Why oh why is this lunatic still so high profile when the description in this image is so spot on? Even GOP donors don’t know the answer to why the party can’t seem to move on. They are frankly baffled as to the resignation that so many Republicans show. Elected Repulican officials are terrified of offending Donald Trump. But the answer is easy. The Republican party has given up on democracy, as was predicted that they would a few years ago, 2018 to be exact, in a book written by David Frum. At that time Frum said, “When conservatives realize that they cannot win elections democratically, they will not abandon conservatism; they will abandon democracy.”
Those were foreboding words then but we have lived to see them come to fruition now. The GOP craves authoritarianism. Trump craves authoritarianism. Ron DeSantis, the closest anybody has come to being a Trump threat or successor has taken actions in Florida that make his feelings clear on the point of authoritarianism. This is not Dwight Eisenhower’s party anymore, it’s a hell of a lot closer to Adolph Hitler’s.
Here are excerpts from a piece by a pro-Trumper called Paul Ingrassia. Trump linked to Ingrassia’s Substack page on Truth Social. He endorses what you are about to read. If Trump knew what the word “manifesto” meant, he might even say this was his manifesto.
Our age’s Apollo is personified by none other than Donald J. Trump, who, in his recent policy agenda, has laid down a sweeping vision to reform the administrative state that would permanently alter the way American politics has operated for at least a century, injecting a potent dosage of classical politics into the matrix. Since the civil service was created in the late nineteenth century with the Pendleton Act, the legislature has ceded increasing power to unelected bureaucrats. This abdication of formal power has over time become more and more unmanageable, leading to the modern leviathan that is the administrative state, which effectively operates in the shadows as a fourth branch of government. Government bureaucrats, in the process of consolidating power over the course of more than a century, have radically exploited and redefined the legal and constitutional semantics by which Americans have come to understand their government.
Now, to launch an attack against the administrative state – which, in our parlance, amounts to “draining the Swamp” – is condemned as “undemocratic” by the most illegitimate of government actors – namely those agencies who never once face democratic scrutiny by way of regular elections, and despite themselves in many cases – notably, the intelligence agencies – are founded upon dubious if not downright unconstitutional grounds. The historicity of their constitutionally doubtful (to put it mildly) origins – from which any good-faith legal argument must ultimately redound – is something that gets irretrievably lost in the legal grammar, which denotes the impossibly tangled rulemaking process from which these agencies repeatedly draw, and weaponize, to justify their continued existence.
And of course Donald Trump would come in — like Apollo, do you love it? — and get rid of the Civil Service system and its tedious rules and hire people loyal to him. That’s what the lunatic was planning on implementing at the beginning of a second term, had he been reelected.
The obvious problem with this is two fold: One, if there wasn’t the bedrock of the Civil Service system to keep some kind of order when Trump was in office the first time, the government might well have ground to a halt. Trump was so abysmally ignorant that neither he, nor his main man Jared Kushner, had any idea that they had to hire a lot of staffers when they came into the White House. They literally had no clue of the basics of how government works. And two, we are talking about many thousands of people who are career Civil Servants, people who have given their life to government service and they would just be out of a job.
So first Trump would eliminate the Civil Service and then of course it goes downhill from there. Here’s more from this article about the authoritarianism of Apollo Trump.
For the purposes of this discussion, the main focus would be the subordination of the administrative state to the Executive Branch – whose power is expressly “vested in a President of the United States of America.” That is to say, all executive power arrogates to one individual – namely, the President. If the President therefore cannot exercise power over one of his subordinates, that failure is in violation of the Constitution. If a conflict then obtains between a presidential prerogative and an administrative state official, that conflict must invariably yield to the President, bar none.
Well, there go not only the protections afforded to the civil servant but now we’re on due process violations grounds, as well. But look where this goes next.
This would be true under any circumstances, let alone for officials belonging to agencies that exercise illegitimate powers at their core. For example, the Department of Justice, while certainly operating well beyond its original mandate, nevertheless can trace its origins to one of the four original cabinet departments from the Washington administration. It therefore obtains a level of legitimacy – or, at least, a stronger argument can be made along those lines – that is absent in the National Security Council, for example, which was established shortly after the Second World War by shredding the Bill of Rights to enact a permanent security apparatus for waging endless wars, while eroding what remaining freedoms existed of citizens at home. And so marked the beginnings of the creeping totalitarianism that now has unleashed a surveillance state upon the world, stewarded by an illegitimate regime with an equally illegitimate “President,” that derives its authority by running roughshod over due process of law.
This is a lengthy article. I doubt if Trump understood very much of it but it “sounds smart” just like Jared Kushner used to sound smart to Trump’s ears and so for entertainment purposes, you might want to glance at it.
