Whatever happened to Romney Republicans?

I’ve got some bad news for you on Geert Wilders.
After Mark Rutte stepped down as Prime Minister and leader of the mainstream conservatives in order to fulfill his dream of sucking up to Trump as secretary general of NATO, his successor decided to campaign on being mean to asylum seekers and other immigrants.

Wilders party got to be the largest in the election because voters who were into being mean etc. Preferred the real deal over Ersatz.

One year later, the new government (with Wilders party as the largest coalition partner) has crashed, delivering nothing.

Unfortunately, it seems that Rutte’s successor is once again trying to out-culture warrior Wilders, this time by dunking on pro-Palestine protesters and trying to outflank the (pro-greater Israel) Wilders.

Chances are Wilders will only lose a few seats. The mainstream conservatives are really, really bad at politics when they have to punch to the right in order to win.

To top it off with a Badenoch-like twist, Rutte’s successor is herself an asylum seeker. Her family are Kurds who came to the Netherlands from Turkey when she was 6 or 7.

It’s all very depressing.

I don’t understand why people keep assuming right-wingers are low information or uneducated voters. Romney and his voters have always been like Trump. They just thought it was gauche, or they had felt comfortable saying what they really believed and valued. These people are adults who are choosing who to be. There is the impression conservatives are uneducated and marginalized when their base has been local gentry, upper classes and just people of all races, education, income who are reactionary. In the US the conservative leadership who portray themselves as know nothings are all highly educated with post graduate degrees from the ivies. I think over the past 30 years, at least, there’s been so much discussion about understanding why people turn conservative or fascist. Republicans voted for a republican and a dog bites a man.

There is not too much we on the left can do about this, except to encourage centre-right supporters to punish conservative parties when they line up with fascists. Any other suggestions are welcome.

One thing that centre left parties can do is to continue to attack the far Right – and specifically to attack it from the left. This, admittedly, is a high-risk strategy: while it may drive votes away from the far Right, it is likely to drive them into the arms of the centre-right, who will also be making hay out of the centre-left’s revelation of its “radical”, “sectarian” nature. The alternative, however, is to turn a blind eye to the far Right, in the hope of profiting from the inroads it makes into the centre-right’s voter coalition, and we have seen how that ends.

We have seen how that ends, in fact, quite recently. During the July 2024 election campaign, the current British Labour Party leadership limited its attacks on Reform UK to a few joking or dismissive remarks,, concentrating its fire on the Conservatives. To make matters worse, Labour’s attacks on the Conservatives were generally coached either in terms of “competence” and “delivery” or in terms of the Conservatives’ own politics – which is to say, they were attacks from the right.

In the short term this strategy amply paid off: rather than draining back to the Conservative Party once the election had been called, Reform UK’s support grew from 11% to 14% during the campaign, ending by splitting the broad right vote so thoroughly that Labour won a landslide majority on little more than a third of votes cast. Sadly history – even psephological history – doesn’t stop the day after an election: over the next year support for Reform UK went right on growing, peaking at 30%. Support for the Conservatives was flatlining at 23% through the election campaign, and it’s been flatlining ever since.

The OP is about the centre-right, not the centre-left, but I think it’s important to remember that the left and right poles of mainstream politics support each other, and to an extent define, even constitute each other. If the centre-left, for whatever reason, legitimates the far Right – even for purely opportunistic reasons – that will have knock-on effects on the centre-right and the whole political spectrum. So, guys, don’t do that, OK?

But what can the Left – those leftists who aren’t running a major political party – do about it? The trouble is, there is a substantial current within the centre-Left which defines itself primarily against the Left (or, as they see it, the ‘extreme Left’, ‘the Trots’). Although its political programme is vague and undefined, their position is just as dogmatically ideological as any Leftist’s: their answer to any challenge or novel situation is for the party to move Right – and if it doesn’t work, that just shows that the party needs to try harder and move further Right. I don’t know about Australian or US politics (I’ve never been entirely sure what the Democratic Party is, outside an election year), but I do know that that current is in charge of the British Labour Party at the moment, meaning that there’s little hope of the leadership drawing any real lessons from its recent experience. What can the Left do? I’m not sure, but a first step is to see the situation clearly.

Remember Romney’s comment about the 47% takers? The Romney Republicans never viewed anyone who’s not wealthy as worthy of any assistance and if you look at OBBBB. you see the natural successor of Romney’s position.

Even the rural voters who support Trump are often pretty well off.

A lot of Trump’s support is based on pure greed, without any regard for even the moderate proximate future.

It seems clear that in most, if not all, cases, the fascist Right have been using immigration and xenophobia as the thin edge of the wedge, and then expanding from there. Global warming (more palatably referred to as ‘climate change’) is going to make that far easier and more widespread as the equatorial zones become increasingly uninhabitable and masses of humanity try to move outward (mostly northward, given the distribution of landmass on the planet). When that happens, expect fascism to expand to just about everywhere, as northern populations resort to increasingly lethal means to deny entry to refugees.

