What Can He Get Away With?

 

A president who intends to govern based on what he can get away with.

--Ezra Klein

As long as Congress is dominated by Republicans, Congress will let him get away with anything and everything. (NB All members of Congress will be up for election in 2026, and a third of the Senate.) That leaves the courts, and we've already witnessed the Supreme Court give him free reign. He's not subject to prosecution. Therefore the law means nothing. The last remaining force that might not let him get away with it is you, the public, the voters, the citizens of the Republic who once upon a time overturned a king and don't especially want another one.

King Trump simply declared birthright citizenship invalid, unilaterally changing the clear language of the Constitution. He is giving TikTok a reprieve from the clean language of the law that Congress passed and Joe Biden signed and the Supreme Court upheld -- so he can figure out a way to save it and simultaneously perhaps enrich himself. (Just a wild guess.) He used his king-like pardoning power to elevate his troop of J6 thugs into a new vigilence posse. He sez he's unilaterally renaming an ocean and a mountain in Alaska, and he sez he wants to simply annex Canada as the 51st state and grab back the Panama Canal, by force if necessary.

Ezra Klein: "The scale of the graft and the grift right now -- it’s astonishing, and it’s all out in the open.

The Trump family launched a "memecoin" in their own name. "You can’t spend it. This isn’t a currency or a piece of decentralized financial infrastructure meant to offer services to the unbanked or commerce to the metaverse. It’s just a way to invest in Trump’s fortunes and invest in Trump. The memecoin shot to more than $70, and the Trump family and its partners seem to own about 80 percent of the coins — making their holdings worth, notionally, tens of billions of dollars."

Then Melania launched her own memecoin after she sold her biopic and another project to Amazon, on which she is an executive producer, for $40 million.

You ain't shit for a king if you can't turn your kingdom into a cash cow.