It starts to get scary when he does blatantly illegal things that are highly popular.
FDR never came anywhere near impeachment over the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent.
What is scary about Trump is that he’d have no problem outdoing FDR’s illegal imprisonment of Japanese-Americans. I can see him sending in troops to burn mosques, arresting media figures who treat him with other than adulation, and deporting everyone of Mexican descent, citizen or not. All illegal but all would be wildly popular with his uninformed/misinformed supporters.
Okay… so I didn’t say “impeached and successfully tried and convicted”. I said “successfully impeached”, meaning the entire process of impeaching, trying and convicting was successful. Maybe it’s not technically the exact right turn of phrase, but anyone with half a brain knew what I was talking about.
And I think the hysteria about Trump and absurd stuff like sending Federal troops to burn mosques is hysterical. You can’t REALLY believe that any elected official would do something like that?
That’s the fast route to an impeachment and conviction; I’d think the hard part would be for the Constitutional scholars to figure out WHICH of the myriad of laws that would break would be the right ones to try him for.
Beyond that, I doubt the military would comply- that’s not within their mission, and explicitly against the Posse Comitatus act and several other pieces of related legislation, at least not without explicit Congressional approval.
Trump’s all hot air. He’s not Hitler; he hasn’t schemed up some sort of race-based ideology or anything like that; he’s spent the last 15-20 years being a celebrity. Being in the limelight is what gives him a boner; if elected he’ll be more like an American version of Baghdad Bob or the North Korean news services. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear a great deal of bloviation in the news media about Congress, the Supreme Court and any other country that so much as mentions the US in a speech.
But I seriously doubt that if he’s even elected, that he’ll do anything illegal. It’ll rob him of the biggest stage in the world, and he can’t have that.
FWIW, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internments.
Didn’t a later court reverse that? But, yes, you’re right, at the time FDR wasn’t in any danger.
Still, it underlines the precariousness of our rights. A bad president, backed up by a bad court, with the passive compliance of a bad Congress…can do very nearly anything.
As near as I can figure it, a good-sized chunk of the world uttered a sigh of relief back when Obama earned the Nobel Peace Prize by just being elected President while simply not being like unto Dubya; if Clinton gets elected President instead of Trump, would she deserve one just as much? Maybe more? Possibly two of them?
I don’t know if I could see him burning mosques, though there are a lot of things over the years that I thought I couldn’t see but ended up seeing.
What I could see is him having a far more authoritarian department of justice, with more aggressive police tactics in its various divisions. There would probably be some resistance by career bureaucrats, but some would bend.
The Peace Prize was a joke; I doubt even he took it seriously, other than as a mandate to try to earn it. Won’t happen with Clinton. (I could make an argument that the people would deserve it if they prevent the orange-haired gorilla from gaining office, though.)
No he wouldn’t do that. What he would do is encourage his supporters to do it and then instruct local law enforcement to turn up extremely late to break up the crowd. Theres no need to get federal troops to do it when you can use deniable “rogue elements”.
Sure, because the President has the power, authority and jurisdiction to tell a local PD to do ANYTHING at all. That makes a whole lot of sense.
Remember, these are the people declaring themselves “Sanctuary Cities” and choosing not to enforce Federal law. What in the world makes you think they’ll just fall into line with some suggestion of a President Trump and let people basically riot and burn shit down in their OWN communities?
Chicken Little didn’t have anything on this sort of thinking.
With the amount of ass-kissing they’ve done so far, I wonder what it would actually take for the Republicans in power to get behind an impeachment of Trump. For the price of the Presidency the soul has been sold-Is there enough integrity left to buy it back if the need arises?
Who do you figure would be Trump’s VP?
That depends. Does he have to announce it before, or after, he gets nominated?
There’s no federal law requiring them to hand over people to the feds.
That’s the thing.
While I don’t think he’d go that far, Trump has clearly shown he’d go much further than anyone in history. There are plenty of things I don’t believe any other elected official would do, but Trump would. The guy is a complete loose cannon. He’s dangerous.
And there’s also the problem of what some people think they will be allowed to get away with if he is in office. He doesn’t have to give an order-just a wink and a nod could set it off.
Good grief.
I know that as well as anyone here. Didn’t realize we were being that pedantic.
It’s a little bit more complicated than that. It is now well know that the government withheld key information that may have changed SCOTUS’ ruling. Also, SCOTUS ignored the issue of internment and instead only ruled on the exclusion zone issue.