Convicted felon Donald John Trump is packing his cabinet with criminals and loyalists who don’t give a damn about the laws of America and the Constitution he and they are swearing to honor and uphold.
Trumo is acting more and more like a wannabe dictator who operates in a nether world that is iollegal and unethical.
The New York Times Editorial Board notes:
The first two weeks into his second tour in the White House have seen so many lines crossed in the pursuit of his agenda that anyone who believes in the Constitution and honest governance should be worried: Many of Mr. Trump’s first assertions of executive power blatantly exceed what is legally granted. He and his supporters have sought to undermine those best positioned to check his overreaches of power. And he is moving to eliminate the tools of accountability in government in quick order.
It’s not just that he sees the U.S. government work force as his personal employees who should be loyal servants; he appears ready to suppress any critique or even allow anyone to bear witness to what his administration is really doing. Mr. Trump has an unusual gift for evading criticism: The Democrats are just the angry opposition. Republicans who stand up to him are just RINOs. Journalists who expose misconduct are purveyors of fake news. Government officials who warn of his actions are part of the “deep state.”
It’s much harder to dodge accountability for his actions when concerns or opposition come from roles that are legally or constitutionally protected in order to preserve their independence, such as judges, prosecutors and inspectors general — the parts of the government that he now hopes to circumvent, remove or bend to his wishes.
Civil servants are expected to carry out the directives from the legislative, judicial and executive branches, but Mr. Trump wants them to be subservient to him. He is trying to fundamentally ignore the constitutional checks and balances carefully built into the American system of government by its founders, and he is unwilling to follow or obey the rules of accountability and oversight that past presidents of both parties have adhered to.
And Americans are already getting a glimpse of what Mr. Trump and his administration would do with fewer guardrails: By unilaterally declaring the end of birthright citizenship, for example, he is expressing disdain for the decades of judicial precedent that have supported the clear wording of the 14th Amendment; he is trying to make his opinion the law of the land. By refusing to spend money already appropriated by Congress, as his administration did on Monday, he is telling the legislative branch that its constitutional power of the purse can be set aside at whim. And all those in a position to question his arrogation of authority and hold him to account will find themselves unemployed or under fire.
Late on Monday night, for example, the White House fired two Democratic members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, describing them as “far-left appointees with radical records.” These officials, who would almost certainly be strong critics of the administration’s attempts to reduce civil rights and labor protections, do not work for Mr. Trump; they are board members of independent agencies, approved by the Senate, and their terms are not up. The Supreme Court ruled in 1935 that presidents cannot dismiss members of independent agencies like these simply over policy differences, and the court declined a chance to overrule that precedent last year.
The administration also fired more than a dozen prosecutors in the Justice Department simply because they had worked on the criminal investigations of Mr. Trump, a particularly egregious example of his determination to combine personal retribution with future deterrence. Beyond the trampling of Civil Service rules for career employees — the termination notices cited no improper conduct or poor performance — the firings sent an unmistakable message to law enforcement authorities throughout the government: Ignore any malfeasance or corruption you may come across in Trump world, and do not even think of starting an investigation or a prosecution, because we will find a way to fire you and stop your work.
Mr. Trump’s steamrolling of all official scrutiny is beginning to draw criticism even from within his own party, which has largely stood by as he has undermined norms and values that used to be considered bipartisan. Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, along with his Democratic counterpart, Richard Durbin, sent a letter on Tuesday to the president demanding a detailed and case-specific explanation for the firing of each inspector general. “This is a matter of public and congressional accountability and ensuring the public’s confidence in the inspector general community, a sentiment shared more broadly by other members of Congress,” the two senators wrote.
