You are all very welcome!
never mind
True, sovereign immunity does not destroy democracy, and writing a new amendment that introduced it, and getting it ratified according the Constitution would not either.
Trump pardoning himself and getting it approved by a supreme court appointed by himself (and his Republican predecessors, many of whom like him were elected by a minority of the electorate) absolutely would
I feel Putin will go for the Baltic states first. They were actually part of the old Soviet Union so Putin will feel they belong to Russia.
Trump will argue that Putin has a legitimate claim and will oppose invoking the NATO treaty. The rest of the Republicans will cave and follow his lead.
I’m sure there are conservatives who are looking back to 1968 and 1972 and the precedents of a Presidential candidate being assassinated. It would certainly help the Republicans in 2024 if Trump became a historical legacy rather than an active disruption.
This is about as likely to happen as not.
Maybe your post wasn’t meant to be taken literally, but if it was:
Would you care to suggest what happens next, after democracy is absolutely destroyed? If the destruction is absolute, that means no more elections, right? Or are you predicting communist-style elections where we are all forced to vote for the same candidates?
I can’t see the President being forced to govern from a prison cell, or going from the White House to big house in January 2029, and am personally confident that a lot of Democrats will still win elections.
Destroying democracy is hard work. I don’t think DJT is up for it.
P.S. However, there are actual very bad things that may happen in Trump administration 2. A politicized Justice Department may lock up some supposed enemy of the people journalists.
Not at all, loads of dictators have elections as you point out. There is a continuum with Stalin at one end where the elections are purely performative but plenty of other regimes along the continuum (e.g. Putin, Ergodan, Orban) that have real elections with real opposition parties but where the system has been so corrupted that they cannot be described as a democracy in any real sense.
My line in the sand is the point where a president gets elected (most likely via the electoral college after losing the popular vote) despite being convicted of a whole raft of serious offenses (including attempting to overthrow the results of an election, and oh yeah also being caught on tape commiting a crime whilst also admitting to knowing it was a crime). And then pardons himself and then “his” supreme court says that’s a-ok and perfectly above board.
At that point (and I agree it will very likely happen if Trump reelected) we have crossed the line from “democracy that’s going through a tough patch” to “no longer a democracy”
Why absolutely destroy? The Republicans find democracy to be useful as long as they don’t have to abide by the results.
So the Republicans will continue to do what they’ve already been doing; allow democracy to exist as a theoretical process while they use their control of government to decide who gets to vote and what votes are counted. And by controlling the outcome of elections, they will ensure they continue to control the government. It’s a prefect cycle.
They’ll probably even allow some Democrats to still hold office - not enough to do anything of course. But the Republicans will find it useful to have a strawman enemy they can blame for everything that goes wrong.
'Zactly.
Look to Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, and up until recently, Putin in Russia for examples of a “democracy” in name and superficial style that amounts in fact to a one-party dictatorship that’s really mostly a kleptocracy for an insider clique of criminal politicians and criminal big businessmen.
There are many many more examples of this genre in the last 100 years. Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and most of the PRI presidents of Mexico fill, or almost fill, this bill.
If you want to refute the idea that “it can’t happen here” look at the southern states between the 1880’s and the 1950’s. They had what was essentially one-party rule. (That party was conservative Democrats.) The Democrats used their control of elected offices to appoint judges and other government officials, enact laws, and control access to the polls. And that control of the mechanisms of government ensured that Democrats were the candidates who got elected.
Modern conservative Republicans are in the middle of replicating that system on a national level.
The old southern one-party system was broken up because there was a national multi-party system still in existence and eventually that national government decided to intervene and restore actual democracy in the states. But if the same one-party system sets itself up at the national level, there won’t be a higher level of government to overturn it. It’ll be game over for democracy in America.
Very well-said. Chilling.
What could they do?
The voters in the rust belt were lied to by trump, and this cost him 2020. So yeah die hard MAGA may not ever see the light, but trump voters can & have.
Not “full scale” but a “military drug intervention”, as several GOPers have already suggested.
Much more likely.
Republicans have already suggested a limited military intervention to curb the drug trade.
It was sheer genius.
trump raised $250m in his con game. However, like some con-men he fell prey to believing his own con.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/jan-6-report-says-donald-trump-s-stop-the-steal-funds-diverted-in-rip-off#xj4y7vzkg
I was going to post this as well. Make the laws sufficiently restrictive, and get the right corporate partners in bed with the government and it’s remarkable how you can have curtains of dictatorship in front of the windows of Democracy.
As an example, restrict all campaigning to a small, set number of minutes (ie, each candidate gets exactly five minutes to campaign on TV). Then declare that incumbents speaking on TV isn’t campaigning, it’s news. That’s (paraphrased) what Orban has done.