Trump told a group of young students last week that the Constitution gave him the right to do whatever the hell he liked.
Seriously, that was what he basically said. Here is the precise wording that he used:
“I could take anybody in this audience. Give me $40 million. Give me unlimited FBI, unlimited interviews, unlimited – they interviewed 500 people. Listen to this: Two thousand five hundred subpoenas. They did everything. Their collusion; no collusion. They have no collusion.
“Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president. But I don’t even talk about that because they did a report and there was no obstruction.”
This man is a true megalomaniac. He knows no limits to his own power, and does not believe in any kind of restraint.
What that translates to, as well, is that he does not understand, or worse, believe, in how democracy actually works. He clearly had a skeptical approach towards checks and balances between the branches of government, since he always had tried to circumvent them, and went on petty, immature tantrums whenever he was targeted in these.
Now, he is showing his true colors. He truly believes that, as president, he is above the law, that there are literally no limits to his power.
Perhaps he will claim later that he was joking, although my guess is that he will not, because this is, after all, what he truly believes. People like me, who believed that this man could seriously become an American dictator, suspected this much all along. He can claim that he was joking about certain things, such as when he flirted with being “President for Life,” or other power grabs.
In truth, that is what he seems to truly believe. As much as he apparently believed that he truly was the only man who could save a nation of well over 300 million people, he still believes it, and feels that all of the rules should either be bent or outright broken or, in this case, apparently erased off the books altogether, because now, he is in charge.
This is what we have a Constitution for, folks. And he, like all other presidents before him, swore an oath to abide by and protect that Constitution. He swore an oath to limit his own powers, in other words.
Apparently, it was just another lie for him, just another broken promise, like so many others that he has left in his wake.
I have said this before, and I will say it again: this man is serious every single time that he talks about his desire for more power, and every time that he makes public his desire for more power. That was what this was, for that matter. A claim to more power than he actually has, in reality. He is trying to shift everything so that this is the first step towards it becoming reality. Perhaps he did not need a Reichstag Fire after all. He is just brazen enough – not in a positive way – to proclaim a national emergency that only he can fix.
And guess what? Do not count on his supporters to show any skepticism or criticism of their man, even though, by now, he had clearly breached presidential protocols multiple times, and has shown, in multiple ways including, but certainly not limited to, outright proclaiming as much.
This is beginning to feel more than a simple Constitutional crisis by now. This is a crisis that threatens American democracy itself. Trump is and always has been a threat to that democracy. He was an extreme narcissist before he ever took the oath of office, and he had abused his powers before he ever announced his candidacy. Even when Mueller suggests that Trump could get in legal trouble once he leaves office, this does not worry Trump, and he proclaims victory.
Why?
Because Trump does not intend to leave office anytime soon. Not by impeachment, and certainly not through resignation, like Nixon, when the nation still apparently had standards, even the Republican party. Trump does not plan to leave on January 20, 2021 either, regardless of whether he, in fact, wins or loses the election. Frankly, I do not believe that he expects to leave within the next decade. He had already outright claimed that his supporters might “demand” that he would get a third term in office, even though he actually has not won a second term, and did not win the popular vote in order to get a first term.
That is the danger of Trump, and that is why he was far worse than anything or anyone we have seen in recent decades. No other leader would so boldly proclaim such things, or make transparent his obvious desire to grab more power and more power, and to make sure that he never lost that power, either.
This is why Nancy Pelosi is dead wrong in not seeking impeachment proceedings, or in being on the fence with it. She is exactly the kind of weak-willed Democrat that has grown so used to losing, that the Democrats have justly “earned” a reputation for being losers and cowards who back down. This is why many people cannot support mainstream Democrats like Pelosi, and others who dilly dally. After all, Pelosi just recently claimed that Trump says and seems to do racist thing, but she apparently is not convinced that he thinks racist things. Does that kind of rationalizing even mean anything? That seems, to me, exactly the kind of wishy-washy approach that got so many Democrats, including presidential candidates like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, the two last losing Democratic nominees for the White House, had regarding Iraq, and which proved very costly.
