Tricky Dick and the Donald

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/tricky-dick-and-donald

Tricky Dick and the Donald
Harold Meyerson
May 24, 2017
Like Nixon, Trump bumps up against an obstinate state.

snip//


The clearest parallel between Nixon and Trump’s attempts to use intelligence agencies to call off the G-Men is the refusal of those officials to do their president’s bidding. In each case, it’s not so much the “deep state” that stands up to the president. It’s the modern state—a bureaucracy of officials who refuse to subvert the workings of law. That’s not to say that political considerations didn’t inform the decisions of Walters, Coats, and Rogers: Weighing in on behalf of their respective presidents in these instances must have looked to them like a sure-fire way to do long-term damage to the agencies they headed.

At some level, Nixon had to understand that—not that it deterred him from authorizing law-breaking and orchestrating a cover-up. It’s not at all clear that Trump does understand that, however. Trump’s vision of government, to whatever extent we can say he has one, is closer to a monarchial court (an aggregation of relatives and flunkeys) than a modern state (with officials and agencies bound more by law than by the president’s whim). Trump’s problem, the source of some of his rage, is not that the state is “deep.” It’s that it’s a state—not a court. His reliance on children, in-laws, and yes-men to counsel him and carry out his impulses may be that of a mad king—a study of Trump and Ludwig of Bavaria would be instructive—but he doesn’t have enough relatives and flunkeys, a critical mass of deferential doofuses, to staff the entire government and thereby rule without challenge.

Good thing Trump didn’t breed like a Saudi monarch. Then there really wouldn’t be anyone in power who could say no.

[Wounded Bear]

1. Trump is the penultimate Republican...

they don't want to govern. They want to rule. There is a difference, although their supporters don't know what that is or care. Our founding fathers did.