Not at all friendly
Trump is still noisily raging at Harvard, clueless as to how obvious he’s making his jealousy and resentment.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump said the home countries of some of Harvard’s international students are “not at all friendly to the United States” and “pay NOTHING toward their student’s education.”
He added that the administration wants to “to know who those foreign students are” and that “Harvard isn’t exactly forthcoming.”
That’s not how any of this works.
Trump’s latest attack against Harvard comes two days after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the administration from being able to revoke the university’s ability to enroll international students.
The university had argued that the Trump administration’s revocation was a “blatant violation of the First Amendment” and punished the school for rejecting “the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”
I suppose the reality is that Trump has literally no idea what the boundaries of his job are. I suppose the reality is that he sees himself as the CEO of us which translates to the absolute boss of us which entails no limit whatsoever on what he can demand and order and require. He thinks he has all the powers of a dictator or absolute monarch.
He doesn’t.
That won’t stop him acting as if he does though.
It also won’t stop people in his junta from tellinh him (and the rest of us), that he doesn’t have those powers.
Ooops
“…from telling him…”
GEEZUZ
It also won’t stop people in his junta from telling him (and the rest of us), that he does have those powers.
Unfortunately, due to the reliance on ‘norms’ and a decades-long history of the legislative branch abdicating powers to the executive (I pin the start with the notion of ‘police actions’–Korea, Vietnam–meant to allow presidents to wage war without actually passing a declaration of war), Trump has as much power as the GOP is willing to stand by and let him take.
It actually goes back much further than that, at least back to Woodrow Wilson, and possibly back to Rutherford Hayes, who claimed a power to preserve lands as national parks and treasures. Did he have that power? Probably not. Was it a good reason? Of course.
That’s always where things start, though. One person does them for a good reason; a precedent is set. Then it’s open season.
I didn’t hear a lot of people complaining about Obama’s use of executive orders. That’s the problem; people keep their mouths shut when it’s something they like, and allow the executive powers to increase. Then the next guy comes along (and it is always a guy, isn’t it?) and uses the same power, and people scream and holler about constitutionally mandated duties. Yeah, he doesn’t technically have the right to do that…but who can stop him? At least, without being a complete hypocrite…not that Congress has ever minded being hypocritical.
And get away with it.
Again.
While the apocryphal baby in the bathwater always remains right around the next turn. #awfulmixedmetaphor
And then the next.
And then the next.
And then…