never encouraged hero worship and was circumspect in his use of presidential power.

By contrast, America’s seventh president, Andrew Jackson, another former general, had no such qualms. This master of the masses, a self-styled “peoples’ president”, rode roughshod over Congress, and rejected the orthodoxy that the legislative branch was superior to the executive. Vengeful and mean-spirited, Jackson bludgeoned opponents, frequently sacked cabinet members and carried out the vicious “Trail of Tears” forced displacement of thousands of Native Americans from their land. Even friendly historians have likened him to an “American Caesar”.



So maybe it is cause for concern that Trump has come to regard the ultra-nationalist as something of a presidential kindred spirit, placing his portrait in the Oval Office and making a pilgrimage in 2017 to Jackson’s former slave plantation, The Hermitage. “Inspirational visit,” Trump commented afterwards, “I have to tell you, I’m a fan.”

Yet it is also important to point out that Democrats have long venerated Jackson because of his role in the founding of their party. Only in the past decade have Democrats moved to rename their traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners, to distance the party from these slave-owning presidents. His portrait still adorns the $20 bill, demonstrating how authoritarians remain mainstream historical figures.

Other heroes of the American story have displayed despotic leanings. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln trashed the First Amendment by attacking free speech and suspended the legal protection of habeas corpus. During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was frequently assailed for being an American dictator after expanding the peacetime powers of the presidency and trying to pack an obstructionist Supreme Court with allies. In this era of national and international peril, when totalitarians were on the rise in Europe, FDR also cast aside the norm set by George Washington that presidents should serve only two terms. However, he won re-election three times, proving how Americans were prepared to repeatedly endorse a president operating at the limits of the constitution. This had been previewed at his inauguration in 1933, when the line from his speech which drew the loudest applause was his call for “broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe”. Plaudits also came from the press. “For Dictatorship if Necessary” read the supportive headline the following morning in the New York Herald Tribune.

In the post-war years, it is also worth recalling the fate of Richard Nixon. As well as being the only occupant of the White House to resign from office, Nixon would likely have become the first presidential felon had his successor, President Gerald Ford, not conferred a pardon. Yet despite being the villain of the Watergate scandal and despite his other constitutional transgressions, including the secret war waged in Cambodia, Nixon was rehabilitated later in life and sanctified after his death. His funeral in 1994 was attended by the full complement of living presidents, Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton. For a former president once cast as cast as America’s biggest political villain, these ceremonial rites felt like a posthumous reaffirmation of his pardon.

For Trump, the road back to the White House has not followed a path of redemption, largely because so many of his supporters do not look upon him as a presidential sinner. To many, the prosecutions mounted against him were a witch hunt. Trump’s Democratic tormentors are the transgressors.

Even before Trump camp down that gleaming golden escalator in 2015, a body of polling data pointed to unexpectedly strong public support for presidents who trampled on the Constitution. Back in the mid-1990s, one in 16 Americans thought that a military dictatorship .. https://theweek.com/speedreads/664505/study-finds-1-6-americans-have-favorable-opinion-army-rule .. would be a “good” or “very good” thing. By 2014, it had risen to one in six. Survey data gathered between 2016 and 2017 found that almost a third of citizens believed that following the “will of the people” was more important than abiding by constitutional principles. Overall, almost a fifth of Americans .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/09/23/trump-america-authoritarianism-420681 .. were “highly disposed towards authoritarianism”. Matthew C. MacWilliams, the academic who gathered much of the data, concluded: “Trump support is firmly rooted in American authoritarianism.” More recently, in September 2022, a poll conducted by Axios-Ipsos found that half of Republicans preferred “strong, unelected leaders” over “weak elected ones.”

So when Trump floated the idea during the 2020 campaign of “negotiating” a third term in office, liberal critics expressed outrage that he was violating the 22nd Amendment brought in after the death of FDR which limited presidents to two terms, but not his MAGA brethren. Likewise, his talk of terminating the constitution was not disqualifying. Quite the opposite. For many of Trump’s MAGA diehards, the president-elect’s authoritarian tendencies form part of his appeal.

[Insert: And more recently - Trump Declines to Back Away From ‘You Don’t Have to Vote Again’ Line
The former president, in an interview on Fox News, declined to back away from his comments and repeated
his argument that if he’s elected, “the country will be fixed” and their votes won’t be needed.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175344643]

The American political scientist Richard Hofstadter spoke in the 1960s of “a paranoid style” in American politics, which has become something of an analytical trope during what can now be called the Trump era. But there has also long been an authoritarian style in American politics.

With ample justification, Trump opponents believe he poses a threat to American democracy.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-10/us-election-trump-triumphant/104580858