It really is pretty much over, I think.

@4
+1
In her own inimitable style, I think nastywoman has pretty well nailed it.

” they have come to hate ‘the woke’ even more – and just don’t take that too seriously or as least not as seriously as Trump who actually FIRST – or always wanted to run as a Democrat – and only after the Democrats rejected him for being blackballed by every serious golf club – and a very funny and GREAT US President made a lot of fun of him (-‘and that’s what keeps me up at night’)”

Its revisionist history at this point, but the republicans wasted the potential of a Romney candidacy by running him in 2008 (hey, lets run a private equity robber barron in the teeth of the global financial crisis, that will surely work). Because of that failure, the party was ripe for a big step-right which as it turned out resulted in Trump I.

The well documented failure of the Democrats to not force Biden to step down and hold a proper primary that would have produced a candidate named “anyone not Harris or Biden” was what produced Trump II….and so here we are.

In Denmark it seems the operation by the Social Democrats to out-xenophobe the xenophobic right has succeeded, at least in political and power seizing/keeping terms.

PM Mette Frederiksen of the Social Democrats leads her second government since first appointed in 2019, and the right side (nominally) of the political spectrum is in severe disarray having been splintered into 6-7-8 parties none of which is claiming more than 10% of the vote.

The previously highly powerful right-populist DPP in particular has been shattered into a shadow of its former self. This is largely achieved by appropriating its policies wholesale though. But it looks to me Starmer is attempting something similar, only less successfully. Maybe less credibly?

engels 8:

“Most everyone other than apologists and professional contrarians would agree at this point that President Trump aims to make the United States a personalist autocracy, where his whims are policy and his will is law.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/opinion/trump-miller-immigration-ice.html

“Trump Wants to Be a Strongman, but He’s Actually a Weak Man”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/11/opinion/trump-los-angeles-ice-strongman.html

“More than a constitutional crisis, this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html

Why is it so hard to understand that several things can be true at the same time: Trump can be a fascist (Bouie talks of autocracy and tyranny; whether he would endorse the label fascism I don’t know but the NYT certainly wouldn’t allow it printed) and also share some of the economic goals of the traditional Right; Trump can be an unprecedented constitutional crisis and also draw on ur-American ideological and political traditions. These are not mutually exclusive. And similar things can be said about Hitler and Mussolini. Only the historically illiterate can deny this.

My family moved from Saskatchewan to Houston in 1959, where we encountered, among other things, segregated bathrooms, and the infinite variety of racial slurs that were common back then.

Since then, I’ve watched voters in the US elect Nixon a second time, Reagan a second time, Bush II a second time, and Trump a second time, not to mention last Democratic president wax nostalgic about his segregationist pals in the Senate, and the Democratic presidential candidate from the election before talk about “superpredators,” in support of a frankly racist and stupid crime bill.

I’m going to go with this one: “Or has he simply allowed them to reveal themselves (or at least their worst selves) as the racists and fascists they always were?”

I think expecting center right folk in the US to exert themselves to punish fascism and racism is delusional. They haven’t done it yet.

I’m with Engels at 10, assuming we can do anything more than hunker down and try to protect people more vulnerable than we are at the moment.

Face It. Trump Is a Normie Republican

Of course, there are two possible interpretations here: a) Trump is a normie Republican, and therefore is not an extremist, or b) Trump is a normie Republican, and therefore is an extremist – faites ce que vous voulez..

The ironclad determination of political analysts of america to pretend the iraq war didn’t exist continues. romney was a brutal white supremacist fascist just as much as trump – he had to be in order to be in the republican party in 2008 and take the position that the iraq war was right, was just about to succeed wildly, the wmds were about to be discovered, and after a quick second invasion, this time of iran, the american flag was about to be flown over the whole middle east (skipping of course our pro-democracy saudi royal family pals and their bonesaws of course.) enough of america had turned away from the roaring, screaming, open hatred of arabs that “barack HUSSEIN obama” could win. I guess the downside of his winning is it allowed analysts to pretend the roaring, shrieking constituency for open, vicious racism didn’t exist for a few years. but i was there. i remember.

Over the last decade most congressional Republicans inclined to oppose Trump in any way have effectively been driven out of the party and some of them have had impeccable wingnut credentials, like Thom Tillis of North Carolina who has just announced he will not run for re-election.

@11: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is said to have had something of an epiphany on her deathbed as to the damage she had done by failing to resign strategically when it was still possible, but Biden’s lack of self-awareness will allow him to go to his grave thinking the party done him wrong, instead of acting too late.

