Trump declares war on America

Is Trump a tyrant? Or does he just play one on Twitter?

The debate over these questions goes back to the earliest days of the Trump administration. Though I've gone back and forth during the past three and a half years, I've usually sided with the skeptics. Trump talks (and tweets) like an autocrat. He clearly would love to control the country like a dictator. He may well be preparing a sizable segment of the population for an authoritarian future. But Trump himself is, if anything, an unusually weak president, with very few accomplishments, most of them enacted with executive orders that quite often get ignored by executive branch departments and agencies or shot down by the courts, and all of which will be vulnerable to reversal by Trump's successor.

Yet the case has always been a complicated one, for one thing because the words a president uses matter a great deal. But beyond that, it's complicated because, despite Trump's feebleness and ineptitude, he practices a style of politics that actively short-circuits liberal democratic norms, pushing presidential powers beyond normal boundaries in order to provoke a reaction on the part of his ideological opponents that will, in turn, advance his own political prospects and justify further unprecedented authoritarian acts. Call it a slow ratchet in the direction of dictatorship.

The most blatant example of the Trump presidency is happening right now — with the Department of Homeland Security deploying on the streets of American cities (Portland in recent days, perhaps Chicago and elsewhere by next weekend) what The New York Times calls "officials from a group known as BORTAC, the Border Patrol's equivalent of a SWAT team, a highly trained group that normally is tasked with investigating drug smuggling organizations." These federal agents — driving unmarked vans, wearing battle fatigues without badges, lacking training in crowd control, sometimes responding to protesters with violence — sweep up people on the street and lock them in vehicles without arrest or explanation.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-declares-war-america-094502832.html