Brief notes (among a glut of dispiriting stories) from today’s news:
▪ I’ve mentioned loyalty questions for job seekers wishing to join the Trump team. It’s no surprise that this corrupt pattern continues. From Bloomberg:
▪ UC Berkley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky makes several sound points in his NYT op-ed this morning. ▫The Trump administration has ignored a number of court orders. ▫The courts have no means to compel court orders; that’s up to the executive branch. ▫VP JD Vance, Special Government Employee Elon Musk, Senator Mike Lee and others have suggested either ignoring court orders or impeaching judges whose decisions displease Trump. These acts would be unprecedented. ▫Chemerinsky also affirms (as others have) that the story of President Andrew Jackson declaring, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” is likely apocryphal.
Alas, though, I agree that the dean has started off on the wrong foot as a Johns Hopkins professor notes. Chemerinsky’s piece begins:
It is not hyperbole to say that the future of American constitutional democracy now rests on a single question: Will President Trump and his administration defy court orders?
Filipe Campante replies: “The future of US democracy does not rest solely on whether Trump will defy court orders. It’s perfectly possible to destroy democracy without doing that, as long as you have a friendly court.”
As a dedicated critic of the Roberts Court, I couldn’t agree more. Democracy is under siege and the Republican majority on the high court is an integral part of the assault and has been for more than a decade.
▪ From Wired, the most recent report of sky-high protection money that Trump is pocketing: “People Are Paying Millions to Dine With Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago: Business leaders are paying as much as $5 million to meet one-on-one with the president at his Florida compound, sources tell WIRED, while others are paying $1 million apiece to dine with him in a group setting.”
▪ Finally, at a time when Trump and MAGA are attacking independent media in multiple ways; going after universities and corporations committed to diversity; firing civil servants for their failure to embrace MAGA doctrine; threatening to withhold federal aid to Democratic governors and mayors; penalizing law firms whose clients displease Trump; and, amidst intimations of retaliation for noncompliance, soliciting payouts from wealthy individuals and businesses, many folks who normally speak up about things they care about have “muzzled themselves” (if they haven’t flipped to Trump’s side) when confronted with the threat of retribution by the President of the United States. Elizabeth Brumiller writes in the New York Times:
More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.
People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.
This goes beyond Timothy Snyder’s warnings about anticipatory compliance — obeying in advance. Folks are obeying in real time. Snyder’s warning suggested that in the beginning, the tyrant didn’t posses actual power to carry out his threats, but by obeying in advance we were granting him that power. In this case, Trump has demonstrated the power to exact retribution. We’ve seen this in action and folks don’t want to come under the lash.
Observing the stampede from all quarters to fall into line has been breathtaking. Steven Levitsky (co-author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die) observed in the NYT report :
When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.
Nothing could be clearer in Trump’s America.
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