ETB @19: “Of course there are two possible interpretations here”

Indeed. At the same time, the op-ed itself seems clear about which side Bouie himself lands on:

Yes, you can attribute some of the worst of this administration to the specific authoritarian vision of Trump and his allies. But a good deal of what we have seen — and what we will see — is simply what happens when you elect a Republican to the White House.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and point out that Romney did not campaign on “dark-skinned immigrants are eating white Americans’ dogs and cats” when he ran against Obama in 2012. If people around here think there’s no difference between the dog whistle racism of pre-Trump Republicans and a campaign consisting of nothing other than wall to wall fascist propaganda right up to the promise of systematic ethnic cleansing, then I’m gonna have to disagree. Because, you know, history. Fascist rhetoric always leads to fascist violence. The project of ethnic cleansing is being realized right now by a lawless fascist paramilitary that has just been given a budget exceeding that of most armies. I do think that matters.

And if you think pointing out the above lets the pre-Trump Republicans who made Trump possible off the hook, then again I’m gonna have to disagree.

Long Island is a slightly non-representative suburb to be focusing on. Look at the shifts in vote over the past three presidential cycles: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/politics/presidential-election-2024-red-shift.html

Most places shifted right in 2024, but the New York City area more so than anywhere else.(Notably, the Atlanta and Charlotte suburbs actually shifted left in 2024, as did a few places in the Dallas suburbs.) In 2020, most places shifted left, but New York and its suburbs were one of the few right-shifting areas (along with most of Ohio, Arkansas, Iowa, Mormon country, and the Rio Grande valley). In 2016, most places also shifted right, but suburban Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia all shifted left, as did most of California – and interestingly, the Connecticut suburbs of New York.

Comparig why Long Island has been shifting right in all three elections, while the Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Charlotte suburbs (as well as the Connecticut suburbs of New York!) have been shifting left during the same period, is going to be much more interesting than just treating Long Island as though it is representative of all of the shifts nationwide.

“There is not too much we on the left can do about this, except to encourage centre-right supporters to punish conservative parties when they line up with fascists. Any other suggestions are welcome.”

If I understand correctly, in may countries now there is a bit of a generation gap in politics where the older voters are more attached to the established parties and kind of the ‘normal’ way of doing things. The younger voters, who are very distrustful of politics are moving towards newer parties like the greens or liberals or also the far right. As a result, party systems are changing in a number of places.

I think the left can try to attract the more distrustful voters. I don’t think the group of distrustful voters is monolithic, some actually do lean far right and would be hard to convince, but some lean in other directions. I think there is a potential future in trying to engage these people and get them more involved in democracy. The far right dominates attention right now because it is flashy and because no one else seems to have a particular vision of the future. But maybe a left wing that focuses more on democracy and what citizen participation in governance could mean would be a fresh take. There are so many problems/issues that the far right doesn’t have a clue about and making any of those salient could take some wind from their sails.

But I’m also a bit clueless too.

Whatever happened to Romney Republicans? Have they changed, or just become their worst selves?

Being in the arguably fortunate position of observing the ongoing tire-fire from a distance, I wouldn’t like to say.

However, if I may be so bold as to venture an opinion on the UK: our ruling class has always being filled with a good number of people who comfortable with systems of great oppression and exploitation, providing it keeps them in comfort and Nice Things. What has largely changed, I think, are the boundaries of acceptable cruelty without plausible deniability have expanded – and while not exactly a shock (once one has accepted that certain people are undeserving of a place to live, medicine to survive, or even food to eat, then what else might one accept as being privileges to be denied to the unworthy?) I doubt it has been spontaneous. Were I to hazard a guess, it would be that this has been largely a result of a mixture of (a) the centre to right wing ecosphere continually pushing a reactionary agenda, or at least opposing non-reactionary agendas; (b) the ruling class circling the wagons (one of the few unforgivable sins an Important Person can commit is inconveniencing their class, which is punished both quickly and mercilessly); (c) the Important People cooking their brains on social media – for all the trees which have died to further questions of Are The Kids Addicted To Their Medias, I think whatever problems – if any – cause by teenagers spending time on Twitter pale into insignificance to those cause by what happens when the ruling class have to interact with the hoi polio in a forum where they can’t control the narrative (the speed of descent into radicalisation which occurs when one of the pig people talks back to their betters has to be seen to be believed); (d) the media engaging in no-hold-barred non-stop scream fest the second anyone proposes a policy which isn’t either stomping on underclass or shovelling wealth into the trousers of the elite; and (e) that as we now enter the stage of capitalism which involves the snake eating its tail, crackdowns and tightening the screws are the only real ways forward which can still maintain (at least for a little while longer) the status quo – and so it is a case of masks and gloves off, time to turn the heat up on the class war. And even the people who don’t actively support this general direction will tend to go along with it – after all, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’.

While the US is not the UK, it may be that there are some parallels to draw?

Long Island (that is, the heart of the place, the “Lawn Guyland” part of Long Island) is a special case. As any Manhattanite can tell you, Long Islanders are not “like most New Yorkers”. Both Trumps, Fred and Donald were “from” out there on the Island, in the deepest sense of the term. Long Island will forever remain his spiritual home, even in Palm Beach, and that was reason enough for the vote.

And, if you were to believe Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind …

… then there might be something wrong with you.

“Do you expect Dilan Ye?ilgöz to lead the government formed after the election in October? Which parties do you expect to make up that government?”

