Trump is an authoritarian wannabe. He must never hold power again.
Opinion by Michael Gerson
Looking on the bright side of a humiliating national disaster, the manner of President Trump’s departure from power has clarified why he must never hold power again.
In leaks to a variety of news organizations, senior Trump administration officials reported: 1) Rudolph W. Giuliani urging the federal government to illegally seize Dominion voting machines; 2) presidential consideration of deranged conspiracy-monger Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating nonexistent election fraud; and 3) a White House meeting involving disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn at which Trump discussed the imposition of martial law.
These accounts indicate the emergence of two distinct factions within Trump’s inner circle. On one side are the lunatics — among them Giuliani, Powell and Flynn — who want Trump to violate laws and assume authoritarian powers. On the other side are sycophants who supported Trump’s spurious legal challenges to the election result but apparently draw the line at treason. By most accounts, Trump’s sympathies lie with the lunatics.
Some respond, as usual, by suggesting that these provocations are merely the sad, silly reactions of a cornered narcissist. And it is indeed ludicrous to believe that the military would ever consider torching the Constitution, particularly in service to a draft-dodging coward who views their honored dead as “suckers.” Even on the rumor of a coup, Army Secretary Ryan D. McCarthy and Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff, issued a joint statement saying there “is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election.”
But the code-red level of worry within Trump’s staff does seem unprecedented. “People who are concerned and nervous aren’t the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe,” said a senior administration official to Axios. “These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history.” At the very least, these freely leaking White House staffers are determined to distance themselves from outright subversion. It is nice to find there are still some limits to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s servility.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-an-authoritarian-wannabe-he-must-never-hold-power-again/2020/12/21/30164bd6-43d0-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html
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