There's good reason to argue that Donald Trump has always been an authoritarian.
He admires strongmen such as the dictators and quasi-dictators who run Russia, North Korea, China, Turkey, and Hungary. He demands absolute loyalty with no backtalk from people who work for him. He despises central tenets of democracy like free and fair elections unless he manages to win.
But after four months of his second term as president, now there's no doubt on which side of the authoritarian fence Trump is on. Just about every action he's taken has either pushed to the limit norms that have been recognized by every preceding president, or broken that limit.
Every morning when I wake up I keep thinking that there's no way the news is going to be filled with some outrageous act by Trump that surpasses the depravity of what he's already done. But many mornings I'm unpleasantly surprised by what my iPhone brings me.
Today it was...
Trump threatening 50% tariffs on the European Union for no reason other than negotiators for the EU are refusing to give in to Trump's crazy trade war demands.
Trump telling Apple that if the company doesn't produce all of the iPhones sold in the United States by factories within the United States, he'll slap a 25% tariff on iPhones -- ignoring the inconvenient fact that tariffs can't be imposed on individual companies.
Trump invalidating the visas of every student from a foreign country who is attending Harvard University just because he doesn't like Harvard refusing to let the federal government decide how the university is run.
There were other outrages, but these were at the top of my Authoritarianism List.
Our nation truly is in dangerous territory. It seems clear that hardly any Republicans in Congress are willing to stand up to Trump. It also is increasingly evident that the Trump administration will ignore rulings by federal courts that it doesn't like, even Supreme Court decisions.
So there's a very good chance that we're going to suffer through a constitutional crisis like the United States has never seen before, because no president has been so willing to trash the Constitution like Trump is.
Today Michael Berman, a professor of law and of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, had an opinion piece in the Washington Post, "No, Trump can't force his agenda on U.S. entities. They have rights." Here's some excerpts:
Universities refuse to fully dismantle their DEI programs? The Trump administration withdraws billions of dollars in federal funding, and cancels visas for their foreign students. Law firms won’t donate their services to causes that President Donald Trump favors? Trump cancels their lawyers’ security clearances and refuses to deal with their clients. Journalists still call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of Mexico”? Trump pulls their credentials for press briefings. The state of Maine allows some transgender athletes to compete on some girls’ and women’s sports teams? Trump threatens to cut off federal funding for its public schools.
Different targets, but one common tool: leverage. Trump uses federal funds and other government benefits to pressure individuals and institutions into exercising their constitutional rights as he prefers. This is extortionate. And therefore unconstitutional.
...If Trump can use threats over tariffs to pressure nations into opening their markets or strengthening their currencies or ordering more U.S. arms, why can’t he do the same with American institutions?
Because foreign nations have no constitutional rights, but American universities, lawyers, journalists and states do — rights protected by the First, Fifth, Sixth and Tenth Amendments. Trump’s efforts to leverage government benefits against them violate those rights by penalizing their exercise.
...Leverage is powerful. More than two millennia ago, Archimedes of Syracuse is reputed to have claimed that, given a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the Earth. The courts have long recognized that such power requires constitutional limits. The president may not withhold otherwise available funds, or deny access to government benefits, to make it costly for Americans to exercise their constitutional rights.
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