Ideas | The new rules in the Trump era

I felt like I was watching two different presidential transitions happen. The official was already there, with all his pride and play. What we call a peaceful transition. The State of the United States Presidential Election. I watched Vice President Kamala Harris lead the election verification. He lost. I watched President Joe Biden welcome his successor, President Donald Trump, back to the White House. The Honorable William J. Clinton I watched every former living president gather under the Capitol rotunda to honor Trump’s second inauguration. How different this inauguration was from four years ago, when the mob had just stormed the Capitol. When Trump tried to include the election results and failed, he did not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. Today we celebrate the victory of a candidate, but the cause of democracy. And in this hour, my friends, democracy reigned. This transition, which is an official transition of government power, was peaceful. However, there has been another transition that happened not in the government, but in the political system, a transition in the rules and expectations of power. There’s some big news coming out of the White House tonight. President Biden is survived by his son, Hunter Biden. For months, the president has insisted he won’t. Certainly, the rallying cry for President Biden comes from all sides. And it’s not just Republicans who cry hypocrisy. I understand Joe Biden’s forgiveness of Hunter Biden. Hunter has become a personal vindication of the Trumpist right. Hunter Biden is guilty of human trafficking, and we have the ticket, Mr. Biden, and the idea that they will take out their revenge on him one by one seems very real. Joe Biden has lost two children. Others may disagree. I had trouble refusing to lose a third. President Biden left the White House with the pardon at the 11th hour. But then came many other pardons, culminating in the pardons of Anthony Fauci and most of the Biden family. It would set a terrible precedent. And it’s not just forgiveness. There was a refusal to implement the TikTok ban that Biden signed into law. And with that came the strange decision declaring that the Equal Rights Amendment had now been ratified, as Virginia ratified it in 2020, becoming the 38th state to do so. Today, I am affirming the Equal Rights Amendment to remove all necessary barriers to inclusion in the United States Constitution. Today, the equal rights amendment is the law of the land today. But this is not true. It was not accepted. Congress set a 1982 deadline for ratification. Biden’s own Justice Department opinion is that Virginia’s late action is meaningless. The season was not approved, and the Biden administration knew it was not approved. All of this is just an effort to make the president stronger, a real result. And why did his president wait for the last day of his rule. Changing the Constitution under a controversial theory is not what you do by walking out the door. Biden in 2020 did nothing on major issues like amnesty. He said he wouldn’t, and then he did. Biden’s acceptance of the new administration makes sense, in its own way. Presidential power is what the president can do. I am not naive. I know that the president has been testing the limits of his power since the beginning of the Republic. But for a president like Biden, whose core message is about preserving America’s constitutional democracy, and not only that, but the illegitimate system of norms and values ​​and behaviors that make up this system. But for this President to leave in this way is a deep statement for him. The message may be nothing. Maybe it’s acceptance because it’s clear what needs to be done now. The beginning of the second term of office of Donald Trump certainly revealed a president who intends to govern as much as he can. Trump immediately announced that he was declaring birthright citizenship invalid, changing the clear language of the Constitution and daring the courts to block it. He gives TikTok a clean bill of rights, so he can find a way to save it. He forgives the crime on January 6. He called the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and Denali Mount McKinley. I was shocked at Trump’s inauguration speech that almost everything that was said was an executive action that Trump would take and the courts would decide to approve or deny. He didn’t talk much about the law. He wants to convince Congress to pass. What interests Trump, what can he do alone. And watching Trump take the oath of office from a comfortable seat are the CEOs of America’s largest mind-control sector. There was Elon Musk, owner of X and Tesla Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. And a bit further away is the CEO of TikTok. For all of Trump’s talk of manufacturing jobs and auto companies and infrastructure, the CEOs of GM and GE and Ford and Caterpillar were not in that room. This is not just a collection of wealthy Americans. This is an oligarchy deliberately gathered in front of Trump. All of this comes just days after the Trump family launched a crypto coin in their own name, a coin you can’t use. It’s just a way of investing in Trump’s wealth. To invest in Trump. To make him rich. The meme coin has shot up to over $70, and the Trump family and their associates appear to own 80 percent of the coin, making their fortune worth billions of dollars. And then Melania Trump. He launched his own meme currency, which also backfired, although it appears to be undermining the value of Trump’s meme currency. All of this is crazy even trying to describe it. But the end of Melania’s memes came after she sold her biopic and another project as an executive producer to Amazon for $40 million. The extent of iconography and grift these days is amazing, and it’s out in the open. It’s not that politics will be free from corruption in 2018 or 2022. But this is the new era of trouble, the power grab. And who will stop Trump and his family. Who will tell them no. We talk about America’s system of government as if it were something concrete bound by the Constitution and institutions, like a belt around the waist. But the main factor is just the trench coat. Break the rules and everything changes. I can imagine what we see, which leads to resistance. I don’t think it’s safe. I don’t think it’s good politics to smear America’s face with this oligarchy and corruption. I also see that it leads to the consolidation of power as Trump and his allies unite to protect their power, unite to help each other, as has happened in many other countries. But we are entering a new era. Power did not simply pass from one president to another. It moved from one regime to another, one rule to another. And you see it. This is clear because the previous government has ended even though the new one has not yet started.