It’s vital that those members of Congress, from both parties, stand up to Mr. Trump’s early moves. Their branch of government is no less in danger of losing its autonomy than the executive watchdogs are. Several Republican senators have already been coerced into abandoning their better judgment on some of Mr. Trump’s most unqualified cabinet nominees, as Joni Ernst of Iowa learned when she first voiced reservations about Pete Hegseth after he was nominated for defense secretary. The pressure campaign directed toward her by the MAGA world and the Iowa Republican Party is a principal reason she changed course and Mr. Hegseth is now running the Pentagon. The president has repeatedly threatened to use recess appointments to bypass the Senate entirely if it rejects his choices.
But it is not just the power to advise and consent that Mr. Trump has put at risk. In the last few days, he has also made it clear that he is prepared to override the most fundamental power given to Congress by the Constitution: the ability to appropriate tax money and determine how it is spent. On Monday the White House announced a freeze on “all federal financial assistance” like grants and loans to state agencies and nonprofit social service organizations, many of which said they were immediately locked out of the federal payment system. The week before he eliminated federal diversity and inclusion programs and halted most foreign aid spending.
After a federal judge temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s order, the White House retreated and said the freeze was no longer in place. But there was no retreat from the administration’s misguided notion that it can rescind at will any spending authorized by Congress, which officials made it clear they still intend to pursue in different ways.
If Mr. Trump doesn’t like the way federal money is being spent, he can do what every other president has done: negotiate new spending priorities with Congress as part of the budget and appropriations process. Federal law clearly prohibits him from making that decision unilaterally. But that would mean playing by the rules and sharing power with another branch of government, a practice Mr. Trump appears to consider unnecessary.
Mr. Trump’s party, after all, controls both houses of Congress, but even Republican leaders were given no voice or even advance notice about the precipitate decisions to rescind this authorized spending. Democratic and independent members correctly said Mr. Trump was provoking a constitutional crisis and helped force the retreat by standing up to the White House. Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, said Monday’s actions were “the most direct assault on the authority of Congress” in the nation’s history. In contrast, a few Republicans expressed mild concern and many were openly supportive, willing to cede their oversight of the nation’s purse to Mr. Trump to avoid becoming the victim of his intimidation tactics. “It’s a pretty major test of separation of powers,” acknowledged Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota.
Mr. Trump is indeed testing Washington and the American people to see how far he can go in accumulating authority and in marginalizing anyone in a position to question his actions. It is a test the Constitution cannot afford to lose.
Trump operates as a Fascist dictator who believes that he, and only he, can do things that are supposed to be governed by law and not his crimina whims. His attempts to steamroll a new FBI director into office as his latest puppet is a flatrang attempt to override law and the Constitution with subservient Republicans stdanding back and letting him rape and plunder the government.
Kash Patel is neither qualified or ethically capable to run the nation’s national law enforcement agency and Trump wants him to be “my Roy Cohn,” the late lawyer that he and his father to ignore the laws and morality of the nation. As Deborah Pearlstein, a visiting professor of law and public affairs at Princeton and the director of its Program in Law and Public Policy,, writes:
Through the sometimes blinding storm of executive orders and memorandums in the opening days of President Trump’s new administration, one pattern is already becoming clear: This is not a crew particularly interested in law.
Within its first nine days, the administration declared it was freezing trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans — a move that at worst violates Article I of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent, and at best violates Article II, which requires the president to ‘faithfully execute” the laws Congress passes.
Mr. Trump fired career officials, flouting laws designed to ensure that government employment is based on merit, not personal loyalty, and then busily began clearing the Department of Justice of career legal staff members so he could replace them with loyalists. And he issued an executive order claiming to eliminate automatic birthright citizenship, in defiance not just of the 14th Amendment but also of the foundational idea that citizens decide who should be a president, not the other way around.
Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to claim broad executive power. The difference this time is not only the enormity of his claims — a level of authoritarian aspiration that far exceeds any other in the modern American age. It’s that the administration hardly even bothers to try to craft legal justifications for its actions.
