No. of Recommendations: 2
But Donald Trump seems to be winding up for a major attempt to grab absolute power
Does it seem that way to you? It doesn't seem that way to me at all. He's stopped even joking about a third term. He has openly discussed the jockeying to succeed him. He's failing on numerous fronts to get what he wants (SAVE Act! Casey Means! Lower interest rates! Filibuster! Tariffs!) and hasn't done anything extreme about any of those things.
He certainly engages in a bunch of shocking disregard of past norms, because he's a guy that doesn't like to believe anyone who tells him when the stove is hot. He wants to touch the stove anyway. Which BTW is not an uncommon trait among certain types of real estate developers - I have had a few clients over the years whose attitude is that they want to engage in literally the most extreme types of bargaining, even if the consequences are terrible and it's unlikely to be successful, you never know unless you go for it.
But he hasn't really done anything remotely like what people are talking about here. He's not calling out troops to Capitol Hill to threaten John Thune (or Susan Collins) over the filibuster, or declaring a national emergency so he can seize the Fed and set interest rates himself, or ordering the treasury to move the $1.776 billion fund into an off-shore account and damn the courts. He's still always trying to find a fig leaf, a veneer, a wisp of a plausible excuse so that he always has a hidey-hole to retreat to, and so he can try to get someone else to go along with it. And when he doesn't have that....he TACO's.
It's just weird to see Democrats do the same "incredibly weak but also incredibly dangerous" cognitive dissonance with Trump that they more clearly see is silly when conservatives do it to trans people or immigrants or what have you. Trump's a senile old man who can't stay awake in a cabinet meeting and immediately gets bored with Iran the moment things don't go his own way....and he's the most dangerous and capable political operative who ever lived!
The truth is that he's a politician who has a very narcissistic approach to governance and business, enjoys enormous popularity among the GOP base but among few others, and is so bad at politics that other than primarying people he has absolutely no way of dealing with people who won't give him what he wants. It's why he keeps failing to get what he wants, over and over again, even with his enormous political assets within the party. If your ostensible authoritarian's main move when the legislature his party controls balks him is do nothing more than petulantly cancel a bill-signing ceremony (but still not veto the bill!), that shouldn't have you quaking in your boots.
