That seems to be what you are espousing.
If Trump does obviously illegal things the courts will save us.
Nevermind that the courts are often supporting him (see: judge Eileen Canon for one) and if they aren’t Trump will have to abide by rulings that go against his wishes (and we have shown he is already ignoring court rulings with some regularity).
I’d suggest this means we (you, me, everyone we know, everyone here, our neighbors and fellow citizens) need to oppose this power grab.
And we can’t do that if we go around saying that the courts and laws don’t matter and nothing we do can stop him, unless you’re proposing that we “oppose the power grab” by doing things it would probably be against this board’s rules to advocate for.
You know there’s a lot of space in between “Booster” and “Chicken Little.” The power of positive thinking isn’t a debate strategy.
There are 3 potential responses to this.
Trump’s ability to perpetrate monkeyshines in the federal government depends on nothing but his physical resources and what the other branches will let him get away with. He lacks the physical resources to occupy apparently even one major city, but “securing the Capitol” with the “invitation” of Congressional Republicans is not a hard lift at all.
And there we have it … again.
It’s called projection. To confront your own insecurities about the future, you need to believe that everybody else is terrified, paralyzed, and has resigned themselves to a horrible, protracted, bloody, fiery death, while you are the lone strong one, heroically charging headlong into the mighty conflagration in order to singlehandedly rescue the thousands of screaming orphans stranded at the breach.
And the rest of us are just in your way.
I spent a lot of years very active in the cycling community. A primary argument in that world is about the use of helmets – more particularly, about mandatory helmet laws (“MHLs”). There’s a relatively small cohort who are passionately against MHLs. A subset of that group has to constantly chide the other side as being “terrified of riding a bike without a styrofoam hat.”
Until one day that I asked them if it mightn’t just be the case that their passionate anti-MHL zealotry could be rooted in a pathological need to prove just how brave they were for not needing to wear a helmet – a trivial gesture that really can’t hurt and really might help – if only at the margins.
No reply.
You’re bright and informed and your passion speaks for itself, but – reminiscent of DemonTree when the topic was anything even LGBTQIA+ -adjacent – when it comes to the perils that Trump & Co. represent, your brain simply glitches. You become illogical (veritably spewing out logical fallacies, rapid-fire), irrational, and incapable of honest exchange. You also become a dog with a bone or the proverbial monkey in the trap.
Maybe you’re just overcompensating for your crippling fears about the future.
Your abject and offensive level of arrogance in believing that you know what nearly all of the rest of us are thinking, feeling, and doing (or not doing) is astounding. Your unsupported temerity in telling so many of us that we are “worrying wrong” is obnoxious. It’s also reminiscent of “Top Gun:” “Son, your ego is writing checks that your [arguments] can’t cash.”
The certitude with which you presume to know that a perfectly sane, rational, grounded, hugely-important, and well-supported discussion – happening among basically the rest of us – about the exigency that is this administration is a tacit admission of defeat is the apotheosis of ignorance and projection.
When “just how bad is it?” is the topic, you fall the fuck apart.
Maybe stop. Maybe introspect. Maybe impose your own topic ban for a few months and see how this all plays out. I think it’s a classic win-win proposition.
The only things you really seem to accomplish are to:
Maybe stop.
If all we knew were the prosecutions of Letitia James, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and Alvin Bragg, and if we had any familiarity whatsoever with the evidence against Trump, then we would never make the claim that he is a man constrained by laws.
It’s one of the innumerable important points that tell me that Smapti’s position is based on something totally unsupported by fact, logic, or rational argument.
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”
–Jonathan Swift
Hey, Smapti? Maybe stop.
Smapti, this analysis and it’s conclusion are worth taking to heart.
Your information is a few days out of date. Both in terms of how many people the regime killed (it’s still blurry but probably at least 10,000) and also in terms of the protests (which have mostly been squashed).
No, that’s authority again, not power.
A person with a gun has power. A person whom people with guns listen to has power. And when the people with guns listen to more than one person who are opposed to each other, what you get is a war.