Ye?ilgöz is bashing the center-left as “too left” (which it is not). She’s not bashing Wilders but has refused to enter into another coalition with Wilders.

I expect it to be near impossible to form a new government after the next elections. The easy way (center-left + center + center-right) is now being undermined by Ye?ilgöz. The center parties (left-liberals and christian-democrats) won’t do business with the looney right (either Wilders or one of the others).

It’s going to be a mess.

Ropber 30: “It might be worth considering the extent to which far-right media groups and their billionaire owners drive elite conversations in Europe – certainly in Germany and France, the countries with which I’m most familiar. I get the sense that to varying degrees, media and political elites in these countries either welcome Trump II as an inspiration for future political action”

Exactly. A large fraction of the elites are on board with and even admire Trump. The media discourse often focuses on low income people voting for Trump, which is backward. A much larger fraction of the upper than of the lower class are supporting fascism, both in US and Europe, and they matter more because they control the media and other levers of power.

Another observation: Especially the left wing discourse seems to oscillate between “Trumpism is a break with neoliberalism” and “Trumpism is just ordinary Republican/rightwing politics”. We have seen enough of this here on CT. Which is it, friends? It seems to me both of these wrong takes are just a way to avoid having to acknowledge that yes, it is fascism.

Shoutout to LFC 36.

Looking a few more decades ahead, instead of only to the next election: what NomadUK wrote at 9. I really don’t see any other outcome now given billionaire ownership of the media and the absence of a left with any degree of mass basis and vision for the future.

mw @42
Yes, the SCOTUS decision is a preliminary one, but staying the injunction means in practice that the admin is allowed to create “facts on the ground.” Once an agency has been slashed and its workforce halved (or whatever), the admin may simply refuse to unwind that even if eventually, at the end of the litigation, it is told to do so. I read the SCOTUS order and I understand the position, including Sotomayor’s concurrence, but I don’t find it persuasive. The order says the particular restructuring plans are not before SCOTUS. True. But by the time the particular restructuring plans are litigated to conclusion it may be too late.

It’s vital to realize, as I’m sure you do, that courts don’t have armies to enforce their orders. Lower courts have the contempt power, which they have been reluctant so far to exercise. The SCOTUS has its perceived “legitimacy” as final arbiter. That’s it. An admin that wants to act illegally can often get away w it. Case in point: abolition of USAID. Illegal but a fait accompli.

Also, the “consistent with applicable law” language in the Trump executive orders is boilerplate, and it doesn’t mean a thing.

In skimming through Jackson’s dissent, I see she called the SCOTUS order “hubristic and senseless.” They reversed a district court preliminary injunction, but as Jackson points out, the district court made detailed findings of fact, as trial courts often do. A district ct judge is better positioned to know what it actually going on “on the ground” than SCOTUS. District ct judges aren’t infallible, but neither is SCOTUS.

Finally, your characterization of the “unitary executive” theory ignores the role of Congress in setting up some exec agencies and overseeing them and allocating money for them. The idea that the exec can just do whatever it wants w fed agencies ignores the congressional role. Your characterization of the debate as being betw. exec power and a supposed “fourth branch” is therefore inaccurate, IMO, because it ignores Congress’s role.

ETB, my apologies: “rants” was the wrong word. “Obsessive personal attacks based on fabrications and liberal stereotypes about the far left” would have been fairer.

Pat and Mr: thank you.

I call people racists, fascists, and Nazis. Why won’t they join my club?

I don’t want racists, fascists, or Nazis in my club. I suppose that leads to a bit of a problem. Oh, well.

I expect it to be near impossible to form a new government after the next elections. The easy way (center-left + center + center-right) is now being undermined by Ye?ilgöz. The center parties (left-liberals and christian-democrats) won’t do business with the looney right (either Wilders or one of the others).

It’s going to be a mess.

If the election result makes it impossible to form a government, that will be bad. But it won’t be as bad as an election which gives a majority in the Tweede Kamer to a combination of (for example) PVV, VVD, JA21, FvD and BBB.

My guess would be that if there’s an election result which gives a majority in the Tweede Kamer to (for example) a combination of GL-PvdA, VVD, CDA and D66 then (after the usual long and agonising negotiations) they’ll find a way to stitch together a government, even if a change of VVD leader is the precondition.

But I don’t know what the election result will be. I can see what the opinion polls are saying, but this far out they’re an unreliable guide, and every other basis for prediction is even less reliable.

It is discouraging to see the direction Dutch politics is moving. They might yet end up somewhere like where the US is–but they haven’t so far and they still might not.

‘Trump is like FDR’

that was one of the funniest comments on CT for a long time…

Mw: „ the courts can’t simply assume that the administration is lying about this.“

If Trump and other cabinet members publicly contradict the claims made by their lawyers in court, and publicly state their illegal and unconstitutional plans and intentions, surely the courts can conclude that somebody is lying.

