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Donald Trump will always behave as though he’s in command, and rules don’t apply to him. This is a tactical aspect of Republican politics, but (conveniently for Trump) it’s part of his nature.
If his secret police shoot a 37 year old mother in the face, he’ll call it justifiable homicide, even if it unfolds one day after he canonizes the insurrectionist Ashlii Babbit.
He seems to have ordered his Justice Department in recent days to criminally investigate Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell over cost-overruns in a headquarters renovation project. Same Trump who demolished the East Wing after insisting he would never do so, and has illegally ordered up the construction of a palace ballroom that grows more expensive week by week.
It’s exhausting. But it’s mostly in service of fostering an illusion of forward momentum. Trump, inevitable; his opponents, hopeless.
This didn’t fool retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) who promised to block Trump’s nominee to replace Powell until Trump stops persecuting him.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) agreed, warning that Trump’s attempt to strong arm the Fed means “Congress needs to investigate the Department of Justice.”
In light of their pushback, markets reacted quietly: There goes Donald Trump again, doing something impetuous-but-expressive because he dislikes Powell personally. It was a bet that the immediate damage to Fed independence would be well contained, and by Monday night, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, pretended it was all a big misunderstanding. “The word ‘indictment’ has come out of Mr. Powell’s mouth, no one else’s. None of this would have happened if they had just responded to our outreach.”
This is a good thing, relative to the likeliest alternative. But it’s also where complacency becomes a real problem. There’s almost certainly more afoot here than a half-cocked effort to punish Powell. Trump’s grip on authoritarian power is brittle, but he’s making steady progress toward establishing a legacy of corrupted institutions that will rule in his image long after he’s gone. The plan is to make the country ungovernable unless he or one of his loyalists is in charge.
OBEY WATCH
First, let me make the case that Trump is struggling on multiple fronts, not just the narrow front of ginning up revenge prosecutions.
Trump staked his authoritarian project on a bet that the public would be much more tolerant of state-sanctioned violence against the population than of dissident violence against agents of the state. That he could deputize goons by the tens of thousands, and his opponents would have to respond with complete docility, or lose the battle for public opinion.
As recently as a few months ago, through this same performance of inevitability, he’d convinced most political observers that he could get away with endless civil rights abuses, so long as he claimed one lazy pretext (crime) or another (immigration), while the resistance would have to maintain an unblemished record of non-violence.
That double standard is untenable. It’s why I wrote this piece. But as a practical matter, Trump seems to have lost the bet...