master.on
New Member
This is what I've been telling you all the time
Manafort pleads guilty
... to crimes made under Obama admin, long before he even knew Trump.
An American president that doesn't even know how many states America has?
WTF?
MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
Manafort pleads guilty
... to crimes made under Obama admin, long before he even knew Trump.
An American president that doesn't even know how many states America has?
WTF?
I was curious what you thought of Fire and Fury. You referenced it in the book, but …
Yeah. I think, just a different style and it got some of the sociology right about the relationships but there … the scenes that are with Roger Ailes or with Rupert Murdoch. It’s basically devoid of the decision-making and process matters. And sometimes there’s a process, sometimes there’s not a process, which I try to describe. And I thought that, you know, that was not the focus of his book.
Did you find it to be a credible book?
I mean, as they say, I think it got the sociology largely right. The relationships and so forth. But 50 years from now what’s going to be important about the Trump presidency is what he does or doesn’t do. And if I’m right, as I believe I am, it’s a nervous breakdown.
What does that mean? Do you use that phrase …
Exactly what’s on display there, nervous breakdown. Things are not connected. There is not … there is impulse, decisions. I think that the most ardent Trump supporter could read the book and not feel comfortable about the management and the staying the course. There’s not a team. You know, it’s a team of predators, or people who just disagree with the president.
How did you decide to describe it as a nervous breakdown? I was speaking yesterday to someone who is very close to the president and a strong supporter of his, and they were taking issue with that phrase. And I was curious because it is a divisive way of explaining the book.
I think it’s accurate. And I think it’s demonstrated.
Is that your assessment or did it come from somebody else in your reporting?
No, no, this is kind of what I got. What’s the summary here? Nervous breakdown.
Twenty-one months into the Trump presidency, how far has the country rolled down the road to autocracy? It’s been such a distracting drive—so many crazy moments!—who can keep an eye on the odometer?
Yet measuring the distance traveled is vital. As Abraham Lincoln superbly said in his “house divided” speech: “If we could first know where we are, and whitherwe are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”
Let’s start with the good news: Against the Trump presidency, federal law enforcement has held firm. ...
The bulk of this magazine issue is given over to questions about liberal democracy’s long-term viability. Around the world, democracy looks more fragile than it has since the Cold War. But if it survives for now in America, future historians may well conclude that it was saved by the president’s Twitter compulsion. Had he preserved a dignified silence for a few consecutive months, he might have bled less support and inflicted more damage on U.S. institutions. Then again, a Donald Trump with impulse control would not be Donald Trump.
Trump has built the worst-functioning White House in living memory, and its self-inflicted errors have slowed him down almost as much as his personality has. ...
Yet even as Trump ties his own shoelaces together and lurches nose-first into the Rose Garden dirt, he has scored a dismaying sequence of successes in his war on U.S. institutions. In this, Trump is not acting alone. He is enabled by his party in Congress and its many supporters throughout the country. Republican leaders and donors have built a coping mechanism for the age of Trump, a mantra: “Ignore the weird stuff, focus on the policy.” But the policy is increasingly driven by the weird stuff: tariffs, trade wars, quarrels with allies, suspicions of secret deals with the Russians. The weird stuff is the policy—and it is transforming the president’s party in ways not easily or soon corrected. Maybe you don’t care about the president’s party. You should, because a liberal democracy cannot endure if only one of its two major parties remains committed to democratic values.
Here are the three areas of most imminent concern:
...
Once violated, democratic norms are not easy to restore, as Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has observed. In the wake of Silvio Berlusconi’s corrupt tenure as prime minister, Italy is now governed by a strange coalition of extremist parties. Nominally of the right and the left, they share a dislike of the European Union, affinity for Putin’s Russia, and distrust of vaccines. Fate struck down the demagogic Louisiana governor Huey Long, but his family bestrode the state’s politics for decades after his death. Argentina, emerging from neo-Peronism, has stumbled on its way back to legality.
Weakened institutions will be challenged from multiple directions: We are already hearing liberals speculating about 1930s-style court packing as a response to Trump’s cramming of the judiciary. The distrust of free speech on campus is being carried by recent graduates into their jobs and communities. We see in other countries, especially the United Kingdom, the rise of an activist left nearly as paranoid and anti-Semitic, as disdainful of liberal freedoms and democratic institutions, as the so-called alt-right in the U.S.
It could happen here. Restoring democracy will require more from each of us than the casting of a single election ballot. It will demand a sustained commitment to renew American institutions, reinvigorate common citizenship, and expand national prosperity. The road to autocracy is long—which means that we still have time to halt and turn back. It also means that the longer we wait, the farther we must travel to return home.
Similar threads
