Donald Trump

The Guardian -“We’ve seen the many ways in which Trump has sought to undermine Congress, and now he’s seeking to undermine the judicial bench,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard law school professor. “This is a president who is arrogating to himself the powers of a dictator.”

For 17 years, until she retired in 2011, Gertner sat as a federal judge in the district court of Massachusetts. There she dealt with the defiance of individual defendants.

“I had people who had been sentenced and didn’t follow the rules of their release, for sure,” she said.

Not once in almost two decades of service, however, did she have to confront a public officeholder openly flouting her authority. “Governmental officials defying the court? It never came up. Literally, never happened.”

Now Gertner is observing Trump’s belligerence towards the courts unfold with mounting concern. “There’s been nothing like this in American history. There have been people who threatened not to obey the law, especially post the civil war, but this is a sustained attack on the courts we haven’t seen before.” 

RBReich  Trump has dropped investigations and enforcement actions against 89 lawbreaking corporations, including:

-42 cases at the CFPB
-15 cases at the DOJ
-6 cases at the EEOC
-7 crypto cases at the SEC

It's a new golden age for corporate criminals

Alex Shephard, New Republic - On Friday, as he and Vice President JD Vance tore into Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office on live TV, President Donald Trump briefly broke the fourth wall. “his,” Trump said as he surveyed the cameras surrounding them, “is going to make great television.” 

It was a moment that summed up Trump’s political project. Here he was, screaming at the leader of a free nation that had been invaded by a longtime American rival three years earlier and who, until recently, had been feted in Washington by leaders of both parties. But more than that, Trump was radically altering America’s foreign policy in real time, shifting the balance of power globally in favor of authoritarianism, and starting a chain reaction that could lead to Russia invading other neighbors and possibly even triggering World War III. It was compelling television, certainly.

Three days later, it happened again. As Trump spoke on live television Monday about the tariffs he was slapping the following day on goods from neighbors Mexico and Canada, as well as longtime trading partner China—tariffs that pretty much every expert agrees risk hurtling America into recession—you could watch, in the bottom right corner of Fox News’s feed, the stock market plummet. Over the course of 20 seconds, the market fell by three points per second; by the end of the day, more than $3 trillion—the total gains for the first two months of the year—had been wiped out. It was, to be fair, pretty great television—particularly once the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme was added.

Trump’s experience as the decade-long host of The Apprentice, where he played the straight-talking rich boss, has always been crucial to understanding both his appeal and his approach to politics. He sees the presidency as a television show, and his decisions are often driven by the desire to make good television above all else. This can lend a sense of unreality to his presidency, as if what we’re watching either isn’t real or is an exaggerated version of reality.