So now Trump wants to distance himself from Monday’s St. John’s Church fiasco: Good luck with persuading anyone outside the Fox echo chamber that Trump didn’t know. As is clear from the timing of events, Trump owns it all. Every bit of violence since the George Floyd murder. Yup, even this: On Saturday, Trump said …
That Tweet was just too tempting. Here goes . . . “Law and Order” says the guy who won’t show anyone his taxes. “Law and order” says the guy whose “charity” was a shell company for “persistently illegal conduct” and “repeated and willful self-dealing transactions.” “Law and Order” says the guy who paid $2 Million …
J.J. asked: A: Trump will do anything he thinks he can get away with, which he believes will benefit him personally. Yesterday he learned what happens when his AG-Henchman Barr orders violence against Americans protesting peacefully. It didn’t go well for him. Evidently it all started because Trump was feeling humiliated when we learned he …
This week has been the most chaotic week of the Trump presidency—and that’s saying a lot. Professor Heather Cox Richardson puts out an excellent newsletter summarizing the day’s news from the perspective of a political historian. She said this last night: There are peaceful protesters and there are chaos agents. The truth about the chaos agents …
Trump did not like it when Twitter fact checked one of his tweets in which he gave false information about mail-in voting. He responded to being fact checked by issuing an Executive Order targeting social media platforms. To give you a taste, it includes this snippet: The Executive Order is more of what Trump has …
After reading this post, Walker asked: Spoiler: A surprising number of people prefer a “strongman” to rule-of-law democracy. Let’s start with a definition of liberal democracy. I like Lincoln’s definition: “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and balances , and always changing with deliberate changes of popular opinion and sentiments is the only …
Lady in Blue has a few legal questions: I’ll answer them. For me, though, the real questions are why Trump is trying to cause so much trouble and what he hopes to accomplish. First: Can Trump override the governors? A: No. If the citizens of a state think that their governor is infringing their first …
LetsNotRepeatThePast asked: There is no book that brings together my threads because I draw from a very broad range of scholarship (history, philosophy, political psychology, law, Constitutional history, etc). But here are my recommendations for reading that has most helped me understand how we got here, and how we get out. These are the books …
Part I is here. Part II is here. We come now to the part when the Leader decides people must be willing to risk death (and die) and the Fox-Trump-GOP—conditioned to obey a leader—falls in line. The goal of a hierarchical government is to preserve the hierarchy. In contrast, the goal of a democratic (fairness) …
Part I is here. Recall: Where we left off: The hierarchical leaders who want the freedom to lie and steal and cheat have a problem: Persuading their victims to vote for them. One way the GOP gets votes is by nurturing and stoking racial grievances. They get certain people to vote against their economic interests …
