1 week Ago By Jen Garofalo
Donald Trump acts like there’s no tomorrow. How else to explain the fact that he’s willfully squandered the goodwill of at least some of the people who elected and then sustained him early in his second presidency? A recent poll – a Pew poll released last week – places Trump’s job approval at 40%. Back in January, shortly after taking office, the president was just above 50%, an astonishingly good number for someone who failed consistently during his first go-around in the White House to break through the majority polling threshold.
Some might say he’s been done in by his principled stands, for instance, in favor of tariffs that would, as administration officials are fond of saying, bring back U.S. factories and rejuvenate the American working class.
A good argument, except that President Trump has been all over the map on tariffs: one day they’re on, the next day they’re off. Moreover, his tariff-reasoning remains unclear. Are they revenue-raisers, workers’ game-changers, balance of trade ploys, or are they simply designed to bloody some international noses? Others may point to Trump’s seeming indifference to falling poll numbers by citing the fact that he is no longer compelled to seek public approval.
As a two-term president, why bother? Trump is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term? There is of course a darker explanation offered by either the most cynical or the most clear-eyed Trump critics: By means of some electoral mumbo-jumbo, by extra-legal proceedings, by the usurpation of the powers of both Congress and the courts, by the use of the military, and by sheer willpower and moxie, Trump intends to install himself in the White House more or less permanently. Last week, many in the punditry class were all in on the Trump the tyrant theme. Thomas L.
Friedman in the New York Times called the president “an impulsive strong man” and leader of what is fast becoming “a rogue state.” David A. Graham of The Atlantic declared, regarding a raft of administration measures, mostly engaging the Department of Justice in going after perceived foes, that for Trump political and legal “revenge isn’t just [an] .
.. adjunct to controlling the levers government.
” It’s the central point of the second Trump presidency. The staunchly conservative Wall Street Journal said Trump was deploying government power to silence critics and warn would-be whistleblowers to back off. In this regard, there are law firms in the presidential crosshairs as well as the two individuals targeted in a Trump memorandum for actions that vexed the president during his first term – the anonymous essayist, Miles Taylor, formerly of Homeland Security, and Chris Krebs, a government cyber-security expert who declared the 2020 was on the up-and-up.
The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last posited what it would mean for the Supreme Court to fail to meet the moment in cases involving the illegal deportation of foreign nationals with claims on Constitutional protections and due process of law. Not only would it spell the end of judicial oversight of congressional and executive Constitutional overreach, “it will mean we have created a de facto extra legal policy of imprisonment in a foreign gulag for enemies of the regime.” Foreign nationals today, anyone and everyone else tomorrow.
More than one scold took aim at the recent meeting in the Oval Office between the president and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, the self-proclaimed world’s “coolest dictator.” In front of the media, Trump pondered sending Americans convicted of violent crimes to overseas prisons. “If we can do that, that’s good,” he said.
He later told Fox News, “I call them homegrown criminals...
. We are looking into it, and want to do it. I would love to do that.
” “If they get people into a judicial blackhole, they win,” said Asha Rangappa of the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. In the most pointed criticism of the week, Rangappa, a former FBI agent, said, “What I saw between Trump and Bukele was a criminal conspiracy. It was an agreement to commit a crime.
It is a crime to deprive people of their rights under the Constitution or the laws of the United States.” “I expect [Trump] to invoke the Insurrection Act,” Rangappa said, thereby placing Army troops on American streets. Maybe the time will come for an American-style “Tiananmen Square moment,” she said in a dialogue with podcaster Ezra Klein.
Klein said, “If it’s not stopped now, it will get much worse.” Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.
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