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I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?
I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.
If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?
I think you're completely overestimating the extent to which the President would be openly defied. Trump succeeded in firing a lot of people. If he goes and fires the head of the FBI again there might be another investigation, but the head of the FBI is still fired.
Presidents are not all-powerful, but they are very powerful. Trump was an unusually incompetent one, but even so there's plenty he would be able to do. If he had made the decision to nuke North Korea, North Korea would have gotten nuked.
Not if the entire FBI says "no he's not" and keeps taking orders from him, while ignoring any "replacement," and whoever at Treasury or wherever prints government paychecks keeps paying him on schedule.
There are over two million civilian Federal employees. If all of those two million plus collectively decide that they are not going to obey, enforce, or even acknowledge any orders or appointments from Trump, what can he do himself, as one mere mortal, to compel them to obey?
If the FBI refuses to take orders from him, he declares the entire FBI fired for insubordination.
If they refuse to leave their physical buildings, he declares them to be trespassing on government property and calls up the DC Police to evict them.
If the DC Police refuse to comply and/or are unable to defeat the FBI (which I admit is quite likely), he declares martial law and sends in the troops to retake the rebel-controlled buildings.
All of this is TTBOMK perfectly within his legal authority as President.
I'm not saying Trump would have an easy time of things, but open defiance won't work (at least not without military buy-in, at which point, well, yes, a coup can override "ink on a page"). It's the cases where things just mysteriously don't happen and there's no clear culprit that are the really-hard ones.
On one hand, I agree that it would take other forms than "nah, we're not doing it", on the other even the first response you list would trigger a wave of international hysteria about the rise of fascism.
Also, you do know that US generals were outright lying to Trump about the number of troops deployed to Syria? Does that count as open defiance?
I presume they didn't tell Trump/the public that they were lying to him - at least, not at the time - so that's not "open" defiance. That's more like the sort of thing that I called "really-hard".
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Right but that's not going to happen. You're actually crazy if you think that's going to happen.
If by "it" you mean "mostly peaceful transition of power from the bureaucrats to the kulaks", I agree- it stops being "mostly peaceful".
Per modern attitudes about violence, the side that shoots first is illegitimate. That's something the Left has taken advantage of, but it by no means has a monopoly over it; should the Right start winning peacefully and the Left reply with violence their moral legitimacy (which is the only power they actually have) evaporates.
An assassination is not in the Left's interests; it'd justify turning a soft coup like that into a much harder one.
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So at that point you’re talking about a coup?
And if they do that, do you think the military will simply
Yes.
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In practice, perhaps, but far enough from the traditional picture that too many people probably wouldn't see it as such. (And even if they did, there wouldn't be anything they could do about it.)
And then the question becomes “what does the military do.”
The U.S. military is, historically, committedly apolitical and stays out of civilian political matters. A "a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics," even.
Where there is an in your face coup? What if the president calls up the national guard?
No, a heroic resistance by dedicated civil service to defend Our Democracy against Trump's authoritarian auto-coup via his illegitimate and undemocratic attempt to replace functional government with corrupt, incompetent lickspittles so he can turn America into a Christo-fascist hellscape.
And then they take a page from Gen. Milley and refuse to assist Orange Man in his attempt to become dictator-for-life of Gilead.
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Secret service agents specifically are legally empowered to control the President's movement in certain situations. Presidents are not all powerful, but they are very powerful. Defying the secret service when they say "No Mr President you can't go there, it's not safe" is not one of their powers.
Also, "your greatest democracy in the world"? I would hardly accuse the US of being that.
Curious, what is the source of this legal authority? That sounds facially implausible to me. Constitutionally, the President is not just nominally but actually the ultimate source of executive authority. He can't order the executive agencies to violate valid laws, but I don't see how Congress could Constitutionally constrain the executive the way you describe, and in fact I'm not aware of any such authorizing statute.
USC 3056. They are authorised to protect the President, the President may not refuse their protection, and it is illegal for any person to resist or obstruct them in the performance of their duties.
The President has executive power, but he is required under the Constitution to use his executive power to faithfully execute the law, and that includes the law requiring that the Secret Service protect him.
That's interpreting a provision that is generally applicable to the public as also applicable to the President, which I still think is questionable for the reasons I suggested.
You can ignore the bit about it being illegal to obstruct or resist the secret service if you like - it's not as if a President is ever going to be charged with that anyway. It's still the case that the law requires the secret service to protect the President, and the President is required to faithfully execute the law. So if he orders them to not protect him, they are required to just ignore that order, because it's an unlawful and unconstitutional order.
Leaving aside the expansive understanding of the executive power of discretionary enforcement (is law enforcement required to ignore executive orders to e.g., not deport DACA recipients because this fails to faithfully execute the laws? Is the directive not to enforce marijuana violations still clearly on the books an unlawful and unconstitutional order?) - the President is not obligated to faithfully execute unconstitutional laws, and (Congressional) laws that direct the Executive to exert executive authority in specific ways are not constitutional for separation of powers reasons. I'd say the manner in which the Secret Service, an enforcement wing of an executive department, undertakes its congressionally-authorized duties particularly with respect to the executive specifically, is squarely in the domain of a core executive power into which congressional power may only weakly intrude.
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If they are protecting him and he orders them not to do so, that is, by your reasoning, an unlawful order. If they are pretending to protect him, but are lying and instead restricting him for political reasons, ordering them not to do so is a lawful order even by your reasoning. It would be hard to prove the order is lawful (since the agents are lying and you can't read their minds) but it would be lawful.
All this argument shows is that if government officials are willing to lie and do their jobs unlawfully, they can engage in a coup-by-another-name and make it appear that the president is in the wrong. But the president won't really be in the wrong, he'll just be a victim of a coup-by-another-name.
You don't even need secret service agents to do this. An ordinary police officer willing to lie could arrest the president for a Trumped-up crime and cart him to jail, where he won't be able to go anywhere at all.
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If North Korea nuked the US first then yes, no doubt. If there was strong-seeming evidence that North Korea was about to nuke the US, then probably. But an unprovoked US first strike against North Korea out of the blue? I am not even sure that the military high command would obey an ordinary president who gave such an order, much less Trump.
Ostensibly POTUS has sole discretion in ordering a nuclear strike, but obviously that's not necessarily how things would go in a real situation. I don't know if the nuclear football relays an order directly to a silo or whatever or to the joint chiefs, but in any case someone who isn't trump needs to decide to push the button.
It goes right to the silos, and the people in the silos have been trained and selected specifically so that if they get the order to launch, they'll obey.
There's been several occasions in history where the guy in the silo did not push the button.
I don't believe that's accurate. There have been cases where officers on the ground have identified what they saw as false alarms, and chosen not to act in response. And there are cases where orders to ready nuclear weapons were issued in error and later retracted or aborted. My understanding is that in the latter case, the men in silos almost always obeyed their orders when they believed they were genuine.
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POTUS lacks the legal discretion to start a war outside the structure of a previously congressionally approved war. Self defense side steps this, as does defense of Senate approved treaty allies. But he can't just order a nuke lobbed at any country at any time.
The War Powers Act and every war since Korea (if not even sooner) suggest otherwise. This is separate from the constitutionality of this
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I don't think there's any reason to think that the president can't order a strike at any moment.
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