“Trump is like FDR in doing a lot of unprecedented”

This is extremely bad faith bullshit. FDR was a democrat who respected the law and the constitution and Trump is a fascist destroying the democratic constitutional order. Folks it should have been obvious from the beginning that this poster is a bad faith Trumpist apologist.

JQ and Steven @ 53 and 54.

I notice neither of you address imprisoning Debs for opposing the WW1 drafts, the forcible sterilization of Carrie Buck (along with countless others), and setting up concentration camps for American citizens. All of which were approved by the Supreme Courts of the day. Along with majorities of the general public. If the constitutional system can survive and recover from those outages, why not Trump?

FDR was a democrat who respected the law and the constitution.

Oh, ffs. He became president for life (still constitutional then but a major norm violation). He threatened to pack the Supreme Court if it did not rule his way, and the court rolled over (the switch in time that saved nine). The eugenic sterilization was during his rule, as, obviously, were the camps for American citizens of Japanese descent. And that’s hardly the full list. Like Trump, he was a bully who expected people to bend to his will and pushed the legal envelope in many ways.

Yeah, he successfully led his country through WWII – but so did Stalin.

mw @59
I have a considerably more favorable view, on balance, of FDR than you do (while not approving of everything he did), but I don’t want to get into a debate about that. I would note however that the date of Buck v. Bell is 1927, so it predates FDR’s presidency.

without a border protected, you don’t have a nation

Bad news for the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, not to mention the 29 nations of the Schengen area.

I wouldn’t take advice on how to win elections from John Kerry but maybe clearly opposing genocide might have helped?

Bad news for the nations of England, Scotland, Wales, not to mention the 29 nations of the Schengen area.

Yes. Yes, it is. Glad we’ve got something to passionately agree on after all.

An observation that seems relevant to the question to what extent Trump’s fascism is just a symptom rather than a cause of the general depravity of the Republican Party:

Many of the lower court judges who have been working hard to defend constitutional governance against Trump’s lawlessness were actually nominated by Republican presidents – some even by Trump himself.

“This order, it stands, would address the worst aspect of the potential results of the Court determining that American federal courts are limited in these cases to the powers of “impotent English tribunals” — the creation of stateless orphans, a particularly severe human rights violation. Alas, I would expect John Roberts’s shadow docket to quickly offer Trump another get-out-of-law-free card in relatively short order.

Incidentally, Laplante is another one of the known Trotskyists put on the federal judiciary by George W. Bush. Trump is largely a symptom rather than a cause of the current state of the Republican Party, but not entirely — birthright citizenship becoming a source of legal controversy really is a Trump-driven thing.”

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/making-the-14th-amendment-law-again-for-now

“Trump is just like FDR”

“Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/07/usaid-emergency-food-incinerate-trump/683532/?gift=hVZeG3M9DnxL4CekrWGK34UoPtkCxvKSW-rp40Qt1-Q

“President Donald Trump’s move to cut most of the US funding towards foreign humanitarian aid could cause more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2jjpm7zv8o

We are still not equipped to mentally process the magnitude of Trumpist depravity. Trump’s policies and goals are intentionally directed to mass immiseration and starvation, inspired by the mass murderers of the 20th century. Food desperately needed by starving people is intentionally destroyed not because they are incompetent managers but because the cruelty is the point and killing dark-skinned people is the whole point of white supremacy. They are going to kill millions not just abroad but in the US as well, by destroying the welfare state, denying health care to millions of poor Americans, destroying medical research, making vaccinations unaccessible if not outright illegal, making medical treatment for miscarriage a crime so more women will die (already happening), nullifying legal labor protections and environmental regulations, systematically dismantling every government agency – mandated by Congress – that might provide some protection or benefit to Americans.

All of these measures are illegal (aided and abettet by the lawless Supremes). And none of them would have been possible in that radicality without Trump making fascism the mainstream position of the Republican party.

TM – regarding mass starvation – simply destroying the agricultural in the US by repatriating a good proportion of the workers will do a lot of the work. The autumn in the US will see massive food inflation (unless you are prepared to eat nothing but grain).

political football @ 68

here is exploring new frontiers of whataboutism, comparing the United States today to the country of 100 or 200 years ago as though national disgraces of the past somehow mitigate the current government’s behavior.

No, there is no question of mitigation. The question is — are the ills of the Trump era so unprecedented that they threaten the constitutional order as never before? Putting aside the civil war — and just looking at the 20th century, I say the answer is a clear, “No”. Things have been worse — some of it still within living memory (I don’t believe the last Japanese-American internees of the concentration camps have yet died). That doesn’t mean, ‘relax, it’s all good’, it only means (to me) that we have very good reason to remain confident that today’s problems are ultimately fixable within the system.

TM @69. Trump is obviously unlike FDR in many policy details. In fact, you might argue that Trump is kind of a bookend to FDR, trying to finally kill off as much of the remaining legacy of the New Deal as possible. The similarities have to do with the ways they wield power to try to achieve their goals — each ignoring long-standing norms and each pushing the envelope on the constitutionality of their acts.

