For years now Democrats and Anti-Trump Republicans such as Bill Krystal have been screaming into the wind about how dangerous Donald Trump is to Democracy itself. We’ve said it so many times, there’s no one is listening anymore — we’ve become “Chicken Little” crying that the “Sky is Falling.”
Well, with Trump’s latest proclamation — the Sky just got a lot smaller.
He who saves his country does not violate any laws.
Say what now?
The law doesn’t apply to who? When?
It’s a flat-out bonkers statement. It’s dictator talk. Law Enforcement is supposed to just ignore a crime because — you meant well? Prosecutors are supposed to just drop the case? Judges are supposed to let you off with a warning?
He’s a convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual predator and adjudicated as a vicious unrepentant insurrectionist. And we knew all that before he was elected.
This is far worse than the sky falling in.
We can see that this has been Trump’s attitude for some time. He repeatedly says that the J6 Terrorists “Did nothing wrong.” He says “They were attacked by the Government!”
Yeah, ok, if they hadn’t used the bike racks and barricades as battering rams against the police in order to trespass on the grounds of the closed Capitol complex and assault the building — no one would have attacked anyone.
But it’s ok, they were “trying to save the Country” -— from a completely made-up fantastical plot to steal the election that not one of them was able to present a shred of evidence for.
More importantly, however, Trump has this attitude when it comes to the laws passed by Congress and he has it in regards of rulings against his actions made by the Judiciary. This is Dictator shit. It’s completely Totalitarian.
Never mind Hitler this is Stalin crap.
Every part of the government, including all Federal employees and Congress, have to swear fealty — to Trump. Every Leader in the Country from County Commission to Governor — has to obey Trump. Or else.
We can see the beginnings of this as he throws the AP out of the White House because they won’t use the ridiculous ‘Gulf of America” reference when literally the entire world still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Admittedly this is a petty example, but it’s illustrative. No dissent will be tolerated. No opposition will be allowed.
This is his mind-set. This is his perspective.
What’s even worse is that with this turn of phrase, Trump was paraphrasing Napolean.
The post came at the end of another tumultuous week early in Trump’s second presidency, during which acolytes questioned the legitimacy of judges making a succession of rulings to stall his administration’s aggressive seizure or dismantling of federal institutions and budgets.
His defiance of some of those orders, including one ordering a restoration of funding to bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, has led to several of the president’s opponents declaring a constitutional crisis.
“He is the most lawless president in US history,” Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, wrote on Wednesday in the Guardian.
“This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power ‘legitimately’, not the president.”
Trump laid out his position in the tweet posted on Saturday afternoon, after a round of golf at his Florida resort. The quote, as internet sleuths soon discovered, is a version of a phrase attributed to Napoleon “Celui qui sauve sa patrie ne viole aucune loi,” translated as: “who saves his country violates no law”.
Another version appeared in the 1970 movie Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as the dictator who rode roughshod over the French constitution to declare himself emperor and pursue world domination before his comeuppance at the pivotal 1815 battle from which the film’s title is derived.
It's also a quote that has been used by White Supremacist Mass Murderer Anders Brievik.
The text called for the deportation of all Muslims from Europe, and Breivik wrote that his main motive for the attacks was to publicize his manifesto. In it, he cites the purported Napoleon quote, "He who saves his country, violates no law," as justification for the attacks.
Just like he paraphrased Hitler with “Poisoning the blood of our Country.”
This was not a mistake. It was not an accident. It is quite intentional.
With Elon Musk and DOGE he is clearly on a rampage to dismantle and destroy the Government. He’s not making it “more efficient” he’s making it completely deficient. He’s making government non-functional.
If he were actually trying to improve the quality of our government, he wouldn’t have started by completely freezing all government contracts and foreign investment. He wouldn’t have begun by doing the most damage possible without any regard to the consequences. He wouldn’t have shut down cancer research for children, he wouldn’t have cut the staff of the NIH, the CDC, the FBI, the CFPB and USAID.
And they wouldn’t be lying about it.
