Trump’s: attack on the Fed’s independence, forcing respected economic experts to push a bullshit political line, and generally incompetent economic comments and policies…are bad for the rule of law, the economy, and people in general. But, one factor that will determine how bad this is, is whether, after Trump, we see further degradation of the rule of law and more bad economic policies, or whether it gets better.
‘I want generals like Hitler had’ ~ Donald J Trump…according to his former chief of staff.
“”He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,'” Kelly recalled to The Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing (Hitler) did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.””
The Supreme Court keeps seeing blatantly unlawful action by the Trump administration, and then ending injunctions and allowing it to go forward anyways while the case works its way through the process. It looks like the Supreme Court is making up doctrines in order to enable lawlessness. The Supreme Court did not act like this toward Biden.
“Reuters identified 75 federal-judge rulings finding Trump’s government infringed on First-Amendment rights including freedoms of speech, religion, and the press.
The unprecedented pushback on constitutional grounds has included repeated findings that the administration chilled or squelched the speech of citizens and groups opposing the Republican’s agenda.”
“The Trump administration has acknowledged in court documents that it canceled $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in this case, 16 states that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.”
The government has charged many ICE protesters with crimes, but many of these prosecutions have fallen apart, indicating that the charges were more about government intimidation than legitimate criminal justice.
Career prosecutor and FBI man say that these professional roles used to not notice much when a new president came in. Trump changed that. He used the justice system to protect his friends and attack his political opponents. Trump is corrupting justice and weakening US democracy.
Jack Smith prosecuted Trump because the facts supported prosecution. If they didn’t support that, he wouldn’t have brought that. He’s a career prosecutor who cares about the law, not a partisan actor.
A regime change war against Iran had a chance of succeeding, but it required both commitment to a longer war and preparing the Iranian opposition on the ground. The Trump administration, despite essentially declaring a regime-change war at the beginning by calling on the Iranian people to soon rise up, did not appear to much help the Iranian opposition and had no stomach for the length of war necessary to give regime change a chance.