@Tom P 74
Mwahahaha! All your base are belong to us!

and the NYT just said it all:
For Trump, Domestic Adversaries Are Not Just Wrong, They Are ‘Evil’
The president’s vilification of political opponents and journalists seeds the ground for threats of prosecution, imprisonment and deportation unlike any modern president has made.When the Pentagon decided not to send anyone to this week’s Aspen Security Forum, an annual bipartisan gathering of national security professionals in the Colorado mountains, President Trump’s appointees explained that they would not participate in discussions with people who subscribe to the “evil of globalism.”

After all the evils that the U.S. military has fought, this may be the first time in its history that it has put globalization on its enemies list. But it is simply following the example of Mr. Trump. Last week, he denounced a reporter as a “very evil person” for asking a question he did not like. This week, he declared that Democrats are “an evil group of people.”

“Evil” is a word getting a lot of airtime in the second Trump term. It is not enough anymore to dislike a journalistic inquiry or disagree with an opposing philosophy. Anyone viewed as critical of the president or insufficiently deferential is wicked. The Trump administration’s efforts to achieve its policy goals are not just an exercise in governance but a holy mission against forces of darkness.

The characterization seeds the ground to justify all sorts of actions that would normally be considered extreme or out of bounds. If Mr. Trump’s adversaries are not just rivals but villains, then he can rationalize going further than any president has in modern times. Last month, he told a cabinet secretary to consider throwing her Biden administration predecessor in prison because of his immigration policy. Last weekend, Mr. Trump said he might strip Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship for the crime of criticizing him.in returning to power, Mr. Trump has been more focused on rooting out the “enemy from within,” as he put it during last year’s campaign. He has devoted enormous energy in his second term to prosecuting perceived enemies, purging career officials deemed disloyal and destroying what he calls “the deep state” that he believes thwarted his policies last time and then persecuted him through criminal prosecutions after he left office….
During the first six months of his first term in 2017, according to a search of the Factbase compendium of his speeches, Mr. Trump regularly used the word “evil” to describe terrorists, Nazis and bigots, much as other presidents might have, as well as immigrants. He used it in a domestic political context only once, when complaining about news coverage. In the nearly six months of his second term, he has used it 11 times to describe Democrats or journalists.
Mr. Trump has said that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “an evil guy who wasn’t very smart” and ran a “very evil regime” surrounded by advisers and prosecutors who were also “so bad and so evil, so corrupt.”

“I knew that running was very dangerous, because I knew how evil these people were,” Mr. Trump said of Democrats on May 12, during an interview on Air Force One with Sean Hannity of Fox News. “I knew how they cheat, they steal, they lie. They’re a horrible group of people.”

and that’s REALLY NOT FUNNY anymore!

Tm @69 “We are still not equipped to mentally process the magnitude of Trumpist depravity.”

Imagining the (repugnant) unimaginable – for normies, law abiding ethical empathic humans with a positive disposition – is very hard. For fence sitters or bothsiders or apologists, and time will heelers, imagining the effects of a President of Impunity is even harder.

“Today it’s a social media app; tomorrow it could be any number of sanctions, trade, or immigration provisions that a president unilaterally decides to ignore based on some generic assertion of foreign affairs authority.” [2]
~ Alan Z. Rozenshtein

Via…
“Abnegation of Powers – Part 1”
POSTED ON WEDNESDAY, JUL 16, 2025 5:00AM BY CHARLES SIEGEL
…
“As Trump’s efforts toward tyranny move ahead with ever-greater speed, those checks and balances feel very creaky these days.

“Why do we care?  What “balance” is to be preserved? “Separation of powers” is a defining concept of our government. But the phrase itself does not appear in the Constitution. What does it mean?
…
“There is no official answer, of course. But Congress has provided a definition: at its direction, every ten years the Library of Congress publishes the “Constitution Annotated,” a “comprehensive, government-sanctioned record of the interpretations of the Constitution” that appears on Congress’ website. According to the Librarian of Congress, then, “separation of powers” is a “well-known concept derived from the text and structure of the Constitution. The Framers’ experience with the British monarchy informed their belief that concentrating distinct governmental powers in a single entity would subject the nation’s people to arbitrary and oppressive government action. Thus, in order to preserve individual liberty, the Framers sought to ensure that a separate and independent branch of the Federal Government would exercise each of government’s three basic functions: legislative, executive and judicial.” The Constitution sets those powers out in Articles I, II and III respectively.

“The Constitution Annotated also quotes James Madison’s statement in the Federalist Papers (no. 48) that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointment, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”  Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a prominent liberal legal scholar and currently the Dean of the U.C. Berkeley Law School, wrote in the first paragraph of the first edition of his treatise on constitutional law that “the division of powers among the branches was designed to create a system of checks and balances and lessen the possibility of tyrannical rule.”