Many of its orders and memorandums so far are bafflingly vague and internally contradictory, some checkered with embarrassing errors, others largely devoid of references to law. These are not the strategic moves of a legal A team focused on insulating itself against judicial correction, or teeing up a model case to persuade the courts to move the law in a new direction. These seem more like the orders of a team unconcerned with the risks of any legal challenge at all.
Is it true that the law poses no serious obstacle to the ambitions of the new administration’s leaders? Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court is at a historical polling low, and a large majority say the Supreme Court is more motivated by politics than law. The left, in particular, seems prone to despair about whether the courts will slow our autocratic slide. But that despair is premature. The legal system is not so easily dismissed.
The assumption that the courts will simply capitulate to Mr. Trump is based on some important misunderstandings — starting with the meaning of Trump v. United States, in which the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have substantial immunity from criminal liability for official conduct while in office. As shocking as the decision was, criminal or even civil liability is only one way that our legal system can check executive overreach. Another way — far more relevant here — is by ordering government agencies to take (or stop taking) some action.
That is what a Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour, did last week in temporarily blocking Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship order. That is also what the lawsuits filed in response to the freeze on federal grants seek. The president’s personal immunity from criminal prosecution is irrelevant to these cases.
What’s more, the courts are not so dominated by partisan judges that any action challenging a Republican president will inevitably fail. Between 2017 and 2021, Mr. Trump succeeded in appointing more than 200 judges to the federal bench, and Republican-appointed justices held a majority on the Supreme Court throughout. Yet researchers have since found that the first Trump administration had the worst win-loss record of cases before th
In court challenges involving administrative agency disputes, the administration was unsuccessful more than 75 percent of the time, including some of the cases that mattered to Mr. Trump most.
But even that abysmal record understates how often the law functioned to thwart many of Mr. Trump’s most lawless efforts. Lawyers within the government successfully deterred him from some of the worst abuses of power well before the matter got anywhere near a court — including his attempts in his previous term to use the Department of Justice to pursue politically motivated prosecutions.
Of course, Mr. Trump and his people have vowed that will never happen again. That’s why they’re in the process of replacing career lawyers inside the Justice Department with people whose personal loyalty they trust more.
But getting lawyers to back absolutely anything Mr. Trump wants may not be as easy as the president and his advisers think. Politicians can lie all they like, but lawyers are bound by professional rules of ethics. Refusing to follow all of Mr. Trump’s orders could endanger their jobs; following him too blindly, however, may risk endangering their entire careers (as Michael Cohen, Rudy Giuliani and others learned the hard way). That may explain why some of these early orders in the new administration are largely devoid of specific legal guidance — and why they stand a fair chance of being overturned in the courts.
None of this is to suggest that the courts — or the law more broadly — are a singular force that can keep our constitutional democracy from veering into autocracy. Quite the contrary: Mr. Trump will lose some of these cases in the courts, but almost certainly not all of the Supreme Court compared with any other administration since at least 1937.
Presidents have enormous power under the law; part of what Mr. Trump is doing is just invoking the breadth of that authority. The deeply conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court will matter in some cases. So, too, will the reaction of the public and Congress if and when the administration moves to defy the courts outright.
But already, the Trump administration has backpedaled on the spending freeze, after less than two days of public outcry and confusion. That’s why it matters that all kinds of forces, from Congress to state legislatures to popular pressure, find the courage to push back against truly lawless executive actions.
For those worried about the fate of our democracy, it would be foolish to rely on the rule of law alone. But it would also be wrong to simply write it off as a meaningless check on presidential authority. That kind of pessimism becomes our self-fulfilling fate. The new president may be aiming for authoritarian control. But the law is not fully his yet.
Some feel the best way to deal with a tyrant like Trump is to treat hium as a lame duck president who cannot run again in 2028 but Trump is already lookingg for waays to stay in power and he doesnt care what the law or the Constitution says.
Donald John Trump is a dangerous domestic terrorist who threatens our democracy, our Coonstituion and our future.. It must be recognized as such and be dealt with as one.
Copyright © 2025 Capitol Hill Blue
