Righteous rant: where national values abide

Chris Geidner ably reviews legal developments under the Trump regime in a highly accessible manner.

 

And more, he goes straight to the political/ethical implications of what he is seeing.

We define “American values” — not Trump

That is the common thread. Time and again this past week, Trump declared that he has the right not only to define American values, but to define who is excluded — and then to act on it.

That is wrong.

This is not the end. Trump does not have that right. The Constitution, many federal laws, and legal precedent all clearly block him from doing so in many respects.

That, as we have too often seen, is not enough. Many people will have to act to ensure it remains so. 

Legal challenges, support for those challenges and the challengers, public officials lodging protests and insisting on accountability, and members of the public speaking out are just the start.

Judges will need to continue ruling against the administration when it acts illegally.

All people need to defend the law and oppose these sorts of actions, not because the law is always right or because it will be sufficient to moving forward and away from authoritarianism, but because the law is a foundational shared understanding that allows us to operate as a society.

Trump has regularly scapegoated groups of people — that has been a key part of his cruelty over the past decade and before. This week, to me, felt different because it went beyond broad attacks on large swaths of people. This was a series of directed attacks on individual entities that Trump believes have challenged him or his policies.

As I’ve written previously, the opening of the second Trump administration has been a series of efforts by Trump and others to see what they can get away with. Those have been extreme efforts at times, but they have, primarily, been about his authority within the government — in particular, when contrasted with other branches.

This week was a further escalation of that — testing out whether he can “get away with” taking a clearly more authoritarian path forward.

We must respond accordingly.

Trump and his acolytes and hangers on and enablers don't get to define what the American people value. We're being reminded that solidarity and empathy are the basis of communal civilization; the war of all against all leads only to collapse of what make us human. We need to take our country back from the stupid, shallow, and greedy.