Precedent Trump – The Dispatch

I know I’ve lost some of you already.  Some folks think, given how his term has unfolded thus far, that to still support Donald Trump makes you a bad person. Well, I think plenty of bad people support Trump, but I don’t think supporting Trump automatically makes you a bad person. It can also just mean you’re wrong. 

So, let’s press on. Assume that decent, fairly normal, relatively reasonable pro-Trump folks exist, and that you’re one of them. Heck, let’s make it easier. Not only are you one of these normie pro-Trump people, let’s say you work in the administration or you’re a Republican in Congress. 

I am fairly confident that you roll your eyes when you hear people say Trump is a threat to democracy. You might wish Trump didn’t chum the water with talk of serving a third term, but you also dismiss that as trolling. You don’t think Trump is a dictator, nor do you think he wants to be one. Indeed, you still believe that any talk of Trump violating constitutional or democratic norms is pretty hypocritical given all the terrible things Democrats did or tried to do under Joe Biden and Barack Obama. 

I don’t want to argue with you about any of that. I want to stipulate that it is true—for argument’s sake. If Trump does become a real, unambiguous threat to democracy in your eyes, you will oppose him. But since you don’t think that will happen, getting worked up about the possibility is a waste of time, kind of unfair to Trump, and bad for Team GOP. 

So, if that’s the case, I gotta ask: What the hell are you thinking? 

What I mean is, if you think Trump doesn’t spell the end of democracy, then you have to believe there will be more elections. And if there are going to be more elections, you have to believe that there will come a time when Democrats will win an election again. 

And yet, the way Trump and Republicans are governing—or “governing”—you’d think Republicans will never, ever, lose another election. 

If the last 30—or 300—years of democratic politics have taught us anything, it’s that when your side unilaterally claims a power or prerogative for itself, you’re also validating that same power or prerogative for the other side when its turn to be in charge comes. 

Yesterday, Trump threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status if it doesn’t cave to his administration’s demands. For what it’s worth, I think there’s merit to many of the complaints against Harvard, but I think the administration’s methods cross all sorts of lines that shouldn’t be crossed. But put aside what you think about the substance.

It has been a dream of the left for ages to get rid of the tax-exempt status and relative autonomy of religious institutions—Christian universities, charities, hospitals, etc. If Trump succeeds in making the IRS revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, based in no small part on personal opposition to what Harvard teaches, what will be the principled objection to a President Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez or Elizabeth Warren when the Eye of Mordor swings rightward? 

Or consider the Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and the bootstrapping of anti-terrorism powers to accelerate deportations. I think it’s a stretch to call these horrible criminal gangs “terrorist organizations.” Lots of stuff can be bad without being terrorism. In fact, lots of stuff can be better than MS-13 and be closer to the definition of terrorism. For instance, I think the people vandalizing Tesla dealerships are closer to actual terrorists—they use violence for expressly political purposes—than MS-13. But MS-13—which murders, tortures, and rapes—is definitely worse than the vandals. And, of course, that doesn’t mean I think that idiots burning Teslas should be declared terrorists, never mind shipped to El Salvador. 

The point is that words mean things. And the Trump administration is using words like “war,” “enemy,” “terrorism,” “crisis,” etc., to concentrate legislative, judicial, and executive power in the president and the president alone (and the Republican-controlled Congress, in its abject cowardice, is letting it). Trump has not only declared a crisis to bypass due process and defy courts, he’s declared a crisis so he can use tariffs at a whim to scuttle the global economy and vandalize America’s economic reputation. 

Do you really think Democrats are incapable of playing the same game? They think climate change is a crisis. Whether they’re right or wrong is beside the point, because what nearly every conservative has been saying for decades happens to be true: the left wants to use climate change to do all sorts of things, many of which have nothing to do with climate change.

For instance, the argument for including “Medicare for All” in the Green New Deal was that a more climate-friendly economy would require lots of transitioning out of industrial jobs that provide health care, so taking care of everyone with socialized medicine would make everything easier as we dealt with the crisis.

Is that any dumber than arguing that we need to bring sneaker and furniture factories home to make American labor more masculine? I gotta be honest, I think it’s a pretty close call. 

But you can be sure that the crisis-is-a-terrible-thing-to-waste Democrats will definitely think that climate change is a bigger crisis than the relative decline in sweaty, testosterone-rich, factory workers. And Republicans have done on industrial policy what former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada did on the judicial filibuster—hand off an excuse, an argument, and an incentive to do the same sort of garbage. As was foretold by Mitch McConnell.

Likewise, even if you think MS-13 members deserve to be treated like terrorists, the fact that they are not, in fact, terrorists, just makes it that much easier for the next Democratic administration to designate some other group of people as terrorists as well.

Keep in mind, conservatives have long fought against the idea of creating a category of law called “domestic terrorism” precisely because of the abuses and shortcuts around due process and criminal law such designations invite. 

So, just for giggles, imagine a Democratic president does exactly that and designates some group of right-wing gun nuts as terrorists. The courts say, well, no, you can’t really do that. And President Gavin Newsom says, “You’re intruding on the powers of the commander-in-chief. This is a crisis. Buzz off.” Glenn Beck would be pouring a can of gasoline over his head in the middle of Times Square, asking if anybody has a match. But forget that. Imagine if, in the course of rounding up members of the gun nut crew, the administration rounded up someone it shouldn’t have or someone a judge said needed special protections. But the Democratic administration, even after admitting it screwed up, refused to release the captured or exiled domestic terrorist. Imagine the outrage from the right as Democrats laughed off Ted Cruz and Mike Lee’s whining about “due process” and “separation of powers.”

For the life of me, I don’t understand how people who hate and distrust Democrats aren’t at all concerned by the fact that the president is shaking down and harassing law firms, and targeting individual political enemies with the executive branch equivalent of a bill of attainder. I mean, I think this crap should offend you on the merits. I think it should offend you more because it is your team, your side, that is behaving so dishonorably. 

But if you don’t care about any of that, you should still be a little concerned that Republicans are laying down a precedent that will, in one way or another, come back to bite them. The only way it won’t or can’t is if you think Republicans will never be subjected to a competitive election ever again. And we’ve already established you don’t think that’s something to worry about.