By the way
Trump says he has power without limit.
In a televised cabinet meeting that lasted more than three hours, Mr. Trump attacked Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat who has pushed back against a threat by the president to deploy troops in Chicago in an expansion of the crackdown on crime he is conducting in Washington.
“You have a guy in Illinois, the governor of Illinois, saying that crime has been much better in Chicago recently and Trump is a dictator,” Mr. Trump said. “Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’ — I am not a dictator, by the way.”
Most people are not saying that. He is himself a criminal, by the way.
About half an hour later, Mr. Trump said that he “would have much more respect for Pritzker” if the governor approved a National Guard deployment in his state.
“Not that I don’t have — I would — the right to do anything I want to do,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
He probably can in the sense of getting away with it, but he can’t do it in the sense of legally or constitutionally. He is not officially a dictator. He may be de facto a dictator, but legally he’s not. Yet.
It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will send the Guard into Chicago, where he may have limited ability to deploy the show of force as he did in Washington, a federal district where the president controls the local National Guard. In Los Angeles, when he deployed the Guard in June to quell protests against his immigration crackdown, he invoked an obscure statute letting presidents call the Guard into federal service during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.
But in recent days he has spoken of deploying the Guard in other cities led by Democrats, including Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York. And his remark on Tuesday is his latest assertion of his maximalist view of presidential power. During his re-election campaign last year, Mr. Trump said that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”
Because on Day 1 he would issue a secret order that says nothing he does is illegal so he can do whatever he wants without being a dictator.
The cabinet meeting took over three hours for a reason: the first hour or-so was taken up with the cabinet members taking turns to thank and praise Trump in sickeningly sycophantic tones, each trying to outdo the one before in how far they could insert their tongue into his arse. I heard some clips on the radio earlier today and it was genuinely nauseating.
Ugh godddddd
Charlie Sykes has repeatedly made the point that if anyone less than a year ago had predicted the abuses of power we have thus far seen from the Trump administration, they would have been accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. And yet, here we are…
We point them out after they happen and are accused of TDS. They see the things he does wtih glee becaues this is what they have been wanting.
In his 2016 address to the Republican Convention, he was pointing out all fhe problems with the United States and in contrast to Obama’s “Yes We Can” he would respone “Only I can fix it.”
I. He stated his intent to be a dictator then, and people voted for him.