A dictator needs support from the people with the guns. If they had support of all of the populace, they wouldn’t need to be dictators.
Exactly. And to be clear, I was limiting my own analysis to Trump arrogating himself governmental powers that he doesn’t have. Wasn’t even mentioning his seeming ability to actually commit crimes and then skate. Although the preventive mechanisms failed there, at least they exist. Theoretically he could be tried and convicted.
For doing extra-constitutional acts as executive, he’s limited only by other branches of government, who currently are do-nothing Republican toadies who are content for him to keep giving them more power.
The only real constraint on Trump’s ability to simply take over the government is how many other people he would need to recruit to both violate the law and act in excess of their authority, in other words his ability to force adversarial parties at the state level to assist in his power grab. That’s the only remaining circuit breaker. I have faith it will hold, simply because it’s a lot harder to make people do things than dare them to stop you. But it won’t be pretty, and the norms and institutions we lose are not going to return fully as we know them.
Or as I keep saying, a general strike is also an option that could really change things, but so far I’ve not seen the kind of coordination and solidary needed for massive numbers of people to actually risk their jobs and paychecks.
For those keeping score at home, it sounds like DHS’s next target is the sprawling metropolis of … Lewiston, Maine:
TPTB in Milwaukee have been suggesting they might show up here in the next few months. Now, I don’t know if they’re just speculating or if they have information we don’t, however, the amount of people on facebook thrilled about this is disgusting. A lot of posts along the lines of ‘as long as you’re not in our country illegally, you’ll be fine’ all the way to “hey ICE, make sure to check out [some specific area]” or even ‘talk to me, I have some addresses for you to check out LOLOL’. They simply do not understand that it doesn’t matter if you have all the proof in the world that you’re a citizen, if they want to take you, you’re getting taken, period.
In one of these [SDMB] threads, someone posted a graph of how people feel WRT ice and one of the posters was surprised that the republican approval number hasn’t lowered much. I assume that’s because they’re not going into red areas and if all you watch is Fox news you have no idea how bad it actually is. So long as it’s not in their backyard, they’re fine with it.
I’d be curious how that response would change if you asked republicans how they feel about ice, then ask them again after ICE has occupied their city for a few weeks. IOW, how many republicans in Minneapolis were happy to see ICE terrorizing the country but maybe feel differently now that they’re seeing what we’ve been telling them for months.
One of the things, I think, that’s going to need to happen for this to start turning around is the wife or daughter or a republican politician getting murdered or dragged out of their car and disappeared for a few weeks because they made the criminal decision to turn on to a road occupied by ICE. And, to make it worse, after Fox and the White House spin the story, it’ll be their fault for trying to kill the ICE agent.
When we talk about states banning abortion, it’s often mentioned that a republican with a pregnant wife/child/mistress that needs an abortion will still be able to find a way to make that happen. Well, that won’t work here. You can’t buy your way out of a an ice agent with pepper spray and a gun pointed at you.
[that’s the end of my ‘the adderall just kicked in’ ramble, hopefully it’s coherent]
For nearly a half-century, my ‘definition’ of a Republican has been:
Somebody to whom it hasn’t happened yet (and/or it hasn’t yet happened to somebody they love)
I’ve found no reason to abandon or modify that definition since.
I’d say that tracks with their more recent call not to commit the sin of empathy.
It lowered around 15% which is pretty significant. The comment wasn’t that it didn’t lower much, it was that it was still high (which it is, around 70%).
Did you miss that whole Guantanamo thing from about 20 years ago?
Again with this “Trump is only getting away with 7 of 10 illegal things he’s doing, therefore he’s not a dictator” argument. It’s still not as compelling as you think.
Too bad local cops can’t check ICE agents for weapons permits. Any J6ers among them shouldn’t be allowed to carry, seeing as how they are felons.
Doesn’t a pardon annul that restriction? Or are you referring to the many other felonies J6ers have committed?