Built to fail? The Constitution worked, more or less, for over 237 years and 44 different presidents. It hasn’t even failed yet now, although it is in a lot of danger.

It’s the job of Congress to stop the President from doing this, via impeachment. However, in a democracy the people get to choose their leaders and if the people elect not just a man like Trump to be President but also a majority in Congress to support him almost unconditionally, then the people get what they voted for.

Even now, Republicans in Congress fear that they will not be re-elected if they oppose Trump. Thus they’re still carrying out the will of the people.

That’s a good point, and I suppose that someone sympathetic to Trump might think that he was being unfairly prosecuted after other presidents hadn’t been.

I disagree with your implication that a former president should always be punished for having broken the law. The rules do need to be different for presidents than for ordinary people.

A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ’tis a misfortune: so that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were really racked between these two extremes: ‘Let him see to it that it be not a loophole for perjury that he seeks.’ He must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it did not weigh on him to do it, ’tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry condition."

Montaigne’ Essays, book 3 chapter 1

It’s one thing to break a law with the belief (perhaps unjustified) that doing so is necessary for the good of the nation and quite another to do to because power protects you from deserved punishment, but how can the law itself make this distinction?

Even the Trump appointees seem like the sort of people who would want to defend the rule of law at least to preserve their own (and therefore the court’s) power, so I wonder how each of the six “conservative” judges was convinced to rule the way that he or she did. I don’t imagine all of them doing it for the same reason. Maybe some were rewarded for their votes and others wanted to see Trump wreck things (Alito and his flag come to mind) but did some actually think that it was a good idea or the correct legal decision?

since 2015-2016

Hah, I would be ecstatic if we had a Romney now instead of what we do have. Or even a McCain. Or hell, even a GWB as long as he wasn’t allowed to invade anywhere.

I’m not at all convinced, because the poor aren’t the ones who elected Trump. Both the rich and the poor voted for Harris. Here’s the data:

Edit: This is not the most up-to date poll, although it is substantially correct. See my post below.

Ordinary people don’t keep track of billionaires. Almost no one even knows how many billionaires there are, or how many billions they have. I don’t know and I bet that even most people who blame billionaires for everything don’t know. If there are twice as many now as there were before and each one has twice as much money, the public won’t even notice.

IMO Trump support is due to envy and resentment, but it’s not the resentment of the rich by the poor. It’s the resentment of the middle class by the working class. Look at the results by college education:

(Note that while income and education are correlated, my first plot shows that the people without a college education who are voting for Trump aren’t voting for him simply because they’re poor.)

It used to be the case that mass media was controlled largely by people with middle class values. The people who opposed vaccination and supported renaming the Gulf of Mexico were called crackpots and they wouldn’t appear in most mainstream newspapers or TV news. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate for President would agree with them.

Now, thanks to the internet, these people have been able to organize into a mass movement and they want to smash the institutions built by the middle class that looks down on them. They voted for Trump because he’s culturally one of them, despite the fact that he’s a college-educated billionaire.

Do experts say Trump is a fascist? Do experts say vaccination is essential for public health? Do experts say tariffs will wreck the economy? Now Trump will make those experts cry delicious liberal tears…

I don’t think that what K-to-12 schools are capable of teaching even in the best-case scenario can be sufficient to equip the average person with the knowledge and critical thinking skills necessary to, for example, evaluate complex economic policy on its merits. I have a STEM PhD but it isn’t in economics and I don’t think I can evaluate economic policy well - I go with the consensus of economists, but that’s easy for me because I think their best interests and mine are aligned. (I want to see the stock market go up.) I’m not sure what a person whose interests are not aligned with the economists’ is supposed to do… Listen to ignorant demagogues who promise everything, apparently.

Before the election, I saw a house flying a big flag with the words “Elect Trump King of the United States”. So, uh, maybe monarchy would turn out to be even worse…

With that said, I understand how you feel. I don’t know how democracy can work in a post-truth era.

What exactly it means to facilitate is part of what the court is considering. From the Vox article:

The Supreme Court concludes that the lower court’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador…

But it adds that the “intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order” — to “facilitate and effectuate his return — “is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority.” The word “facilitate” suggests that the government must take what steps it can to make something happen, while the word “effectuate” suggests that it needs to actually make it happen.

