During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.
Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.
In Trump’s final year in office, he opened a new, more ominous front in his campaign to assert control over blue jurisdictions. As the nation faced the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump repeatedly dispatched federal law-enforcement agents to blue cities, usually over the opposition of Democratic mayors, governors, or both. Trump sent an array of federal personnel to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse amid the city’s chaotic protests; reports soon emerged of camouflage-clad federal agents without any identifying insignia forcing protesters into unmarked vans. Trump responded to the huge racial-justice protests in Washington, D.C., by dispatching National Guard troops drawn from 11 states, almost all of them led by Republican governors. Later he sent other federal law-enforcement officers to combat rising crime in Kansas City and Chicago, a city Trump described as “worse than Afghanistan.”
Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America. He’s again promising federal legislation that would impose policies popular in red states onto the blue states that have rejected them. He has pledged to withhold federal funding from schools teaching critical race theory and “gender ideology.” He says he will initiate federal civil-rights investigations into liberal big-city prosecutors (whom he calls “Marxist local District Attorneys”) and require cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants.
This is one of the key deficits in modern liberal politics that will cause democracy to fall. I can totally understand the arguments for why political assassinations are regarded as more or less ‘not worth it’ but there reaches a point where a nation-state as pseudo-person in and of itself must practice self-defense up to and including arguable murder.
Napoleon being the classic example. Hitler after the Putsch another. Letters from a Birmingham Jail in a more positive light. There are figures in politics from whom flows such charisma and control that a polity, a democracy, a nation-state must choose to integrate or extirpate the figurehead of a threat.
What happens with Trump in jail? Civil war. What happens with trump as President? Civil war. What happens with trump assassinated? Still civil war but against disparate movements with no leading figure.
Fuck all you Americans for letting it get this far. Someone should’ve stomped on New Gingrich’s face back in 94. Y’all let Mitch McConnell Weimar your republic. Your liberals and neutered leftists have failed the world. Fuck you all.
Fight.
Does assassination not just lead to someone else taking over but with the casus belli to implement more extreme measures, faster?
Typically yes and again I understand the argument but what else?
Should Napoleon been given the opportunity to return from Elba? Should Hitler have had the chance to assume the Chancellorship after the Reichstag fire?
There’s a risk and balance to all action especially in geopolitics. I doubt someone like Kissinger would give a different assessment if our morals aligned.