“The Supreme Court, of course, has had plenty to say about separation of powers over the years.
…
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/07/abnegation-of-powers-part-1.html#more-283210

[2]
“The Government’s Astonishing Constitutional Claims on TikTok”

Alan Z. Rozenshtein
Thursday, July 3, 2025, 6:25 PM

“The Justice Department is advancing a radical theory of presidential power, nullifying Congress’s foreign affairs powers whenever the president finds them inconvenient.
…
“Let’s be clear: The executive branch is asserting that if a president determines that a duly enacted statute is inconvenient for the conduct of foreign affairs—and that’s assuming this is about a good-faith view of foreign policy, and not, say, the financial interests of a major campaign donor with a massive stake in TikTok’s parent company—
( https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/jeff-yass-billionaire-donor-investments-tiktoks-parent-company-rcna142531 )
” – he can simply set it aside. This interpretation effectively creates a foreign-affairs exception to the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

“This argument conveniently ignores that Congress has its own significant, constitutionally enumerated powers in the realm of foreign affairs. The authority to enact PAFACAA falls squarely within Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” a core legislative function under Article I. The logic of Bondi’s letters suggests that this power exists only at the sufferance of the president. Whenever a president finds a congressional commercial regulation to be an obstacle to his foreign policy goals, he can, by this reasoning, simply ignore it. Today it’s a social media app; tomorrow it could be any number of sanctions, trade, or immigration provisions that a president unilaterally decides to ignore based on some generic assertion of foreign affairs authority.
…
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-government-s-astonishing-constitutional-claims-on-tiktok

P.S. FDR used every dirty trick in the vagaries of The Constitution, Laws, Policy, politics etc. predomiately after Pearl Harbour. Hint.
FDR also came up with “United Nations”.
FDTrump? Old deals and conflicts of my interests … and skim crypto.

FDT? I’ll leave readers to fill in the FD.

Q: What is the opportinity cost re Trump?
“For economists, the right way to think is in terms of ‘opportunity cost’, which can be defined as follows: The opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up so that you can have it. So how should we think about the opportunity cost of CO2 emissions? [Trump regime]
…
https://aeon.co/ideas/opportunity-costs-can-carbon-taxing-become-a-positive-sum-game

Because “No tolerance for lies” takes precedence over “Don’t feed the troll”, I feel obligated to repeat that mw’s claim about FDR disrespecting law and constitution is pure Trumpist propaganda. FDR promoted his agenda the constitutional way, by getting Congress to pass laws and authorize government agencies – while Trump is illegally dismantling agencies mandated by law. It’s rich that the the only actual example given of FDR allegedly violating “norms” (not a single example of him violating the law was offered) was his running for reelection in 1940, which was perfectly legal at the time, while Trump illegally announcing another run in 2028 is clearly unconstitutional. While J-D is of course right that the purpose of presidential action matters, the legality also matters because without the rule of law, we’re all (including us outside the US) at the whims of a psychopathic dictator. So let’s get the facts straight.

“The constitution is a liberal, enlightenment era document such that I think would never be produced today if we started from scratch given today’s politics.”

I would say that mw has 3/5 of a good point here…..

I would say that mw has 3/5 of a good point here…..

As to whether the US Constitution is fundamentally a pro-slavery document, I can’t
possibly improve on the arguments of Frederick Douglass.

Have I got this right? No true US Constitution would permit human slavery, so any slavery that happened was not a function of the Constitution. The US Constitution cannot fail, it can only be failed. If the Constitution leads to something despicable, then it’s not the real Constitution. By definition.

mw@85: It is perfectly appropriate to say, as Douglass does, that the ideals of the Constitution — as defined by Douglass — should be honored. But the Constitution did not overturn slavery — soldiers did that. Even as amended, the Constitution permitted a hundred years of Jim Crow — not Douglass’s version of the Constitution, to be sure, but the one that existed in the real world.

It’s fine for Douglass to read the Constitution in an aspirational fashion, but it’s ignorant to suggest that this reading, rather than the reading of history itself, is the one that governs.

As to whether the US Constitution is fundamentally a pro-slavery document, I can’t possibly improve on the arguments of Frederick Douglass.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America included this text:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

That’s the kind of text you find in a Constitution which licenses slavery. There’s no text like that in the Constitution of the United States of America.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution includes this text:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

That’s the kind of text you find in a Constitution which prohibits slavery. There was no text like that in the original Constitution of the United States of America.

So the original text of the Constitution of the USA neither explicitly licensed slavery nor explicitly prohibited slavery. The text of the document, read in isolation, wasn’t pro-slavery (nor was it anti-slavery). But is it sense only to look at the text of a document in isolation and to pay no attention to its effects? Words are tools. If you want to evaluate a tool, you can’t just look at it, you need to find out what happens when somebody tries to use it.

The weaknesses of the US Constitution, do not particularly relate to slavery. A lot of the problems relate indirectly to slavery in the way it concentrated a lot of the power in the States in order to protect slavery. The Senate is possibly the least democratic institution in the Western world, excepting the House of Lords (which has less power).

