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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.
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.
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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