Quote:
Originally Posted by Rococo
Institutions are weaker than they were, but they are still much stronger than they are in many countries. We still have an entirely free press. We still have elected officials who accept court rulings as the law of the land. We still have a legislative branch that is capable of thwarting presidential initiatives.
Think about what this country would look like if Trump were, indeed, the emperor he would like to be. Obamacare of course would be gone. An absurdly high percentage of federal resources would be devoted to building the wall. The travel ban would still be in place and likely would have been expanded. Reporters who criticized Trump would be in jail. All major news outlets would be completely coopted. Thousands of protesters would be dead. Upcoming elections would be postponed or outright rigged. It would be impossible to get accurate information about COVID from any source, much less the government.
This counterfactual is evidence that the country's institutions have been diminished but not destroyed. We are not living in the Dear Leader's North Korea, or even in Erdogan's Turkey or Assad's Syria.
But no one should mistake my relative confidence in the strength of U.S. institutions for confidence in Trump's decency. He has none. There is no norm or institution for which he has any respect. There is no limit on presidential power that he would observe as a matter of principle. The failure of people like Inso0 to appreciate or care about what this country would look like if Trump had absolute power is a grave oversight. In many respects, by supporting Trump, they are recklessly chipping away at our institutions just so they can get lower taxes or whatever. And if you chip away at the wall for long enough, we all know what happens.
I think you could argue Fox is no longer Free Press even if not controlled by Gov't. It has become an almost 100% propaganda tool.
I think you can Trump and Co have not just disdain but also disregard for judicial rulings utilizing every tool to make the process of Courts and Laws impotent knowing justice delayed often equals justice lost.
I think we can say the Legislative branch has shown themselves to be near impotent in actually stopping any action Trump wants to under take even his most blatant and illegal actions. All they can do is say 'bad boy' but then let him carry on doing it.
Not that the above is a counter to your position but I think we need to highlight how easily Trump showed he really cannot be stopped from doing anything and all they really can do is say 'bad boy'.
I am not sure people fully understand how damaging this Trump Presidency will be to the US going forward. His Presidency and exposing that if you rely on Norms and Morals and Standards to govern a POTUS you have nothing when you have a POTUS who does not care about them will lead the Legislative bodies to try and codify in law everything that prior was governed by a NOrm.
The difficulty in that is that law struggles to contemplate each and every bad thing a bad actor might do and by which methods. And laws need to clearly spell everything out or people escape punishment even when we all agree it is wrong. Sorry but the law did not spell that out specifically, sorry about your luck.
That is why Norms which are more along the line of "I will know a bad action when I see it' and relying on a House and Senate that would punish such actions illegal or not was a much better method.