Douglass argued that the US Constitution, in the hands of abolition politics, was well-suited to stop slavery, and I think secessionists had the same thought.

I’ve just glanced at the Douglass speech that was linked. It has to be read in the context of the debate within the abolitionist movement between the Garrisonians, to whom Douglass refers, who rejected electoral politics altogether and viewed the Constitution, in Garrison’s words, as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” and those abolitionists, like Douglass, who did not reject electoral politics.

Before the Reconstruction amendments, the Constitution, while not explicitly licensing slavery, obviously permitted it to exist (there is a reference to the slave trade in the original document and an agreed date for its end, iirc, but that’s not the same as the issue of slavery itself). The pre-Civil War Constitution was a compromise between states in which slavery was an essential part of their political economy and states where it wasn’t, in which the former got most of what they wanted, but the resulting silences in the original document are what fueled, or allowed. the debates within the abolitionist movement about it.

Deleted. You’re banned

Please, somebody tell me which provision is the monstrous one.

‘The executive power shall be vested in a President …’

‘So the colonies which entered the union as “slave states” didn’t agree to it.’ Tom P, 97
There was just one free state at that point, Massachusetts.

The crucial issue however is the fact that the 13th and 14th amendments were, after all, passed, and lawless wannabe dictator Trump has decreed the 14th amendment null and void and if he can get away with it – of the fascist Junta masquerading as a Supreme Court lets him get away with it – , no part of the current constitution of the United States will ever matter again.

Somehow we got through 46 presidents and you never had a problem before.

On the contrary! Lots of problems before.

The real problem you have is with “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.

Well, haven’t you got tickets on yourself! You have no idea what my real problems are.

Americans want the law enforced …

The more fool them! People don’t even know what the law is!

What I want is for people to treat each other well. Sometimes that might mean enforcing good laws; sometimes that might mean changing bad laws.

Uncontrolled immigration into EU is legal, as far as I can tell.

As far as you can tell! And how far is that?

Proponents and detractors alike agree it’s a death knell for legacy cultures and populations.

Everybody dies: and not just individuals, but legacies, cultures and populations as well. Were you hoping to live forever?

But the government, as such, can order anybody deported with or without reason.

And you think that’s a good thing?

LFC @ 106: Thank you. We don’t need more Trump BS here.

TomP @ 110 “so you won’t want to argue about that.”, I bothered to check my ignorance.

TomP try… checking your bias.

“Left-wing extremists … since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence.” [1]
~ Anti-Defamation League re 2022

“In both datasets we find that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent.” [2] “A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world” 2022

TomP @110 “By mere coincidence, there is a steady drumbeat of political violence from the”…
“All 25 U.S. extremism-related murders last year were linked to right-wing extremists”
Chanelle Chandler, Reporter
Updated Fri, February 24, 2023 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/all-25-us-extremism-related-murders-last-year-were-linked-to-right-wing-extremists-212259479.html

[1] REPORT
“Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2022
…
“All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012).  Left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence. The same cannot be said for domestic Islamist extremists, but deadly incidents linked to Islamist extremism have decreased significantly in the U.S. over the past five years. 

“White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high:  21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists.  Again, this is primarily due to mass shootings. Only one of the murders was committed by a right-wing anti-government extremist—the lowest number since 2017.”
…
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/murder-and-extremism-united-states-2022

[2]
“Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2022 Jul 18;
..
“A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world”
Katarzyna Jasko a,1, Gary LaFree b, James Piazza c, Michael H Becker d
…
“In both datasets we find that individuals and attacks associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent.”
…
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9335287/

TomP “The acute effects of uncontrolled [… and unverified biased opinions correlations] on places like France, Germany and England [… where CT writers post thoughtful OP’s and provides a public facing comments service] are undeniable [… in some peoole’s minds], so you won’t want to argue about that.”

TomP “Sometimes I use satire and surrealism in ways that can be confusing, and I’m not a rabid partisan so you can’t always tell whose side I’m on.”
An all/what/both about??? blamange then, indistinguishable from a troll.

TomP; “Sorry about all that.”
– I don’t believe you TomP.
– wasting our time is nowhere as detrimental as mis/disinformarion called BULLSHIT.

It took me 1 minute to gets some data re “All 25 U.S. extremism-related murders last year were linked to right-wing extremists”.

Do Your Own Research TomP, because the “steady drumbeat of political violence” is your uncorroberated free floating bias hitting your dissonance. And reverberaring on your mischief. Vomited up here.

Although probably invisible to TomP, here is TomP’s Mirror… “Maybe, just maybe, you’re being a little irresponsible and out-of-touch. Well, if you don’t want to “deal with” your feelings of embarrassment, you don’t have to do this in public. Get a room.”

Deal with it Tom, in your room.

@Tom P

JQ did inform you that you’re banned (read what JQ wrote @109). That actually means you’re not allowed to post any more here, and whoever let your post @110 through should not have done so.

The CT proprietors decide who will be allowed to post comments and who won’t. The comments policy makes that clear.