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.
“Chief Justice John Roberts is allowing President Donald Trump to put a Joe Biden-appointed member of the Federal Trade Commission out of her post while the Supreme Court considers a longer-term resolution of the legal battle over her firing.”
So, whether it’s legal or not, Trump gets to go ahead and do it, and even if it turns out to not be legal, much damage will be done and the law ineffective.
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.
“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.
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the tariffs in a chaotic state of limbo. Three courts have now ruled that they were unlawfully imposed, and yet they will remain in place (at least for now).
That’s an outcome that seems to create even more uncertainty for American businesses that are bearing the brunt of the tariffs. Rather than providing relief in the form of a new or renewed injuction, the appeals court has effectively said that Trump is illegally taxing nearly all imports into the country and that Americans will have to continue paying those taxes while the rest of the legal process plays out.”
“it would appear this would be another “emergency” that the president will declare to force through policy changes that in nonemergency times would require going through the federal rule-making process or even, gasp, Congress.”
Trump has used the pardon power to unjustly save his political allies. The founders said the control on the pardon power was impeachment, but that clearly isn’t going to happen.
“They were the 187th and 188th executive orders of Trump’s second term, on just its 203rd day.
That’s more executive orders than predecessor Joe Biden issued in his entire presidency, 162. It’s also more than George H.W. Bush (166), Gerald Ford (169), and 24 of the first 25 presidents. (Ulysses S. Grant, with his 217 over eight years, will likely be eclipsed by Trump’s 2025 totals this fall.) Neither the famously power-expanding George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama of the notorious “pen and phone,” signed as many as 188 executive orders in any of their combined four terms.
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The move toward federal government by presidential fiat comes as a transformation not just of Republican orthodoxy, but of Trump’s own prior statements and actions.
At a campaign event in February 2016, the GOP front-runner complained that “the country wasn’t based on executive orders….Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.” The next month, he vowed: “I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
The 2016 Republican Party Platform decried executive-branch overreach, starting a multiparagraph section on the subject with the declaration that “Our Constitution is in crisis.””
“To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.
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This is not just a rhetorical point but a question that’s central to the legality of the tariffs. In front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last month, the Trump administration’s lawyer told skeptical judges that the president’s tariff powers rested upon the existence of an “unusual threat” that the president was taking action to “deal with.”
The latest delay in the China tariffs, then, seems to directly undermine that claim. If Trump wants to use the threat of tariffs to negotiate a new trade deal with China, fine, but then that’s not an emergency—and, as a result, those tariffs cannot be implemented with the emergency powers the president is currently claiming.”