Steve Benen expresses some anxiety concerning the possibility that President Trump is serious about getting a “do-over” just because he was being investigated by Special Counsel Mueller:
But at the heart of Trump’s tweets is something darker than just routine lies.
The amateur president with authoritarian instincts obviously hopes voters reward him with four more years in the White House, but Trump’s occasional talk about extra time in office is altogether scarier.
Indeed, the weekend’s tweets weren’t entirely unique. In March 2018, Trump praised China’s President Xi Jinping for extending his hold on power. “He’s now president for life,” the Republican said. “President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
White House officials have said comments like these are intended to be funny. Perhaps. But Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor who studies authoritarian rulers, said something to the Washington Post that stood out for me: “Everything that he says is a trial balloon – even his, quote, jokes are trial balloons. But if you look at what he jokes about, it’s always things like this – it’s the extension of his rights, it’s the infringement of liberties. And authoritarians are continually testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with, and everything he does is a challenge to Democrats to mount some response against him.”
And if he tries to remain in the Oval Office? You take half a dozen Marines and tell them to clear the White House of Trump and his staff.
Sounds flippant? It isn’t, really. The Joint Chiefs of Staff – indeed, just about every serious military person – has expressed serious doubts concerning President Trump. If push comes to shove, I seriously doubt there’s more than a few loons in uniform who wouldn’t be just as happy upholding the loyalty oath they took to country and Constitution, and explicitly did NOT take to the President, and boot him out on his fanny.
Benen speculates that Trump would call for a march on Washington by his followers to preserve his position. The problem with this scenario is that such marches nearly always happen during times of economic desperation, and, according to both President Trump and independent evaluations, that just isn’t happening – we’re chugging along just fine, although of course that could change between now and the next election.
It would be a sudden and humiliating ending for a Trump Presidency marked by ineptitude, incompetence, and sheer bad behavior – as the latter is documented by the motivating force for this entire ridiculous suggestion, the Mueller Report. If you’ve heard Trump was “exonerated” by that Report, just remember your good sense: President Trump has been busy proclaiming same, would benefit if that were the same, and, hey, we all know better than to believe the party that would benefit if it were true. That’s why Andrew Napolitano’s evaluation of the Mueller Report is so important. as well as the former Federal prosecutors of various political stripes who believe the President is guilty of obstruction.
So if you do run across a hair-on-fire true Trump believer who wants to abrogate the Constitution because of the terrible, terrible imposition of the investigation, just suggest to him that you’ll consider it if, first, the Gorsuch seat on SCOTUS is returned to President Obama, who can make the selection, and have it honestly debated by the Senate.
