Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The presidency, for Trump, is a vehicle for his personalist rule, in which all power flows from his person. It is a virtual extension of Trump himself, and in the same way that we control our bodies, he holds authority over the entire body politic, with the power to detain and remove anyone he’d like, without explanation, justification or even cursory legal proceedings. The presidency is also, in this vision, his to use as he sees fit, up to and including endless self-enrichment and personal aggrandizement, with no regard for the public good.

This is the president as elected despot. It is a conception of the office that is inimical to the American political tradition in every respect.

But somewhat more interesting than the president’s abuse of power is the indifference — or active support — of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. One might think that even with its zeal for tax cuts and right-wing social engineering, the conservative movement’s reverence for both the founding fathers and the nation’s revolutionary heritage would not overwhelm a basic respect for the hard-fought rights and privileges of the American way of life. You would think that those who elevate 1776, who fetishize the Constitution as an object and who practically spend every waking moment reminding the public of their patriotic bona fides would, at some point, have something to say about this perversion of the American republic.

You would be wrong. The Republican Party is, with only a few quibbles and some occasionally timid disagreement, united in support of Donald Trump. Conservative intellectuals have spent the last decade spinning endless excuses for the president and his allies. They treat his tyrannical aspirations as little more than a curiosity, or even a justified response to some imagined revolutionary movement of the political and cultural left. Both the MAGA cheerleaders of the Claremont Institute and the Trump rationalizers in the nation’s premier publications agree: Nothing Trump has done, or wants to do, is beyond the pale.’ (from the New York Times)

Many of these opinion pieces are not telling us anything we don’t already know, but it is still sobering to see it all spelled out.