There seems to be a split in Trumpworld these days. Some seem to think Trump can get away with anything, no matter how devastating it is to the most vulnerable or how corrupt an abuse of power it represents. Others seem aware that there are limits—that at some point, Trumpworld might push things too far and suffer a public backlash, and that this might actually matter.
A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”
The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”
This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at worst. As The New York Times reports, some senior USAID officials recently received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.
These are literally the people who keep us safe. Their job is to protect the American people from the threats of disease, corruption, crime and terrorism.
And this is where he started smashing things?
During the 90’s, Vice President Gore headed an effort to improve government efficiency called “Reinventing Government.” That project worked with the front-line employees to find deficiencies and problems, as part of the team they implemented fixes and corrections and then, through attrition, they reduced the Federal Workforce by nearly 10%. This resulted in savings which helped balance the budget in 1998. But they didn’t do this by reducing the capabilities of government — they did it by improving them. The first rule in this type of effort should be “Do no harm.”
On the other hand Trump, In the process, ignores that these entire agencies — like USAID — were established by Congress. They can only be dismantled and removed — by CONGRESS. The Executive branch doesn’t have the power to unilaterally undermine the law as passed by Congress.
Amherst College Political Science Professor Javier Corrales has spent his career studying the processes of democratization and autocratization in nations throughout Latin America — and he sees a very familiar and troubling pattern developing in the United States.
First, Corrales flags Trump's declaration over the weekend that "he who saves his country does not violate any law" as a classic justification used by dictators to amass unchecked power.
But it's not just rhetoric that has Corrales alarmed, as he also points to Trump's attempts to fire massive swathes of the civil service and to defund or abolish entire government agencies without any input from the United States Congress.
Added to this, writes Corrales, Trump has launched a campaign to "mobilize hate across society" by "encouraging people to develop intense hate of some out-group (illegal immigrants, trans folks, ethnic minorities, Hollywood celebrities, elite colleges, dissenters)."
Finally, he writes, Trump has embraced a plan to "defy the courts when they turn against you" and to "make sure you have a conflict with the court, so that you can counterattack them en bloc."
This is what he means by “does not violate laws” — because he doesn’t care what the law is. It doesn’t matter to him. The law is merely a weak suggestion to him. It’s a minor obstacle. A hurdle to stride over.
He doesn’t care that he is being blocked, restrained and enjoined by Judges all over the country. He and his lackeys think that those Judges are “wrong” and perhaps “corrupt” and that perhaps they should be impeached.
Feb 12 (Reuters) - Donald Trump and his supporters on Wednesday continued to ramp up their criticism of judges who they say have stymied the Republican U.S. president's second-term agenda, with billionaire ally Elon Musk calling for "an immediate wave of judicial impeachments."
Those statements came a day after federal courts forced U.S. agencies to
restore health-related websites taken down in response to one of Trump's executive orders and
declined to lift a judge's order barring the administration from freezing federal funding.
Those and other legal setbacks have prompted Trump, key members of his administration and Musk to
attack judges who have blocked major pieces of his agenda, in some cases arguing judges have no power to intrude on the president's authority.
Such comments have fueled concerns about whether the Trump administration would abide by court rulings. The American Bar Association on Tuesday condemned such comments, saying they presented "serious risks to our constitutional framework."
This is nightmare fuel. This is a five-alarm fire alert.
It’s not that he’s likely to actually have these judges removed by the Senate — it’s that he is gradually ramping up the campaign of harassment and persecution.
Today it’s the AP kicked off of Air Force One — tomorrow he’s hauling Judges up before MAGA Congressmen to be grilled on their decisions like Joe McCarthy going after Commies in the State Dept.
He doesn’t have to win the argument in court, he can just attack the judges and discredit them among his flock. Then as he loses his cases he whines, yet again, that he’s once more being “persecuted” by the mean Radical Left.
And much of his MAGA flock will stay with him — which is the true danger.
He didn’t return to the White House without supporters. There are many people — still — who support what he’s doing. They don’t care that he’s taking food out of the mouths of starving children, that he’s taking life-saving medicine away from people suffering from malaria and HIV, that he’s blocking refugees from war-torn nations from escaping. They simply don’t give a fuck.
