Trump the Monarch

For John, BLUF:  I don't think President Trump wishes to be a Monarch or Dictator, but I do think he is tired of a huge bureaucracy, and Judiciary, standing between him and what he was elected to do.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful

From The Old Gray Lady, by Professor Damon Linker♠, 4 May 2025.

Here is the lede plus three:

With a blitz of moves in his 100 days in office, President Trump has sought to greatly enlarge executive power.  The typical explanation is that he’s following and expanding a legal idea devised by conservatives during the Reagan administration, the unitary executive theory.

It’s not even close.  Mr. Trump has gone beyond that or any other mainstream notion.  Instead, members of his administration justify Mr. Trump’s instinctual attraction to power by reaching for a longer tradition of right-wing thought that favors explicitly monarchical and even dictatorial rule.

Those arguments — imported from Europe and translated to the American context — have risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.

Mr. Trump’s first months back in office have provided a sort of experiment in applying these radical ideas.  The alarming results show why no one in American history, up until now, has attempted to put them into practice — and why they present an urgent threat to the nation.

Since the 1930s?  Is the author saying that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a right wing nut case?  It would seem so.

As an aside, I would note that if the Federal Bureaucracy and the Media had not messed with the Election in 2020, suppressing the Hunter Biden Laptop (From Hell), Mr Trump would currently be enjoying his retirement in Mara Lago.  Instead, they enforce a sabbatical on him, giving him time to study what he had done wrong in his first term.  And, he learned.

And he wrote:

Here you can see why, for instance, Mr. Trump fired inspectors general at more than a dozen federal agencies, despite law requiring the president to give Congress 30 days notice of, and provide cause for, his intent to dismiss them.

Actually, I don’t.  I think that he should have used the regular process.  Could he have ’suspended” them while he waited the 30 days?  I would think so.

Then:

You can also see why Mr. Trump rejects the very idea of a person or office in the executive branch being independent of his will.

I agree.  If you are an official in the Executive branch, then you are an extension of the President.  If you don’t work for the President, who do you work for?  Who is your manager, and who is your manager’s manager?

As to:

He thinks he has unlimited enforcement discretion, allowing him to choose not to enforce duly enacted legislation, as he has done with the law banning TikTok.

How is he different from President Joseph R Biden?  President Biden ignored laws to allow millions of immigrants into the nation without any due process.  You can call them undocumented, but that just puts emphasis on the lack of following the law, as enacted by the Congress.

But, at the end:

The best way to mitigate that risk is to insist that presidents accept the constraints of ruling within a constitutional order defined by the separation of powers.  And the only way to ensure they will accept such limits may be to demand that those who seek the nation’s highest office display an understanding of those limits and accept them as a necessary bulwark against tyranny.

Multiple guess test or essay test?

When I think of the National Socialist era in German politics I think of the authors Karl Binding (jurist) and Alfred Hoche (psychiatrist) and their 1920 Book, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life.  Yes, I think the Socialism was bad.  And the aggressive foreign policy was bad.  But the worst of it was marrying Eugenics they picked up from us with the ideas of Binding and Hoche, leading, through euthanasia of “worthless eaters" to the Death Camps.

Hat tip to my Middle Brother.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. He writes the newsletter Notes From the Middleground.