“Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?”

Will Stancil on Bluesky:

I don’t know how to say this any louder

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS MORE RADICAL, MORE FASCIST, MORE VIOLENT THAN ANYONE IN MAINSTREAM POLITICS OR MEDIA IS WILLING TO ADMIT OUT LOUD

THEY ARE FULLY IN THRALL TO A MOVEMENT OF ONLINE NAZIS THAT WANT TO END AMERICA AND KILL MANY, MANY PEOPLE

They do not care about fixing anything. They do not care about running the government. They want to set the Constitution on fire, destroy the federal government, and torture and murder their enemies for fun. This is their only true political commitment

It’s beyond insane - it’s suicidal - that our leaders and our commentators and our media won’t talk about what’s really going on here. They maintain the pretense that this is all about policy differences, but MAGA is barely even bothering with the pretense of a mask anymore

I agree 100% with Stancil here — it is so completely obvious what Trump and the Republicans are trying to do (they are not hiding it!) and it’s maddening to watch the media and Democratic politicians treat this like any other political situation: “that this is all about policy differences”. They are trying to destroy American democracy and amass power for themselves and the oligarchs that support them — that’s what autocracies are for and it’s why Trump and Republicans want one.

We’ve seen this happen with brittle governments all over the world for the past century — it’s not a novel situation — and Republicans have decided that now is the moment to strike our teetering democracy. They convinced voters to roll a wooden horse covered in MAGA stickers inside the city walls and now they are going to hollow it out from within. That’s the game and the sooner everyone wakes up to this truth, the sooner we can try to fix the situation.

Update: Jamelle Bouie: If All This Sounds Delusional, That’s Because It Is.

Put another way, the American system of government is not one in which the people imbue the president with their sovereign authority. He is a servant of the Constitution, bound by its demands. Most presidents in our history have understood this, even as they inevitably pushed for more and greater authority. Not Trump. He sees no distinction between himself and the office, and he sees the office as a grant of unlimited power, or as he once said himself, “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

The freeze, then, is Trump’s attempt to make this fanciful claim to limitless power a reality. He wants to usurp the power of the purse for himself. He wants to make the Constitution a grant of absolute and unchecked authority. He wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.

💯 Bouie is one of the few traditional media folks who sees this situation clearly.

Title quote courtesy of Bishop Mariann Budde.

• Donald Trump
• Jamelle Bouie
• journalism
• Mariann Budde
• politics
• USA
• Will Stancil