Trump rule

Washington Times -  Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said vaccines can stay, but parts of the Food and Drug Administration need to go, as he prepares for a possible position in the second Trump administration.“I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview with NBC News, adding that he’s not “anti-vaccine” like some people say he is.

“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he said. “So I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”

Washington Post - Donald Trump’s return to the White House signals a significant breakdown of an already battered democracy, experts say. Almost as dangerous, they contend, much of the electorate sees him as democracy’s savior.  “We’ve already been in a process over the last 10 years of democratic decay,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of “How Democracies Die,” among other books on the subject. “This election will just hasten that decline.”

Trump — who was impeached twice, convicted of some crimes and charged with others, judged liable for sexual abuse and fined hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil fraud trial — campaigned on instituting sweeping changes to the country, including mass deportations of immigrants, broad-based tariffs, dramatically pared-back climate regulations, and a purge of “deep state” bureaucrats.

But it is not Trump’s individual policy proposals that worry history and democracy scholars as much as his continued denial of reality that he lost the 2020 presidential election and his role in encouraging his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol. The failure of the courts and Congress to hold him accountable for those actions signals an unofficial takeover of the levers of government by a charismatic, strongman figure who has remade the Republican Party in his image, these democracy scholars say. He is poised to start a second term with broad legal immunity, granted by a reshaped Supreme Court upon which he has exerted significant influence. 

Hartmann Report -  Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations could take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.

In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.

In the 200 preceding years — all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776 — no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.

The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that “money is the same thing as free speech.” In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:

“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.” 

Washington Post - What Trump has promised to do on ‘day one’ as president 

NPR - -Trump has remarked that his tariffs would generate enough revenue to fund other aspects of his agenda, NPR’s Scott Horsley says. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that Trump’s overall economic plans could add nearly $8 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. Economists have also noted that some of his policies, such as the deportation of immigrant farm workers, could lead to higher prices on things like groceries.

Politico -Donald Trump’s victory means the nation’s first convicted-criminal-turned-president-elect is headed for the White House instead of a prison cell.That’s because Trump’s Nov. 26 sentencing hearing in the hush money case almost certainly won’t happen.“I think any reasonable judge wouldn’t sentence the president-elect,” said Jill Konviser, a retired New York trial judge.

Imposing a sentence now — even a non-prison sentence like home confinement, probation or community service — would interfere with the soon-to-be president’s duties, legal experts say. In theory, the judge who presided over the hush money trial, Justice Juan Merchan, could try to proceed with the sentencing as scheduled and order that any sentence be deferred until 2029, when Trump will complete his term. But even that would pose problems, as Trump’s lawyers are sure to argue that hauling the president-elect into a state courtroom in the middle of the presidential transition would impede the orderly transfer of power.

“His lawyers will say he’s busy with the transition and therefore he won’t show up, and they will ask that any sentencing be adjourned until after the presidency,” predicted former prosecutor Catherine Christian. 

Hartmann Report - Donald Trump is preparing to crash the American economy. He intends to do it by tearing up vital parts of our American government. He may even hire Elon Musk to pull it off.And from his point of view, this is not going to be a bad thing. The farther the economy crashes, the greater the buying opportunity for billionaires.

It all has to do with something called the administrative state. While it’s not sexy or even particularly interesting to the average American voter, having a strong administrative state is essential to a high-functioning economy.  A strong administrative state is the only thing that protects entrepreneurs and small businesses from being squashed like bugs by monopolistic behemoths, and small businesses are our nation’s main growth engine.

For example, over 70 percent of all new jobs created since 2019 were created by small businesses, producing almost 13 million new jobs over the past 25 years. Small business creation is up 50 percent over Trump’s years because the Biden administration has been enforcing the rule of law, including taking on the giant tech monopolies. Small businesses now account for over 43 percent of all American economic activity.

 A strong administrative state is also the only thing that can protect the environment from those who’d destroy it for their own profits. It’s the only thing that can protect consumers from defective or even deadly products and food or drug contamination. It our only defense against predatory banks, airlines, and insurance companies, among others. A strong administrative state that follows and enforces the rule of law — as opposed to the kind of grift-driven kleptocracies typical of strongman governments — is essential, in other words, to a functioning national economy.

Here in America, we see this best in the contrast between lightly bureaucratic and largely unregulated Red states and more bureaucratic and regulated (and taxed) Blue states and counties. While Red and Blue states are represented in Congress about 50/50, as the Brookings Institution found a few years ago:

“Biden’s winning base in 509 counties encompasses fully 71% of America’s economic activity, while Trump’s losing base of 2,547 counties represents just 29% of the economy.”

 Some expected actions and policies under Trump rule