Trump is using the power of the federal government to arrest and harass people in his way or who even criticize him.
Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself.
Trump is using powers not given to him by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court is not stopping him in many cases.
Trump is using the military to patrol and intimidate U.S. cities.
Trump is using ICE to assault, arrest, and deport people without due process.
Trump fires statisticians because the actual stats make him look bad.
Trump fires analysts because he doesn’t like the accurate information they bring him.
All over the government and military, Trump has fired watch dogs whose job it is to report corruption and abuses of power.
Trump uses the government’s power to limit what major media outlets can say.
Trump gets legitimate prosecutions dropped because he wants the accused as a political ally.
Trump uses the pardon power based on whether the guilty are his political allies, rather than whether they are unjustly being punished.
Trump fires prosecutors for legitimately prosecuting his political allies.
Trump’s advisors and business leaders suck-up to Trump like he is a monarch or a dictator, showering him in bullshit praise that would be a sarcastic insult to anyone else.
The Trump family makes money from dictatorships who want things from the United States.
By these actions, Trump is greatly damaging U.S. democracy. If you don’t recognize this, you either have not been paying attention, or you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. U.S. democracy is under attack, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.
So far, the Supreme Court is allowing Trump to use powers that appear to be unconstitutional. The Court has largely done this using the shadow docket, where the court doesn’t need to explain its reasoning.
By allowing the president to create real-world and not fully reversible impacts while acting with clearly unconstitutional powers, the Supreme Court is derelict of its duty as a check on presidential power.
It makes sense to limit injunctions that stop the president when his actions may not even be found unconstitutional in the first place, but if the president can act in any way, and not be stopped until the damage is done, then the Supreme Court is derelict in its duty.
The Supreme Court can act very quickly when it wants to, and it can slow-walk when it wants. Seems like it will do this in favor of Trump and Republicans.
Trump and his associates say clearly why they are doing what they are doing, and then tell the Court that they did it for different reasons. The Court has naively accepted the administration’s legal justifications that conflict with the administration’s clearly spoken motives.
The Constitution does not take into account political parties. The founders did not expect parties when they wrote it. Parties ruin the separation of powers and cause officials to not restrain a president acting illegally, even though it is those officials’ (Congress and the Supreme Court) duty.
Trump ran on mass deportation. Mass deportation inherently requires removing a lot of hard working good people against their will because they crossed a geographic line they weren’t supposed to. If you voted for him thinking he would only remove criminals, then you didn’t pay enough objective attention.
But, Trump is doing more than that. He is violating due process–a basic right to all people. He is forcing a mass of people into detention centers where it is difficult for their family and lawyers to reach them, and where conditions are sometimes abysmal. Trump is using troops and law enforcement to do demonstrations to strike fear.
The militarization of criminal justice can lead to the end of democracy and basic rights.
The administration is actively making it more difficult for those accused of immigration violations to get a lawyer. They are sending police to lawyers’ houses apparently to intimidate them. They are making student loan repayment more difficult for lawyers who defend immigrants.
Masked men who don’t identify themselves and force you into custody is not how democracies do law enforcement.
Trump has purged parts of the military and replaced them with unqualified sycophants. Instead of lawyers telling Trump that what he wants to do is illegal so he can’t do it, this term he has people finding excuses for him to do undemocratic things.
JD Vance wrote a book with the theme of him and his people being othered by the rest of the country. Then, he goes into politics with a strong strategy of othering other people in immoral ways.
Many people living in the early days of an authoritarian government didn’t realize they were in an authoritarian country. Democracy often slips away over time, rather than ending in one dramatic coup.
Dollar dominance is a benefit to Americans. Even individuals could borrow cheaper because the U.S. dollar was the global reserve currency. The dollar losing its value hurts this benefit. Trump’s tariffs weakened U.S. dollar dominance by losing trust in the United States as a responsible leader.
The U.S. didn’t primarily lose some manufacturing due to the strength of the dollar.
U.S. problems are worse than just Trump. There are a lot of bad political ideas on both sides.