Challenging them is one thing. Disrupting the CEO’s public speech is another. I think almost every company would fire any employee who did that for any reason.

online information siloes

I’m not sure that’s possible because the Democratic platform doesn’t have the sort of populist appeal that Trump’s Republican platform does. Moderation can’t compete with extremism in this domain. I suppose that the Democrats could try to pivot to their own (presumably class-based) form of populism but, at least from my point of view, one very strong reason to support the Democrats is because they aren’t populist. Having one populist party versus another would be a lose/lose situation.

I don’t have an alternate proposal. It may actually be the case that social media will eventually force every serious political movement to pivot towards populism and create its own truth in order to be competitive, but then who would make the policy decisions in a world of meme warfare?

The actual Economist editorial is here (paywalled but archived).

Perhaps some leading election deniers are motivated by a psychological defense mechanism, but I think that many realize the strategic benefit. The members of the public who are convinced that Democrats steal elections will vote Republican. They’ll also be more willing to accept a Republican refusing to leave office after losing an election, if things come to that.

It’s unfortunate, but Leland Dudek is doing his job. Some people appear naive about what his job is.

Edit: Perhaps I should explicitly say that I’m not happy with the administration’s agenda, and what I mean is that this guy won’t be punished because he’s doing what he was hired to do. I don’t mean that this is what his job ought to be in some moral sense.

Of course as a resident of NYC I am angry about this. Not only is he a criminal but he’s also selling out the city to Trump. I would enjoy knowing how much he was squirming if the case was dismissed without prejudice like Trump wanted it to be, but I suppose it’s better that Trump has less control over him.

I do see a bit of humor in all this, because he accepted such small bribes.

From Wikipedia:

Adams took over $100,000 in bribes from Turkey in exchange for using his powers to help open the Turkevi Center. These bribes mostly took the form of free and discounted luxury travel benefits. These benefits included free hotel rooms, free meals at high-end restaurants, free entertainment while in Turkey, free and heavily discounted flights, and similarly free and discounted flight class upgrades.

I would understand why he might be tempted to give up his integrity and accept the possibility of being caught if large sums of money (millions at least) were involved, but $100,000 is less than his yearly salary would be in the NYPD and he didn’t even get it in cash! I don’t earn as much as an NYPD captain like him (but enough to be comfortable) and I would experience zero temptation to take such a risk even if I had no moral objection to bribery. If I was the mayor then I would even be offended by the offer - who do they think I am if they expect me to sell myself for so little?

He’s just a petty crook higher up in the world than he knows how to be. Pathetic.

Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.

So a man who promised to pardon his friends and allies, once elected, pardons his friends and allies. Is that corruption or is it just government policy by this point?

I wonder if that’s actually true, because I think that he is to some extent literally psychotic. What happens when someone who actually has enormous wealth and power still goes through manic phases or experiences something like grandiose delusions? He might really believe that he’s saving the nation and the world, and that this should be obvious to all.

It’s like those movies (I can’t remember which ones but I’m sure I’ve seen some) where the king thinks of himself as good and is genuinely surprised and confused when he learns that the common people feel oppressed by him. Except in this case the king does not (and probably can not) learn a heartwarming moral lesson.

That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.

Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.

My understanding is that Trump’s guys are arguing that the court has no authority to order them to return this guy, not that he can’t be returned. In other words, now that he’s out of the country, his situation is foreign policy rather than American legal proceedings.

It’s what the linked article presents as the likely explanation.

Biden deported more people

Technically true, according to Reuters:

U.S. President Donald Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, previously unpublished U.S. Department of Homeland Security data show, far less than the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Joe Biden’s administration.

However, this appears to be the case simply because fewer people are currently attempting to enter the USA illegally.

Biden did not do anything about illegal immigration propaganda

Biden’s policy was to let record numbers of people into the country and then do almost nothing for them afterwards. Apparently he was fine with, for example, relying on the City of New York to provide food and shelter to several hundred thousand completely destitute immigrants out of its own local tax budget. I would have respected a major federal-level initiative to help these immigrants. I would have understood turning them away. The federal government did neither - a total failure of leadership.