Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Trump threatens to deploy military amid national unrest

Axios logoPresident Trump announced from the White House Rose Garden Monday evening that he is “mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military” to stop violent protests across the country, decrying “professional anarchists, looters, criminals, antifa and others” whose actions have “gripped” the nation.

The backdrop: Trump’s announcement came as police clashed with protesters just outside of the White House, using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds chanting, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and other slogans. Flash bangs used outside the White House could be heard from the Rose Garden.

What he said:

  • “Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets. Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming presence until the violence is quelled.”
  • “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
  • “I am also taking swift and decisive action to protect our capital, Washington D.C.. … As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and wanton destruction of property. We are putting everybody on warning.” Continue reading.

Trump declares he’s president of law, order amid protests.

WASHINGTON, DC — Amid racial unrest across the nation, President Donald Trump on Monday declared himself “the president of law and order” and threatened to deploy the United States military to American cities to quell a rise of violent protests.

As Trump spoke, an incredible TV split screen developed around the White House. While he addressed the nation in the White House’s idyllic Rose Garden, a series of military vehicles rolled out front on Pennsylvania Avenue and military police and law enforcement clashed with protesters at Lafayette Park.

Those peaceful demonstrators were cleared so Trump could walk across the park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as “The Church of the Presidents,” which suffered fire damage in a protest this week. Holding a Bible, he then stood with several of his Cabinet members as the cameras clicked. Continue reading.

Trump loves the rule of law. As long as it targets his enemies.

Washington Post logoThe president’s gross distortion of facts is a problem, but legal norms themselves may yet survive him.

After his impeachment trial, President Trump declared himself, “I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country.” And then he called for investigations of those who had investigated him, undid prosecutions that had resulted from the Mueller probe of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, pursued his pursuers all the way to the Supreme Court, encouraged militias to “liberate Michigan,” fired inspectors general who might find wrongdoing in the wrong places and, most recently, tweeted about “some very nervous criminals out there” as he set out to get to the bottom of the bottomless “Obamagate.”

Trump places himself above the rule of law, so it’s easy to see him as a grave threat to it. But as much as the president distorts facts, the law itself is mostly still intact. The president, aided by Attorney General William Barr, other administration officials and Republicans in Congress, eagerly promotes the law, as when he tweets about perceived opponents like his fired former FBI director, James Comey (“What are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail?”), or former Obama secretary of state John Kerry (who supposedly “grossly violated the Logan Act with respect to Iran”). What’s good for the goose may be off limits for the gander, but it’s still good. We do not, for now, live in a tyranny with corrupt laws; we still have just laws. And that bodes well for the survival of norms that seem constantly under assault by a singular president.

The law only appears to be under attack because Americans disagree about facts — and about what officials should do to enforce laws in response to particular facts. But except for some arguments about presidential power under the Constitution, rarely do we disagree about what the law is. How to apply it is another matter. Continue reading.

Trump social media order starts off on shaky legal ground

The Hill logoPresident Trump‘s executive order that aims to strip certain legal protections from social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook is making political waves, but legal experts say the measure is mostly toothless and vulnerable to court challenges.

The order drew praise from Trump allies who share the president’s view that Silicon Valley carries an anti-conservative bias. The practical effect of Trump’s executive action, however, is likely to be minimal, according to telecommunications lawyers.

The most ambitious component of the order is a proposal to peel back legal immunities that online platforms have enjoyed for almost 25 years. Those valuable protections fall under a provision of a 1996 law often referred to as Section 230. Continue reading.

The Memo: Trump ratchets up Twitter turmoil

The Hill logoPresident Trump’s battle with Twitter intensified on Friday, sparking new debates around the combustible themes of race, policing and protest.

Trump has been accused of inciting violence. The president has suggested that he would like to shut Twitter down if he could.

The question is where the row might go next, given the conflicting dynamics at play.

Twitter enables Trump to go around the traditional media and communicate directly with his 80 million followers — even as he fulminates about alleged bias in Silicon Valley.  Continue reading.

