From Dell Cameron and Andrew Couts in Wired, Trump’s Prosecution Is America’s Last Hope:
The Trump administration’s ever-broadening palette of ethics violations caused Americans to realize, perhaps for the first time on a national scale, that truly there are few if any laws against some of the most basic forms of corruption; that, instead, conventions and norms — an honor system, essentially — is all that stand between presidents and the gross abuse of their power.
This is a good, short piece, riffing off of the 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. The Republicans, Trump, the Supreme Court, billionaires, corporations, and corporate shareholders are using America’s legal system to substantially weaken our democracy. It’s not a new thing for the powerful to place themselves above the law, but the pace and openness with which it’s happening right now is alarming.
In an opinion piece for the NY Times, Thomas Edsall asks the provocative question: How and when will President Trump leave the White House? In the course of attempting to define and then answer the question, he talks with a number of political experts about how a successful impeachment or a 2020 election defeat could play out. When he asked “eminently reasonable scholar” David Leege about it, Leege said:
We should not assume that either a 2020 election defeat or impeachment/conviction will remove Trump from the White House.
Both before Trump was elected in 2016 and during his term, he has made frequent references to “my 2nd Amendment friends”’ and increasingly the “patriots” who constitute the military.
As president, Trump has resisted any effort to curb citizen access to guns and ammo. He puts on a modest show of concern when a particularly bad gun massacre occurs but, in the end, he sees armed citizens as a significant personal asset.
And if the 2020 election is at all close, you’d might see something like what happened in 2000 with Bush/Gore, except way worse, given today’s hyper-partisan political atmosphere. Here is Harvard’s Steven Levitsky:
It is possible that Republicans would close ranks behind Trump, resulting in a constitutional crisis. If right-wing media and the G.O.P. politicians were to remain solidly behind Trump, as they largely have thus far in previous scandals, there would be no easy constitutional exit.
I’ve had a bad feeling about just this possibility for a few years now. From a post I wrote in Sept 2017:
But watching Trump as President over the past few months, is it really that difficult to imagine him going full OJ here when confronted with losing his powerful position? Instead of Simpson being driven around LA in the white Bronco by Al Cowlings followed by a phalanx of police cruisers, on January 20, 2021, it’ll be Trump locked in the White House with Senator Kid Rock, taunting the military via Twitter to come in and get him. That sounds more plausible than Trump genteelly hosting the incoming Democratic President for tea in what USA Today calls “the 220-year-old ritual that has become a hallmark of American democracy: The orderly transition of power that comes at the appointed hour when one president takes the oath of office and his predecessor recedes into history”. Aside from “power”, not a single other word in that sentence even remotely describes anything Trump has ever cared about.
It will indeed be interesting and terrifying to see what happens here.
