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.
“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.”
“A wind power farm in the mountains of far-Northern California was the first through the door of a new permit streamlining program that came with a lofty promise to renewable energy developers: Once a permit application was complete, the California Energy Commission would make a final ruling on the project within 270 days.
It’s been more than 650 days since Fountain Wind completed its application. But the agency still hasn’t made a final ruling, after fierce local opposition successfully derailed the permit review.”
“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.”
“it’s not the policy that’s holding nuclear back: It’s the industry. All the incentives and permitting reforms the government can muster won’t change the basic economics that have led to just three new nuclear plants getting built in the U.S. this century: It takes too long, is too expensive and is only getting pricier.”
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” The nuclear industry has as much going for it right now as it’s ever had. U.S. electricity demand is growing for the first time in 20 years as data centers and artificial intelligence companies proliferate.”
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“The average cost of large-scale solar has fallen 84 percent since 2009, to $58 per megawatt-hour, while nuclear power has risen 47 percent, to $180”
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“the problem isn’t limited to the U.S. The U.K., France and Finland have all seen major cost and timeline overruns with their most recent plants. China, which is building more nuclear than anyone, has gotten its timelines down the farthest but is still around 7 years,”
Trump’s tariffs are costly, but if Trump takes over the financial power currently held by the Fed, that’s a much more dangerous threat to the prosperity and democracy of the United States. Especially when you combine this with Trump’s other potentially costly actions like limiting science and scientists, Trump’s constellation of bad economic policies could add up to a considerably weaker U.S. economy.