The New York Times is back at it, trying its gosh-darn best to get people like me fully on board the Trump train.
Here they are warning that Trump, should he win in 2024, would usher in a “coterie of lawyers and advisers” to target his political opponents (who, unless you live in the D.C. suburbs, are also your political opponents).
Via The New York Times (emphasis added):
American democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them. But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.
Recent reporting about plans for a second Trump presidency are frightening. He would stock his administration with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping — if not circumventing altogether — existing laws and long-established legal norms. This would include appointing to high public office political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on First Amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.
We have seen him try this before, though fortunately he was thwarted — he would say “betrayed”— by executive branch lawyers and by judges who refused to go along with his more draconian and often unlawful policies and his effort to remain in office after being cast out by voters. But should Mr. Trump return to the White House, he will arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again.
Related: Nancy Pelosi’s Daughter Caught on Hidden Camera Admitting January 6 Was a Hoax
And here is MSNBC doing more pearl-clutching with a Lincoln Project hack and a diverse millennial grifting as a Republican strategist.
Of course, what goes unsaid is that the kind of people he might appoint to key positions in his administration, like perhaps Steve Bannon, are dangerous, particularly to them, the members of the ruling class.
This is the kind of talk that gets me really titillated for the next Trump regime.
He didn’t drain the Swamp last time, as he promised to do and much to his discredit, but I’m banking on the fact that the roadblock was his naïveté and better angels that kept him from doing what needed to be done.
Coming from the upper crust of society and being formerly celebrated in these circles, he may have hoped that if he played pattycakes with the permanent ruling class, they would come around eventually. No one ever accused Trump of not enjoying the fawning praise of high society. Some might argue that attaining prestige has always been his overriding life goal.
My hope would be that it is now clear to Trump that he is never going to be welcome back in those circles, and his only real contingent of support left is the Deplorable rabble of flyover country.
To be clear, I have no faith in Trump himself as a man. The faith, supposing any should be placed in a future administration, would be in the people he surrounds himself with — men with hard noses who know how Permanent Washington works and, more importantly, have an earnest drive to purge it.
