They Were Waiting for Trump All Along --
Jamelle Bouie's opinion is a solid read (though arguably long on familiar examples) about the fascist worldview that has driven our foreign & domestic opponents for the four generations since Reagan.
Preaching to the converted here, perhaps, but there is a young Democratic Party audience that needs to read this (and an older audience that must never forget the worst of the past that led to today).
For younger voters and most non-voting Americans, however, it has taken this second term for them to see with 20-20 hindsight what Bouie describes by examples -- the full effects of the past propagandizing & privatizing worldview that right wing voters have: that they are just fine with disposing of "We the People."
This dark hearted minority party living among us silently tell us they are
a) glad their commander-in-chief uses the Military and right wing paramilitaries on standby, and
b) okay that a corporate/military dictatorship rolls out to erase government, humans, law, institutions, and reality they've been convinced are bad.
https://archive.ph/xSfsa
"Of the endless torrent of illegal ... anticonstitutional ... actions flowing from the Trump administration, there are three that stand out for their contempt for the rule of law.
...the president’s ongoing assault on the right to due process ...
... the suggestion by the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that the president might suspend habeas corpus to keep federal courts from releasing the administration’s detainees ...
... the president’s plan to accept a $400 million luxury aircraft to temporarily replace Air Force One, provided to the United States by the royal family of Qatar ...
...Take these constitutional violations together and you have a clear picture of how this president sees himself and his office in his second term. The presidency, for Trump, is a vehicle for his personalist rule, in which all power flows from his person. It is a virtual extension of Trump himself, and in the same way that we control our bodies, he holds authority over the entire body politic, with the power to detain and remove anyone he’d like, without explanation, justification or even cursory legal proceedings. The presidency is also, in this vision, his to use as he sees fit, up to and including endless self-enrichment and personal aggrandizement, with no regard for the public good...
You would think that those who elevate 1776, who fetishize the Constitution as an object and who practically spend every waking moment reminding the public of their patriotic bona fides would, at some point, have something to say about this perversion of the American republic.
You would be wrong ... Both the MAGA cheerleaders of the Claremont Institute and the Trump rationalizers in the nation’s premier publications agree: Nothing Trump has done or wants to do is beyond the pale. Everything is a necessary and defensive act in the war against critical race theory or gender ideology or so-called wokeness...
This is who they are, this is what they’ve been, and whenever the age of Trump passes, this is who they’ll be. What it should signal to observers of American politics is that there won’t be a time when either the conservative movement or the Republican Party truly changes course.
There is no Trumpified conservative movement.
There never was.
There is only the conservative movement that was, we can see now, waiting for its Donald Trump."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/opinion/trump-due-process-habeas-corpus.html
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