"Everyone in the United States must now realise that the Europeans will not go along with this. A line has been crossed here."
www.zeit.de/politik/deut...
This fascinating article doubles as a pocket-guide to the Trumpist regime's Establishment collaborators:
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/b...
"The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world," reads the inscription on the Anderson Memorial Bridge, a point of entry to Harvard Square. Harvard doesn't always perfectly lived up to this ideal. But today it is doing its part.
www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...
It’s like they took the three worst days of the first Trump presidency — Charlottesville, Helsinki and Jan 6th — and used them as the model for every day of the second.
My God.
bsky.app/profile/kept...
After Chamberlain sold him out at Munich, Czech president Edvard Beneš resigned his office. I'm thinking today of his understated, prescient farewell:
"Do not expect from me a single word of recrimination against anyone whomsoever. One day history will judge and pronounce sentence in all equity."
“It was telling that, in Munich, Vance found time to meet Alice Weidel, the AfD’s co-leader, but not with Chancellor Olaf Scholz.”
www.ft.com/content/11f1...
Go back to 1995 and explain that the Nazis return to power in Germany will be encouraged and aided by an authoritarian America First president allied with apartheid-era white South Africans.
For @vanityfair.com , I looked back at Mitch McConnell's decision not to push for Trump's conviction in the Senate after January 6th -- a failure that looks worse and worse as the constitutional order slips away
www.vanityfair.com/news/story/h...
For @vanityfair.com , I looked back at Mitch McConnell's decision not to push for Trump's conviction in the Senate after January 6th -- a failure that looks worse and worse as the constitutional order slips away
www.vanityfair.com/news/story/h...
it is beyond even comically brazen at this point
It's a remarkable state of affairs when a member of Congress needs anonymity to say that the Treasury Secretary is in charge of the Treasury Department.
www.politico.com/news/2025/02...
Double dictators
Trump ran for his second term saying he would be a dictator "for Day One," and his staff made sure to tell the press he was joking. The joke was the part about only doing it for one day.
www.indignity.net/double-dicta...
This, for example, is not the sort of thing you say about a country with a functioning Constitutional order:
I started reading this bone-chilling article wondering if we still have three functioning branches of government. I ended it wondering if we even still have one.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/u...
America's friends and allies should treat us the way they would a friend experiencing a profound psychosis: Don't try to reason with us, de-escalate when possible, hope that we get the help we so desperately need.
bsky.app/profile/trum...
If you wanted to convey an inability to confront an authoritarian constitutional crisis you could consider sending a message like this.
While we Americans cower in our numbness, apathy, and fear, Germans keep taking to the streets to protest the ascent of the far right:
www.zeit.de/gesellschaft...
FDR in 1940: "A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. The vigorous expression of our American community spirit is truly important. The ancient injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself is still the force that animates our faith."
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/h...
Ah yes, just another fight over visions, like Reagan and Tip.
A spending law, passed by Congress and signed by the President, sets the policy per Article I of the Constitution. A new President can't unilaterally override that policy, even temporarily. And that's the point of this provision of the ICA -- to enforce Congress's power of the purse.
If this guy is supposed to be "our Einstein," is it really too much to expect him to understand the very specific historical imagery he is conjuring with his actions and words?
"It's good to be proud of German values, German culture, and not to lose that in some multiculturalism that dilutes everything."
Shiver.
bsky.app/profile/jwmu...
Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.
1/6: For U.S. Presidential Inauguration Day, a short thread of constitutional law and history:
The 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect on October 15, 1933. It decrees that every President's term ends on January 20.
It's Martin Luther King Day, even if it doesn't feel like it. Watching Trump assume the awesome powers of the presidency, I am trying to remember King's words:
"Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that."
A poem for reflection, 01/20/24: "Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes. poets.org/poem/let-ame...
FDR rode to his inauguration beside a stewing, silent Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt, desperate to break the tension, spotted the brand new Commerce Department building Hoover had constructed on Constitution Avenue. "Lovely steel!" he chirped enthusiastically. Hoover said nothing in reply.
What rough beast
Its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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