Donald Trump’s call to violence was never his backup plan. It wasn’t his Plan B, held in reserve in case he couldn’t win fair and square. Cheating was never Trump’s second choice. It was his plan from the very beginning, because it’s never enough to win by the rules. To Trump, you have to prove you’re better than those rules. Winning within the system is a sign of weakness; beating the system is the only thing that matters.
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Pundits have focused a lot of attention on how much Republicans have done to protect Donald Trump, regardless of how outrageous or destructive his behavior has been. But less has been said about the things Republicans have learned from Trump about how to engage in that behavior themselves. Here are four ways they’ve done just that.
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Censure was created as an alternative to expulsion that’s designed admonish an elected official for ethical misconduct or violations of a legislature’s rules. And that’s exactly how Democrats in favor of such a move would have used it to rebuke Trump. If sicking a violent mob on the Capitol isn’t an ethical violation, it’s hard to say what is. That’s not political, but the way Republicans have been using censure is.
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The entire impeachment process is built on a false premise: that politicians are fit to judge their own. It may have worked in theory in 1787, but it doesn’t work in theory or in practice now. Using a partisan grand jury and a partisan panel of political jurists to decide the fate of a sitting president (or any other partisan figure) is about as sensible as allowing members of Congress to redraw their own districts. When you trust the foxes to guard the henhouse, you shouldn’t be surprised if all your eggs have been broken and the chickens have been butchered.
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Despite the founders’ intent to create a nation that was welcoming to those of all beliefs, an aura of awe and majesty has been superimposed on both those founders and the document they produced. They’re seen as prophets of sorts, and the Constitution they produced as holy writ: inspired and inerrant. To question it, or them, is seen as unpatriotic.
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The insurrection at the Capitol was an act of war, at the direction of the second president of the Confederate States of America. That would be Donald John Trump. This isn’t another civil war. It’s the same one that supposedly ended 150 years ago.
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