"Holy smokes… Whoa… We're living in A Different World…"
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) February 10, 2025
Trump's had a net positive approval rating for all 21 days of his 2nd term vs. just 11 days during his entire 1st term!
Big reason? 70% say he's doing what he promised vs. just 46% who felt that way by April 2017. pic.twitter.com/Tj3jSAv0rL
It is Year Zero in Washington.
The New Deal era liberal order is being aggressively dismantled.
WSJ:
“I saw a broad and growing sense in Washington that American domestic politics, or at least that part of its politics that comes from Washington, is at a similar inflection point. That the second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past—that stable order, healthy expectations, the honoring of a certain old moderation, and strict adherence to form and the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different—something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.
There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place. Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.
There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century. …”
Apparently, I am not alone in thinking what we are witnessing is the death of the old liberal regime created during the Great Depression and World War II, and the construction of its replacement.
“Americans are prone to venerate our Constitution, mythologizing the founding generation as uniquely wise, and our subsequent constitutional history as a process of evolution toward an ever more perfect union.
But American constitutional history is far more fraught, its evolution a kind of punctuated equilibrium marked by mass extinction of prior forms and precedents. Each of these moments has reshaped the way our Constitution works in fundamental ways, providing a new framework for normal politics for a new era.
The scope of President Trump’s challenge to the existing constitutional order — largely through a blitzkrieg of executive orders, many of them in blatant disregard of established precedent and legislation — suggests we may be in the process of another such discontinuous and disruptive moment.
The question is whether it will transform our constitutional order fruitfully yet again, or accelerate a final degeneration into Caesarism. …
Mr. Trump’s challenge is strikingly different. He aims to unbind the executive from constraints imposed by the other branches and the normal process of administrative lawmaking. To stand, these changes will require the other players in our constitutional order to accept that the president by himself can make changes of such magnitude. That would be a fourth constitutional revolution. …”
Liberals are screaming about authoritarianism, but the public doesn’t seem to be listening.
“With the leader of a failed coup back in the White House and pursuing an unprecedented assault on the constitutional order, many Americans are starting to wrap their mind around what authoritarianism could look like in America. If they have a hard time imagining something like the single-party or military regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, or more modern regimes like those in China or Russia, that is with good reason. A full-scale dictatorship in which elections are meaningless and regime opponents are locked up, exiled, or killed remains highly unlikely in America.
But that doesn’t mean the country won’t experience authoritarianism in some form. Rather than fascism or single-party dictatorship, the United States is sliding toward a more 21st-century model of autocracy: competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbent abuse of power systematically tilts the playing field against the opposition. In his first weeks back in office, Donald Trump has already moved strongly in this direction. He is attempting to purge the civil service and directing politicized investigations against rivals. He has pardoned violent paramilitary supporters and is seeking to unilaterally seize control over spending from Congress. This is a coordinated effort to dig in, cement power, and weaken rivals. …”
More on the “constitutional crisis.”
“There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis, but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope, not a switch. It can be cumulative, and once one starts, it can get much worse.
It can also be obvious, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
“We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,” he said on Friday. “There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.” …”
Joe Biden’s handlers tried and failed to do something similar from the Left.
There are two major differences though: the first is that Republicans have a supermajority on the Supreme Court, which means that any attempt at regime change from Trump and the Right is much more likely to be ratified by the federal courts, and the second is that there is no comparison between the dynamic and aggressive leadership of Trump and his cult of personality and the frailty of Joe Biden.
Note: Lincoln and FDR’s regime changes were ratified by the Supreme Court. Like his predecessors, Trump changed the balance of power on the Supreme Court in his first term.
Leave a Reply