Subject: Re: John Oliver Weighs In
Which is why efforts to use Project 2025 to tarnish Trump are doomed to fail.

This debate is becoming very meta meta meta.

Will "attacking" the content of Project2025 succeed in "tarnishing" Trump? None of those words mean anything.

Trump 1.0 demonstrated two fundamental problems with a person like Trump being in power. First, his very existance at the top of an Administration immediately reduces the number of people willing to serve in ANY appointed position of power by probably 75%. At this point, anyone with two brain cells who might get nominated to a Cabinet position or any other high profile role knows all of the following probabilities are SKY HIGH in a Trump led Administration:

* being asked to do something unethical
* being pressured to do something illegal
* being tossed out at the drop of a hat and being defamed by the President
* having your family attacked should you ever offend the Orange One
* needing hundreds of thousdands of dollars for legal counsel
* spending YEARS in seedy little rooms with lawyers and courtrooms with judges

Any person willing to face those risks and take a high profile position working for Trump is either a saint or a friggin' IDIOT or ZEALOT. Last time I checked the idiots to saint ratio has to be at least 1000:1 so the caliber of management that will be present in a Trump Administration 2.0 will easily be the lowest in US history (and that's including Trump 1.0).

Second, the Supreme Court has fundamentally distorted the balance of powers within government and thus grossly weakened government accountability to the public with its recent rulings. The court completely gutted a forty year precedent regarding administrative law and "deference" in what perhaps is the biggest rejection of the concept of stare decisis in western legal history. The court also fabricted a new power of Presidential immunity and matching "auto-tainting" of evidence related to anything the President claims to involve their decision making about official acts. These decisions will multiply the workload of administrative departments by orders of magnitude in order to justify any regulatory ruling they make. They will also make any corrupt actions taken within these departments (on their own corrupt impulse or at the direction of a corrupt President) nearly IMPOSSIBLE to INVESTIGATE, much less PROSECUTE. Trump's actions in his first Administration showed that a political strategy aimed at making people distrust government by nihillistically paralyizing it from doing anything to help anyone is much easier to execute than executing a strategy by which government actually helps the public good.

Project2025 identifies DOZENS of tactics that now can be pursued with far less accountability thanks to the Supreme Court that can inflict DECADES of damage to civil rights, voting rights, workplace safety, environmental protections, public health and long term economic improvements without relying on a single act of legistlation being passed. All of the required ingredients are already present:

* paralyzed legislative process controlled by big business special interests
* paralyzed executive branch departments now subjected to every decision being litigated
* a cadre of corrupt zealots eager to take the reins of those departments to add to the paralysis and chaos
* a public conditioned to assume government can't work because Republicans have purposely starved it of required resources

Arguing that opponents of Project2025's goals shouldn't devote time explaining its risks to America's future because it won't sufficiently taint Trump to block HIS election overlooks the fact that there is more than Biden versus Trump on the ballot. Until voters do something really stupid like not only voting for Trump over Biden but putting Republicans in the majority in the Senate as well as the House, there is still a chance at using existing checks and balances in our system to thwart Trump 2.0. If Americans put Republicans in control of the White House and both branches of Congress, it is OVER. Aggressive efforts to expose the ideas in Project2025 and explain their impact on every day life is perhaps THE best way to explain to average Americans how fringe the current Republican party has become and far backwards the country will slide if its supporters gain control.


WTH