Every point that is made in this article leads back to the central theme of an all powerful presidency, i.e. authoritarianism. That’s where Trump and, apparently, the GOP want to go. He is once again their standard bearer.
If Trump does get the nomination, which so far he seems on track to do, then 2024 will become not about Biden v. Trump but rather about Democracy v. Authoritarianism. That was the case in 2020. Let’s hope democracy can hold the line, once again.
We haven’t ceded power to un-elected bureaucrats, we have ceded governance and management to them. The power still lies in our elected representatives who hire and employ these ‘un-elected’ employees for their knowledge, expertise, and experience, so that they can run the systems a 21st century technologically advanced DEMOCRACY needs to function properly. We need a country run by people who deal competently with the problems and challenges presented by the world, not a bunch of partisan hacks and yes-men who follow beliefs not anchored in reality.
This ‘manifesto’ is pure sophistry, lies and distortions and spin dressed as arguments and reason. If the edifice you build your arguments on has no foundation, your arguments are false, and are dis-ingenuous lies.
I couldn’t agree more. This is authoritarian drivel which I never would have bothered to read, but since Trump himself featured it and linked to it, I decided to check it out. Trump doesn’t want to be prez, he wants to be Big Brother.
Ummmm, I rather think he wants to be God!
Shooter was a movie. Not a great one but okay it had a few pretty good actors including Ned Beaty as a corrupt, way too powerful Senator who was the point person for dealings between a Trump type cabal in the govt. and a private “resource” that did terrible thing both here and abroad with no regard for the rule of law. Only their gaining ever more power and influence by getting around and/or ignoring what MAGAs would call the “deep state.” It winds up ending badly for them as Mark Wahlburg’s character does exactly what the Attorney General hinted he should do. Violent and disturbing? Yes. But even if it’s wrong to wish for such a thing to happen in real life (and it IS wrong) sometimes one wishes life could at least proverbially imitate art.
This movie shows exactly what needs to be done with all the fascists in our government!
I thoroughly believe that what Trump views as administrative state and power hungry bureaucrats are just people who have the integrity not to bend or break the rules to his satisfaction. In his mind, if a person doesn’t do his requests or do things his way, they must go.
The idiot who wrote all that drivel seems to forget that the members of the Cabinet are not “elected” people. They get their jobs SOLELY because the person in the White House selects them and then the Senate (not the PEOPLE) vote either to confirm or reject the nomination. If the person in the White House is a GOPer and the Senate has a GOP majority, that nomination is confirmed (unless there’s something about the nomination that REALLY troubles some of those senators); if the person in the White House is a GOPer and the Senate has a Democratic majority, the nomination will be rejected ONLY IF there is something horrifically objectionable. (With a Democrat in the White House, there’s a greater risk of rejection no matter who has the majority in the Senate except a Democratic Senate usually rejects due to policy differences and a GOP Senate usually accepts only if the nominee is really acceptable–such as the nominee has “conservative” credentials or is known to “buck” the party.) As we saw with the Trump cabinet (or should that be “cabinets,” given the surprisingly high turnover in Cabinet posts?), the nominee had little to no real experience in their being chosen for the post aside from being Trump suck-ups; most had been business executives who largely relied on “bureaucrats” to keep those businesses running. NONE of them were involved in the day-to-day hiring process that kept those businesses functioning. I’ll guarantee you (and the writer of that drivel) that Trump NEVER hired a single one of the maids who kept his hotels clean nor a single one of the greens keepers who kept his golf courses playable and looking nice for the players; he left THOSE decisions to “lesser” people (and Trump probably never hired most of THOSE people either).
I mean, I don’t really like putting it like that (government should NEVER really be compared to a business/corporation) but, when push comes to shove, that’s EXACTLY how you should think of those “bureaucrats”: As the folks on the assembly line who make the cars and planes and refrigerators; as the servers and cooks in a restaurant; as the concierges and maids in a hotel; as the grips and model makers and costumers and stunt people who make all those movies with little more than their name scrolling by in super-tiny print in the final credits.
If the writer of this drivel wants a return to the days when all those jobs went to party loyalists with no REAL understanding of the jobs they’re expected to do, it shows he also never studied history. When you’ve got people in jobs they got only because they’re loyal to the party, they ultimately become loyal only to themselves and make sure absolutely no one else ever learns how those jobs get done to ensure they keep them. So when those folks go on a vacation, the job basically falls apart because no one else really knows how to get even the most routine stuff done (usually, the best case scenario is that several people come in and manage to cobble something together to keep the job/department from complete collapse but there are always nitpicky details that get missed).
Simpler: Trumpies are stupid. completely devoid of critical thinking, emboldened by his racism.and misogyny allowing them.to be proud of their views as normal, and genuinely love him.for making ignorance,,aggression towards anyone who disagrees with them, and hatred acceptable.
Perfectly well said. And sadly, probably pretty true.