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The latest federal case against Donald Trump is putting a spotlight on the role of false and baseless claims in his presidency. The indictment alleges that the former president and his co-conspirators used lies for the criminal purpose of overturning the 2020 election. For some scholars of history, its forensic look at how speech underpinned an alleged conspiracy to illegally retain power helps to situate Trump into larger historical patterns.
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How many of his fans know he was probably lying, and supported him anyway because they perceive that as normal, well-adapted-to-modern-life behavior? He’s a symptom, not a cause.
He’s a puppet of foreign forces.
Either way, it doesn’t really matter where he came from, that’s functionally irrelevant. Managing to gain popularity is the real problem, and it’s representative of something worse.
You know how reality tv is total garbage, but its also still kinda popular? They keep making more because we keep watching it. Or clickbait headlines. They produce them because they work.
It doesn’t matter where these things come from. What matters is how they succeed, and what we can understand about that. That way we can better combat them.
You’re, of course, right.
“What Trump is doing is, he’s asking for personal loyalty to him to outweigh the rule of law,” said Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. "We see this in any authoritarian takeover of a system. We see the authoritarian say, ‘Devotion to me is more important than the rule of law.’ "
On NPR this morning, they were talking about efforts by Trump and aligned Republicans to give the president more power to direct federal agencies - that agencies in the administration should be beholden to the president himself, not the office or something broader.
They were interviewing a former Trump administration official (I forget what he was). The interviewer asked if that would mean Trump, if elected, could direct the DOJ to drop the investigation against himself. The guy said yes, he should be able to, but wouldn’t do it because it wouldn’t be the right thing. The interviewer said, “So you’re saying that he could, but we could trust him not to.” The guy say yes.
Meanwhile most of us know the main reason Trump is even running is to try and stay out of jail.
So the argument trump and his ilk use, that Biden is using the DOJ (hint; he isn’t) to persecute trump would be a valid action as he is the president and is allowed to, is moot? Or is only 1 specific potential president allowed to use this logic?
Yeah, that’s a great point that I wished the interviewer had asked. Something like “If what you want was in place today, wouldn’t the accusation that the DOJ is only going after Trump because Biden wants them to be considered fair or appropriate use?”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The latest federal case against Donald Trump is putting a spotlight on the role of false and baseless claims in his presidency.
For some scholars of history, its forensic look at how speech underpinned an alleged conspiracy to illegally retain power helps to situate Trump into larger historical patterns.
“All authoritarian leaders have cults of personality,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
But Ben-Ghiat said in her studies of authoritarian leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Silvio Berlusconi and Jair Balsonaro, there was precedent for this.
“What Trump is doing is, he’s asking for personal loyalty to him to outweigh the rule of law,” said Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.
The case will likely focus on statements that Trump and co-conspirators allegedly made in the weeks between the 2020 election and the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
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