How a ‘notoriously stupid’ Fox News host inadvertently let slip Trump’s corrupt plan: media reporter

AlterNet logoAlthough President Donald Trump has used Twitter incessantly to promote himself, he has been furious with the social media outlet this week for fact-checking two of his tweets — so furious that on Thursday, he issued an executive order targeting social media companies and claimed that he did so to “defend free speech.” Twitter hasn’t removed any of Trump’s tweets, but flagged or hidden them as inaccurate or violent. While legal scholars have been asserting that the order cannot withstand legal scrutiny, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz stresses that it serves a useful purpose for Trump nonetheless — and that purpose has been identified by the “notoriously stupid” Fox News host Steve Doocy.

“President Donald Trump capped off a multi-day tantrum at Twitter for appending a mild fact-check to one of his false tweets by retaliating with the power of the federal government,” Gertz explains. “The executive order he signed Thursday is slapdash and incoherent, rooted in a false premise, hypocritical and potentially unconstitutional, legally unenforceable yet dangerously authoritarian, with sections that read like a Fox News screed. But to analyze the executive order’s flaws is to miss the point entirely.”

That purpose, according to Gertz, is “raising the cost of defiance until his perceived enemies break” — and the executive order “forces Twitter to expend resources fighting it, but if the company bends to Trump and does what he wants, maybe it will just go away.” Continue reading.

Trump is all about deregulation — except when it comes to his enemies

Washington Post logoDeregulation always, promises President Trump. Unless of course it comes to his political enemies.

Furious that Twitter deigned to fact-check him, Trump has threatened “big action” against the company, including through an executive order signed Thursday. He accused social media platforms of silencing conservatives and vowed to “strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

Constitutional scholars point out that shuttering a private firm for producing speech the president dislikes would violate the First Amendment. Notably, it also contradicts a core plank of his economic agenda: reducing burdensome government interventions and regulations, wherever possible. Continue reading.

Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano Backs Twitter’s Right To Fact-Check Trump

The legal analyst said Twitter can correct any user it wants, “including the president of the United States.”

Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano exposed the holes in President Donald Trump’s threat to regulate social media platforms like Twitter after the company tagged the president’s tweets with fact-check warnings.

“Can they do this?” Fox News host Sandra Smith asked Napolitano of Twitter’s move on Wednesday.

“The short answer is yes,” Napolitano responded, before adding, “The president is right about the bias in social media and the president is also understandably not happy about his being fact-checked. I mean, nobody would [be].” Continue reading.

Grassley says White House response on IG firings insufficient

Washington Post logoA senior Senate Republican criticized the White House late Tuesday for what he deemed an insufficient response to demands from senators to more fully explain President Trump’s controversial recent ousters of two inspectors general.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a longtime defender of the dozens of independent government watchdogs placed throughout the federal government, released the five-page response from White House counsel Pat Cipollone on Tuesday evening.

Senators had raised concerns about the abrupt dismissal of Michael Atkinson, who had served as the intelligence community inspector general and had alerted Congress to a whistleblower’s complaint about Trump pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political rival — a chain of events that led to Trump’s impeachment and eventual acquittal in the Senate. Grassley also demanded an explanation for the ouster of Steve Linick, the inspector general for the State Department who had started to investigate alleged misconduct on the part of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Continue reading.

A recipe for fascism: The GOP has given up on the central purpose of political parties

AlterNet logoAccording to Jonathan Swan, Jared Kushner has taken on yet another task:  “a radical overhaul of the Republican platform.” Apparently Kushner wants to reduce it from 58 pages down to a single card that people can fit into their pockets. Rather than a document outlining policy statements, he wants it to be more of a mission statement that “looks something like the 10 principles we believe in.”

Kushner’s efforts are the perfect example of how the entire GOP is about to complete its journey toward being the post-policy party. What the president’s son-in-law wants to accomplish is to turn the Republican Party platform into a public relations document rather than a policy statement. That aligns perfectly with what I reported recently about the Trump campaign website, which contains no issue statements or policy proposals, but is simply dedicated to selling campaign merchandise and raising money from contributions.

The pathway to becoming the post-policy party didn’t begin with Donald Trump. The process started back in the 1970s when Richard Nixon revived the party by adding southern Dixicrats to the base via the Southern Strategy. Then, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Paul Weyrich brought Christian nationalists into the fold, primarily by exploiting the Roe vs Wade Supreme Court ruling. That allowed the GOP to use grievance politics (i.e. “cultural issues”) to keep their base in line while continuing their policy agenda of shrinking the federal government, lowering taxes, gutting regulations, and implementing military adventurism abroad. Continue reading.