Many Americans take for granted the idea that the US is a "nation of laws" and that "rule of law" governs above all else. But the reality is this: there is no such thing as a perfect legal system.
You can have a strong legal system by design (good oversight, various checks and balances, etc.) but in practice, any system is only as good as the most powerful people are decent and respectful of it.
If you have someone in the most powerful position (the executive) who doesn't respect the law and who isn't willing to, with wisdom in his or her heart, exercise restraint with the understanding that protecting the integrity of the system is ultimately more important than getting your way, the law stands no chance.
Presidents are not historically all powerful within their own parties and the nature of the big tent systems means usually it is fairly difficult to get agreement on everything within a party without some compromise. Trump has managed to defang everybody else in the GOP.
And (2) if the law hasn't been used then WTF did we even consider signing it into power, let alone actually doing it? Something like this should never be done, but if done one would think it would only be in the face of an imminent and urgent need. Instead we seemed to have just casually signed unconstitutional executive tyranny into power 'just in case.'
The only way we're ever going to reign in executive power is if one party or the other starts rolling back executive power while they're in power. But when people are in power they seem to convince themselves that it will always be like this, and so when it comes to power all they can say is 'more, more, more.'
[1] - https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...
Someone has to get things done, and if Congress won't do it, maybe the President has to.
They can't even get the SAVE act passed.
The SAVE act status probably has more to do with some Republican legislators who think it will harm their re-election chances by impacting their own supporters.
It is going to take literal decades, if it is even possible at all, to repair the damage Trump has done in 18 months.
...and lives. Musk is now up there as one of the individuals with the highest kill counts in history - at least 500,000 to 700,000 so far. Analysis suggests that by 2030, this could reach as many as 14 million, including 4.5 million children under age 5. Musk is going to have to come up with his own salute, because he's no longer playing second fiddle to that other guy.
Sources, with details of methodology, here: https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2026/07/how-pulitzer-final...
The people who called it a cult were basically right. Trump has overwhelming control over republican voters and has proven he can easily end the careers of republican politicians who oppose him. I do not recall a single politician of either party in my lifetime who has held this level of uncritical support.
It will be fascinating to see what happens when his grip on the party is removed. None of the current crop of potential successors appears to have even remotely the right kind of support to maintain the coalition. That does not seem surprising, he cannot really abide having someone close to him who looks like a powerful successor because he would see it as a threat. So he will anoint a weakling and the base will fracture.
Prediction: he will never anoint anyone. He is pathologically incapable of stepping aside, sharing, or caring one iota of what happens to anyone after he dies. He may not even be capable of conceptualizing his own mortality.
I fucking hate living in interesting times.
You are in very good company, I expect. There are so many interesting aspects to the time we live in and I find it exhausting.
They have literally no excuse to be this cowardly. They will still be alive and rich if they go against Trump.
What happens then will be very interesting!
I don't see anyone who can keep wielding Trump's power.
This is a dying vestige of the greatest generation who passed it onto their boomer kids who blindly believed it despite evidince to the contrary. We're moving back toward a late 19th and early 20th century understanding of how government and laws work.
Yeah, god forbid they drive right down the middle of the lane rather than drive right up to the line of what the public will tolerate.
There is a direct causative line between government actors feeling like they can get away with unpopular things and the populist politics we've had brewing in this country for the past 20yr. The tea party, the Bernie bros the ron paul era libertarians, even MAGA, they were all ultimately captured by the establishment.
The establishment wielding progressive (lowercase p) types would do well to understand that on some level you, the peddlers of government, must cater to the demands of the people, because if you don't eventually the pressure will build until a populist movement you cannot contain comes around and stomps you. And what that could look like is a serious power transfer away from the feds and toward the states. So if your policy goals involve people in other states, which just about all progressives do, this would be bad for you.
Which is to say turn down the damn heat on the frog, this is all happening because you're going too fast.
That does not seem like a feature unique to progressives? Conservatives are trying explicitly to involve other states, they'd happily put us all under the thumb of a Evangelical theocracy if they had the power to do so.
Those jerks in NC to cram Christian values down everyone's throat via the federal government are no different than the jerks in CA who think that if they have to suffer through a low flow shower head some guy in Alton Missouri ought to as well. They're all progressives. We can debate the merits of the directions in which they seek to progress but they're both progressives on a fundamental level. They're seeking to use government to shape society, to what they think is everyone's benefit but in reality that's not so clear.
All of it, apparently, I've never heard the term progressive used to describe conservatives. I gather that you don't like the divergence between the dictionary definition and the practical one? That's valid, but in a discussion it helps to use terms in the most commonly accepted way to avoid that confusion. I don't think modern conservatives are very conservative at all, but I have to stick with the terminology other people understand.
The whole thing. I spend way too much time in the politics/political-philosophy rabbit hole, and it still whooshed right by me. I bet you got like a 2% hit rate on people understanding what you meant.