David Frum: How to Defend Against a Lame-Duck Trump

[highplainsdem]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/how-defend-us-against-lame-duck-trump/616774/

This piece is well worth reading, and sharing, in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts:

-snip-

The resolution funding the federal government expires December 11. If it is not renewed, the U.S. government will shut down, as it did for 35 days in December 2018 and January 2019, the longest shutdown in U.S. history. That shutdown badly hurt the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter of 2018.

-snip-

After his presidency, Trump will face a large number of legal hazards. Most of them involve state law, but some will be federal, especially credible allegations of tax fraud. Trump has asserted a right to pardon himself. Many legal scholars disagree. But the question has never been tested in court over the long history of the U.S. presidency, and who knows what a John Roberts–led Supreme Court majority reinforced by Amy Coney Barrett will think of the matter? Trump seems likely to try the pardon—and in doing so might plunge the nation into convulsion.

Making things more complicated is the uncertainty about what a president can pardon for. The IRS has the power to forgive all or part of a taxpayer’s liability. Can a president direct the IRS to forgive his own debt? That question has never arisen. It may arise now.

-snip-

Trump never realized his fantasy of locking up his political opponents, and now it seems he never will. But there is one last service his politicized attorney general can do for him before returning to whatever law firm will have him—and that is dirtying those opponents on the way out the door.

-snip-

The 4th point, not excerpted there, is Trump just decided to stay at Mar-a-Lago until Biden's sworn in, forcing the federal government to pour more money into his property.

[Newest Reality]

1. This will be a first, maybe.

I've never seen a rabid duck before.

[Cirque du So-What]

3. Even a rabid duck

has no teeth.

[dalton99a]

2. Trump lives for revenge. He will try and burn everything down

After his bankruptcies in the late 1980s, Trump extolled his “art of the comeback” in a 1997 book. Nearing age 75, and after repudiation at the polls, he is unlikely to have any comeback awaiting him. But he can at least work for the gratification of his vindictiveness, inflicting a final act of retaliation against the nation he will now hate, just as a narcissist always hates those who escape his domination and control.

[highplainsdem]

4. And Michael Cohen has pointed out Trump might even start a war.

[Mike 03]

5. Michael Beschloss said the same thing.

[Mike 03]

6. There is something viscerally repulsive about this idea

Trump could pardon himself. I'm not a lawyer, but I just seriously doubt this can be possible.

[tritsofme]

8. It's very much an open question.

The Constitution says the only limit is: “except in Cases of impeachment”

However there is a long standing legal tradition that a man cannot be a judge in his own cause.

[David__77]

9. It seems pretty clear to me based on the text that he can.

Of course, that would do nothing outside of federal law.

[MyOwnPeace]

7. I'm just SO tired of him......

I'm almost willing to say that ANYTHING will be worth it - just to have him gone!!!