We have to do everything we can to turn this around. We have to organize, we have to march, we have to contact our representatives, we have to RUN FOR OFFICE, we have to change the face of Congress.
Every crime he commits has to be highlighted and shouted to the rooftops.
Every time he messes over Farmers, every time he screws over American workers, every time he screws over contracts with American Businesses, each time he fucks with the FAA, FDC and EPA — we have to point it out. We have to remind the people who voted for all this -— is this really what you wanted?
Sure, you wanted to hurt immigrants, but did you want him to cancel the Asylum program and toss people who were invited by the TPS and refugee programs — people who have been the most vetted and least likely to commit any crimes — out of the country? Did you want to shut down food safety inspection? Did you want to let planes crash on the ground and in the air? Did you want to let corrupt corporations rip people off and incompetently pollute and destroy the environment? Is that the plan?
You wanted to save money, but do you realize what sending migrants to GITMO will cost?
President Donald Trump caught the Pentagon off guard when he announced late last month that he would be expanding the migrant holding facility at Guantánamo Bay to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” Since then, the administration has begun to shuttle immigrants from the United States to the base aboard military planes, post photos of them in shackles arriving at Guantánamo’s airstrip, and lock them away in a facility previously used to incarcerate war-on-terror detainees. Across the bay, Navy and Coast Guard forces have started erecting a tent city, presumably to hold thousands of other noncitizens the administration has promised to send to the base in the coming weeks.
While shipping immigrants from the United States to Guantánamo is new, using the base to detain migrants is not. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred asylum seekers who were held at the naval station during the 1990s. I’ve walked the exterior of the Migrant Operations Center and the Mass Migration Complex that are the subject of Trump’s order to expand detention capacity at the base. From what I can see, Trump’s proposal is a bet on no-oversight immigration detention and a branding campaign designed to make immigrants appear as threatening as the war-on-terror captives still held in Guantánamo’s prison complex. Despite the bluster with which the administration has rolled out the proposal, it’s a bet that’s not likely to pay off in the way the administration thinks it will.
To explain why this wager is reckless—even on Trump’s own cruel terms—let me begin with the base’s history as a site for detaining asylum seekers. The United States has held Haitians at Guantánamo on and off since the 1970s, though a formal policy of processing asylum seekers began only in 1991, and an early iteration of the Migrant Operations Center, the facility mentioned in Trump’s recent memorandum, has existed since 1996. No immigrants detained as part of civil removal proceedings, however, have ever been sent to Guantánamo from the United States. Still, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called Guantánamo “the perfect spot” for the new detention mission, he was leaning heavily on this history.
[...]
Given the budget-slashing measures that the administration has been ruthlessly and recklessly pursuing through the Department of Government Efficiency these past few weeks, one might wonder what the monetary cost of all this will be? After all, the prison complex for war-on-terror detainees at Guantánamo is one of the most expensive in the world, with a price tag per detainee of more than $10 million per year, more than 128 times the cost of holding a person in a maximum security prison in the United States.
Is that where you what you want your taxes to go?
Did you want them to gut Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security?
Did you want to lose your livelihood? Did you want to lose your home?
What do you think of the price of groceries? How’s inflation going?
I know it’s fun to laugh at these people. They “Fucked Around and Found Out.” “Leopard are eating their face.” Ok, alright, sure, it’s fun to gloat — but where does that really get us? What happens after we stop laughing? We need to ask them, “Ok, Trump screwed you --now what are you going to do about it?”
He’s still in power. He’s still in control.
If we’re going to change things, we’re going to need these people to do more than feel sorry for themselves. We have to turn them from laughing stocks, into assets and allies. We need them to act, we need them to stand up, we need them to Fight Back.
We don’t have to agree with them about practically anything — all they have to know is that Trump is deadly dangerous. All they have to do is fight back against his agenda, vote down his acolytes — remove them from power — throw them the fuck out of office.
Flip the House. Flip the Senate. Hold him accountable. Stop him.
That’s all that matters. That’s all we should be focused on.
Everything else is a distraction.
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