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Dems, do not swim in denial, there's crocodiles there and the biggest crock of all could win in 2024 [1]
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Date: 2022-11-26
As Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rep Paul Gosar speak at this white supremacist, anti-Semitic, pro-Putin event, silence by Republican Party leaders is deafening and enabling. All Americans should renounce this garbage and reject the Putin wing of the GOP now. pic.twitter.com/6fgpV6ohZ8
47 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want Trump to be the nominee in 2024, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll . And if Trump and Joe Biden are the contenders, Trump narrowly edges Biden, 48 to 46 percent, among registered voters (albeit within the poll’s margin of error).
You need to read this WaPo piece by David Montgomer y, the bullet dodged in 2020 may lodge again in the body politic. 2023 could begin looking like 1923 or 1933 in Germany.
David Montgomery talked to 21 experts and came to some unfortunate conclusions about the Trump second term. “I think it would be the end of the republic,” says Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz, one of the historians President Biden consulted in August about America’s teetering democracy. “It would be a kind of overthrow from within. … It would be a coup of the way we’ve always understood America.” Based on what these experts described, here’s a portrait of a democratic crackup in three phases.
Phase 1: Trump seizes control of the government … … And installs super loyalists.
“Among the first things he would do, in the initial hours of his presidency, would be to fire [FBI Director] Christopher Wray and purge the FBI,” ...Trump “would then set about trying to politicize the FBI, the intelligence agencies and as much of the government as possible,”...
If Trump installed loyalists at the FBI and Justice Department — picture as the next attorney general Jeffrey Clark, the Justice official who tried to get the department to help overturn the 2020 election — then any lingering federal investigations of Trump could be dropped….
He governs without Senate advice and consent.
It can also create chaos. In the last year of Trump’s term, the Government Accountability Office found that his acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the acting DHS deputy were serving unlawfully, calling into question the legitimacy of their policy decisions. But there’s little to stop a president willing to skirt the rules and run out the clock on his term. It would take both houses of Congress to stand up to him, perhaps wielding the power of the purse as a cudgel, says Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group focused on effective government and smooth presidential transitions. And what if a gridlocked Congress failed to check an out-of-control chief executive? Stier told me: “If the president decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”
He creates a MAGA civil service.
Installing loyalists at the top of government won’t be enough. As for populating the rank and file with those who echo the former president’s slogan of Make America Great Again, Trump tipped his hand near the end of his term, when he signed an executive order designed to strip as many as tens of thousands of federal employees of their civil service protections. The order created a new category of employees, dubbed Schedule F, targeting those whose jobs arguably include a degree of policymaking. Top officials would be able to fire them almost at will. President Biden rescinded the order shortly after he was inaugurated. If Trump were reelected, he’d reinstate the policy, Axios reported in July.
[...]
The approach would restore a patronage system that hasn’t existed in the United States since reforms were enacted in the late 19th century, says Stier. “It is fundamentally this notion that the president should be able to decide, not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of political or personal interest, a larger segment of the workforce,” he says.
Phase 2: Trump deploys the military aggressively at home, while retreating abroad.
He uses the military to promote his own political power.
After Trump led Secretary of Defense Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and other officials across Lafayette Square for a photo op in June 2020 amid racial justice protests, Milley apologized to the public for participating in a staged politicized event, enraging Trump. In a second term, such cautionary voices will be fewer, says Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke University and a leading expert on civilian-military relations…
American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.
If in 2025 Ukraine still depends on American aid for survival, halting it would hand Vladimir Putin the victory that he was denied in 2022.
Intelligence work is harmed.
Phase 3: Political violence and democratic collapse? It’s possible.
Trump did not cause the fissures slowly pulling the country apart. He’s a symptom — but he’s also an accelerant, one whose return to the White House could provoke the final breakdown. “Trump has been able to add to the narrative that if democracy doesn’t deliver what I want, then it must be a flaw in the democracy,” says Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, executive vice president of Freedom House, a nonpartisan democratic advocacy and research group, which has recorded a decade-long decline in political and civil rights in the United States that accelerated during Trump’s term, putting us on par with Romania and Panama.
Ideological, racial and ethnic tensions ramp up.
America is already gripped by an unprecedented level of what political scientists call “pernicious polarization” — stoked and exploited by Trump — and a second Trump term could make it dangerously worse, says Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University who co-authored a study of the phenomenon for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Racism, including violent racism, is likely to increase.
Trump would almost certainly return to the issue that first built his following in the GOP and still animates the party: harsh measures to counter illegal immigration.
The bonds that bind the Union loosen.
How Trump gets reelected matters. Is it a close but legitimate victory where he loses the popular vote but takes the electoral college, as he did in 2016? Or do the insurrectionist schemes that failed in 2020 — getting state officials to block certification and substitute slates of electors — work in 2024? Perhaps by 2024 such shenanigans will have been made legal in certain swing states. Ultimately, does the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority or the gerrymandered House of Representatives pick the winner?
Differences between states could deepen.
The chances of civil war increase.
Activated rage would not be limited to Trump supporters. A narrow or dubious Trump victory would inspire massive, potentially violent protests on the left. “Then the MAGA, violent, January 6th-style extremists would take that as the signal to rise up,” Diamond says.
The spiral of violence, response and counter-response would create the kind of disorder that Trump — no longer constrained by his secretary of defense and attorney general — could use to justify invoking the Insurrection Act. Then federal troops would flood the streets of American cities — and this time, not for a parade... Then federal troops would flood the streets of American cities — and this time, not for a parade...
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/26/2138378/-Dems-do-not-swim-in-denial-there-s-crocodiles-there-and-the-biggest-crock-of-all-could-win-in-2024
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