Trump: "Long Live the King"
twitter.com
twitter.com
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-se...
In large part because the last one to seriously try it, ah, ended up a bit lacking in the head department.
To Americans, please WAKE up.
To all people reading this site and working for Musk companies - can you please explain how do you feel about it ? Don't mix work and politics argument ?
Edit: By 'it' I mean an unprecedented power grab by Trump / Musk. They are trying to cut every agency and institution that could limit them, in a blantantly illegal way, and using tech-enabled propaganda machine to achieve their goals. This is very much a tech topic we should massively be discussing on HN, but for some reason it's being silenced. We used to say 'software is eating the world'. Software is currently turning USA into a dictatorship.
That this was posted from the official White House Twitter handle (that has been used for official announcements in the past) is disgusting and speaks volumes about how social media has developed for the worse over the years.
That the image in the post is (likely) AI generated speaks volumes about what the real intent of this technology is, as well.
Where are the folks who preached checks and balances 2009-2016, and decried rule by executive order now? Where are the state's rights people right now?
Rule by executive order is obviously only a problem when Democrats do it.
Also why bother with impeachment? He's already been impeached twice. It's nothing more than a strongly worded reprimand, it doesn't accomplish anything.
Even if the impeachment vote were to fail in the House, or conviction vote fail in the Senate, it would underline that ironically name Republicans have abdicated their entire ideology. Rub their noses in it. Make them take responsibility for a dictatorship.
That is false equivalence. Obama's EOs would wind up going through the court system and getting overturned and ruled unconstitutional. The courts would tell him that he had committed executive overreach, and that what he wanted was the provenance of Congress, and that he needed to go do the hard work to get a law passed through that body.
Trump has already had EOs rules unconstitutional, and he's announced his intentions of ignoring the courts entirely. That violates our system of checks and balances, and is the comic-villian interpretation of what Obama was doing (he wasn't ever doing that).
What we have now is a CEO-President. And Companies don't have a representative Congress or Courts. The top-down hierarchical structure of the typical corporation would be called a dictatorship in the political sphere (particularly if the CEO owns >%50 of the voting shares). That isn't what our system of government is supposed to be. Arguably we shouldn't accept that in corporations, either, but at least we have some kind of freedom of association to quit and find another job.
Half the country has forgotten basic High School Civics 101 and "Separate but Equal" along with "Checks and Balances" and think this is entirely normal. But we aren't supposed to have one person who makes up the laws and enforces them, with no checks on their power. That would _accurately_ be described as a Dictator/King/Fascism or some other term in that general universe. The Constitution was written to prevent _exactly_ that.
And to reiterate, Obama was regularly checked by the Court system. Trump has indicated that he will ignore the Courts. That really is "crossing the Rubicon".
The only thing providing a check on Trump right now seems to be the stock market.
The things he is saying and doing are not a joke, and should not be treated as one. The facade of "he's just messing around to make the left angry" is false and thin. He is telling you exactly what he aspires to be. Or, more accurately, he is attempting to assert that he already is one.
If you believe in the ideals that America was founded upon, you should be angry. Fascism is here, and it's up to us to resist it. Please.
He generally accuses the other side of the thing he's about to do, so I'm more than a little suspicious of the last election results.
"When somebody shows you who they are, believe them" -- Maya Angelou.
The country did get the best look at what His Majesty was and is: among other things, at the insurrection party, and when he told his subjects to drink bleach. But nah, the price of eggs was more important.
Democracy dies not just in darkness. It also dies by the sheer stupidity of the demos.
And where are the libertarians? Reason.org has a few posts on New Mexico labor relations (arguing on the side of federalism and NLRB control, no less) and nothing about this. No principles whatsoever.
It will be less than months, maybe weeks, before this begins impacting tech. Are you not paying attention? https://www.wired.com/story/brendan-carr-fcc-trump-speech-so...
"Carr authored the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, writing that the agency needed to prioritize issues like “reining in Big tech” and “promoting national security.” Specifically on his to-do list, Carr says that the FCC should issue an order that reinterprets Section 230 to eliminate the “expansive” liability immunities it provides to social platforms. Section 230 is part of the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, which protects internet companies from being sued over content that appears on their platforms and has given companies the ability to decide what content can or cannot be posted.
But there is no precedent for the FCC governing online speech, and experts tell WIRED that the agency has no authority to act on Trump and Carr’s speech prescriptions."
This is coming for you next
>“We are a nation of laws, not ruled by a king,” she said in a written statement. “We’ll see you in court.”
We shall see.
The issue here is Trump calling himself "king", from the official White House account. That is not a title that is given out for ending congestion pricing.
In contrast, the decline of America feels both faster and more destructive—after all, China mostly harms its own people, while the U.S. brings chaos on a much larger scale.