They were against the Iraq invasion, sort of. They voted in favor of it, but they explained it as simply giving President Bush the power to invade, even though, in reality, everyone knew that Bush and his administration had every attempt to go to war against Iraq. Then, they criticized Bush administration’s mishandling of the war effort, but not too harshly. After all, when he proclaimed victory, they could bask in the glow of that victory. Until it proved not to be a victory, and the war continued on and on, and eventually became a quagmire.
Some people felt that it was one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in American history, and the Democrats too frequently remained on the fence, unable to fully make up their minds about whether the war was a good idea or not. Much like they remain on the fence today about whether or not to hold President Trump accountable for breaking the law, for obstructing justice, and for constantly lying and abusing his powers.
We need stronger leadership from Congress to hold this ridiculous farce of a president to task and to account. Frankly, he should have been impeached a long time ago, and to hell with his absurd, militant supporters. Law is the law, after all.
So, Trump is trying to brainwash people, and he is clearly especially interested in doing that with impressionable young people who will be wowed by his presidential status. He wants to brainwash them into seriously believing that he can literally do whatever he wants, since he is the president. Of course, he seemed to already possess that same false sense of entitlement before he was elected to the White House. Now, however, it is through the roof!
He needs to be stopped. And we need to remember that he does not have the right to do whatever he wants. He believes he is an absolute ruler, like the old days in France, just before the Revolution broke out, when France had an absolute monarchy, and the kings did not have to worry about anyone keeping their power in check. Look how well that turned out for them, once their decades, and perhaps even centuries, of irresponsibility finally caught up with them.
Lest we forget, a large part of what bankrupted France was a war they fought against the British in order to help the American colonies achieve independence. We gained independence because we did not believe that a tyrant thousands of miles away should make decisions about the lives of people literally an ocean away. They were against taxation without representation, and were willing to put everything on the line to fight a revolution and end the king's rule here.
We should remind each other, as Americans, that we did not merely fight that war against a monarch with delusions of grandeur and a sense of entitlement to make whatever decision he wants without bothering to worry about the impact it has on people's lives, in order to voluntarily submit to a 21st century version of that kind of lazy, cowardly, arrogant and ignorant monarch. The United States got rid of the rule by monarchs nearly two and a half centuries ago, and we need to remind Trump, and anyone else who believes in some kind of absolute, all-powerful ruler, that this is a place that shook up history with "the shot heard around the world" that was the beginning of the end of monarchy here in this country. Let us not merely give all of those principles up now, simply because some arrogant billionaire "reality television" star who somehow got into the highest office - without winning the popular vote - now has delusions of grandeur, and is trying to act as if he already owns that absolute monarchy style of power.
Again, we fought a revolution and, against all odds, defeated the superpower of that time, in order to set up a new system of government that ended a monarch's ability to do whatever he liked in ruling over us. We set up a Constitution in order to ensure that such abuse of power would never again befall Americans. All of what was not done merely so that some erratic imbecile with a prideful mixture of ignorance (clearly, especially of the Constitution that he swore to uphold) and arrogance could now erase legal traditions that are well over two hundred years old. The Constitutions does not give him the power to do whatever he wants. It was set up to put limits on abuses of power, and he is using this document, and those legal precedents, to try and convince people that, in fact, it gives him the power and privilege to do whatever the hell he wants, even though it clearly, without question, does not.
We do not have absolute rulers here in America. Let us remind Trump and his ridiculous supporters of that fact, whatever the price. Let us cut him off at the knees now, and make sure that the Constitution that our Founding Fathers literally risked everything in order to achieve still works, and still protects Americans with a solid system of checks and balances. Trump is a joke, but there is a danger with him, because he and his supporters are the only ones who do not see him as a joke. In past history, people laughed at dictators before they gained absolute power and did unbelievable damage. We see the threat. Let us deal with it now, and let us get rid of Trump and Trump wanna be's, before they do irreparable damage to the Constitution, and our way of life overall.
Trump: Constitution gives me ‘the right to do whatever I want’ by Steve Benen Trump: Constitution gives me ‘the right to do whatever I want’ 07/24/19:
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