They Foresaw Trump’s Rush To Autocracy – They Just Didn’t Think It Would Happen So Fast
HuffPost
From his creation of a ‘papers-please’ police force to unilateral military actions to his disregard of court orders, even those who warned it would happen are alarmed.
WASHINGTON ― One year into Donald Trump’s return to the White House, those who warned Americans that he would try to rule as an autocrat confess they got one important detail wrong.
They never imagined it could happen so fast.
“This was the picture we were painting,” said Geoff Duncan, the former lieutenant governor of Georgia who was among a cadre of Republicans urging voters to support Democrat Kamala Harris over Trump. “Unfortunately, we’re having to live this out.”
From the moment he took the oath of office, Trump immediately began consolidating power, issuing a string of executive orders declaring various “emergencies” to justify expanded unilateral authority to waive rules and laws. He pardoned hundreds of violent domestic terrorists who had assaulted police officers to advance his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. He cut programs already funded by Congress and spent money on things for which they had not. He defied federal judges. He declared he had the authority to kill suspected drug smugglers on the high seas and then to attack a foreign country, without congressional approval, to capture its dictator. And most recently, he has deployed a de facto secret police force in military gear, answerable only to him, in a city where he is broadly despised. One 37-year-old mother and American citizen is already dead, shot in the head following a dispute with immigration agents.
Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor of government and co-author of 2018’s “How Democracies Die,” said he did not foresee how quickly Trump would move.
The Homeland Security Secretary also accused Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of refusing to “protect their own people."
The White House deputy chief of staff's bizarre claim came after a New York Post columnist wrote that “local cops have gone AWOL."
The high court is considering whether President Donald Trump can fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, as he said he would do in late August, in an unprecedented attempt to remove one of the seven members of the Fed's governing board.
President Donald Trump cited his Nobel Peace Prize snub as a justification for his push to acquire Greenland in a letter to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere.
"I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace," the president wrote in an extraordinary message to the Norwegian prime minister.
“It’s literally the end of the world," said comedian Tim Dillon.
It went around in circles.
The Duke of Sussex is the lead litigant in a case full of high-profile plaintiffs who accuse the publisher of the Daily Mail of invading their privacy.
The newspaper's conservative editorial board pointed out the "sad irony" of the president's bid to seize the island.
A protester let the president know exactly how he feels about U.S. efforts to take Greenland.
“CBS News leadership has always been committed to airing the 60 MINUTES CECOT piece as soon as it was ready,” a spokesperson said.
Scott Bessent argued that Trump is “looking beyond next year to what could happen for a battle in the Arctic.”
They're also intensifying efforts to persuade the President against imposing the levies over Greenland.