Subject: Re: Trump orders DOJ to go after oil companies
Like Alexander, Trump can break a lot of things. We’ve never faced an internal threat from a guy willing to go the lengths he seems willing to go to secure his own reins on absolute power.

And we seem always behind the curve in thinking “Surely he wouldn’t do THAT!”

Again, I just don't see it. He accepts loss after loss after loss, stymied in one effort after another. Congress, the courts, the Fed. If he were willing to go to great lengths to secure the reins on absolute power, surely we would have seen something of it so far.

But nothing. Nothing that says he's willing to go to any lengths to secure absolute power. He doesn't send armed men to visit Kevin Massie or Kevin Powell in the middle of the night to get them to do what he says. He doesn't send armed men into the courts, or into Congress, to force what he wants. When the public gets mad at his use of armed men (Minnesota), he withdraws them. He doesn't spend money that hasn't been appropriated; he won't even decline to spend money in defiance of the Anti-Impoundment Act. When the courts tell him not to do something, he refrains from doing that thing.

All he does to his enemies are legal things. He doesn't disappear them - he investigates them, and then abides by the courts when the investigations get dismissed. He doesn't execute the folks in Congress who defy him - all he does is the perfectly legal (and genuinely democratic!) thing of defeating them in a primary, where they remain in office to the end of their term to defy him further as the YOLO caucus.

He's always willing to go well beyond what a normal President would do - but he never goes to any appreciable lengths to secure absolute power. He picks on the weak, but yields to anyone that has the ability to say no to him. He'll abuse any power he can legally claim to be his, but he never uses the considerable power he has to act extralegally against anyone with any resources to push back. Against them, all he does is whine and lie to his Truth Social followers.

I don't there being any lengths he seems willing to go to secure his own reins on absolute power. At all. He does little more than abuse the powers the Presidency already has, for the most part. That's terrible and disruptive and damaging. But the man has never shown, not for a moment, that he has what's necessary to take the Big Risk - to operate outside the power that he legally has and seize genuine power that he has no articulable claim to. This is not praise. He's just not brave enough, not dedicated enough, not strong enough to be a dictator.