In Saturday’s edition of Quadrant, Roger Partridge lambasted Donald Trump as an enemy of America’s constitutional democracy. On Sunday, James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland and the author of Democracy in Decline, took his friend and colleague to task.
Let me start this reply to Roger Partridge’s column (‘Trump’s War on Constitutional Democracy‘) by laying my cards on the table. I know Roger Partridge. He is one of the best lawyers in New Zealand. He, like me, has grave worries about the sort of judicial activism or judicial usurpation of the role of Parliament that he sees over across the Tasman (and which, in enervated form, is on clear display here in Australia too). Indeed, Roger and I have worked in parallel and at times together to try to rein back the current imperial judiciary in New Zealand, a set of top judges seemingly intent on making significant inroads into Parliamentary sovereignty simply by decreeing new supposed realities in big-ticket cases. Indeed, in an excellent recent report, ‘Who Makes the Law? Reining in the Supreme Court’, Roger sets out the problems chapter and verse and then offers proposals to ameliorate this big-ticket problem.
He and I are fully in agreement about what is happening in New Zealand and I support all of his proposals. But for my purposes today I thought it best to begin by noting how much he and I agree about the state of Antipodean judicial and constitutional affairs.
I need to note that because I certainly do not agree with how Roger has characterised the first month or so of the second term of President Trump in Saturday’s Quadrant Online. Readers who haven’t done so should first look at what Roger argued. Here’s a sample:
- Roger notes that Trump has made 50 executive orders since taking office a little over a month ago. (Roger does not tell readers that Joe Biden issued 60 such orders in more or less the same amount of time.)
- He condemns Trump’s use of emergency powers as regards justifying tariffs on Mexico and Canada and suspending asylum applications.
- He claims that Trump is trying to rewrite the 14th Amendment by executive order to stop birthright citizenship.
- He praises the lower Federal Court judges who have issued nationwide injunctions to stop the suspension of asylum claims and birthright citizenship applications. Indeed, he cites what some of these judges have said. But Roger never lets readers know that every such injunction-issuing judge was a Democrat appointee.
- He notes J.D. Vance’s questioning of whether unelected judges have this authority to override executive power and Vance’s assertion that such actions by judges is constitutionally illegal. For Roger, that sort of scepticism “reveals a fundamental attack on constitutional government”.
As an aside, when Roger writes a report detailing how New Zealand judges have gone off the rails – and they have – by legislating from the bench is he not in that context ‘openly questioning judicial authority’? And what’s wrong with such questioning? Moreover, there would be plenty of Left-wing Kiwis in the so-called ‘Judge’s Party’ who would word-for-word characterise Roger’s who-makes-the-law critique as ‘a fundamental attack on constitutional government’.
But back to the US. Is the Vice President somehow constitutionally prevented from criticising unelected judges? If so, that’s a constitutional norm I have never heard of and certainly would not support. I think what Roger really appears to dislike is the hint Vance makes that the Trump administration might in extremis simply ignore these lower court injunctions – you know, the way President Lincoln did when he flat out ignored the Supreme Court’s writ of habeas corpus as regards arbitrarily detaining citizens and the way that President Jefferson wrote what he would do if democratic executive government were to be hamstrung by activist judges. I will come back to this issue. Then there are Roger’s claims about the ‘vindictive purges’ of January 6th investigators — the firing of Justice Department lawyers and the FBI agents demoted and dismissed, plus stripping Secret Service protection from former officials. And all of that and a bit more is sandwiched between Roger’s references to how Mussolini came to power. And to Peron in Argentina. And to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
And most overdone, hyperbolic and sensationalist of all is the implicit comparison he appears to make to Hitler. I don’t know if this was intended or not, but many readers (including me) will read the paragraphs on the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt – who, as Roger notes, “provided the intellectual framework for authoritarian rule” (which is a softly-softly, ‘you know what I mean’ way of saying ‘the intellectual framework for Adolf Hitler’). Anyone who wheels out the Hitler analogy has lost the argument already. Just ask the Democrats who wheeled it out repeatedly before the US election and helped Mr Trump win all seven swing States, the Senate, the House and the popular vote. US voters knew it was a laughable, ridiculous assertion.
Let me be blunt. I think it is patently absurd to suggest or believe Mr Trump governs anything like the way Chavez, Mussolini or Hitler used power. Suggesting that analogy, explicitly or implicitly, strongly or ever so faintly, is not much more than what you’d see in the wilder pages of the Guardian. Or on today’s massively Left-skewed public broadcasting networks. Or MSNBC and CNN. Come back to me when Mr Trump has put a few million people in concentration camps and gulags; outlawed all other political parties; killed opponents; co-opted big businesses to do as he says; invaded other countries. Let us not forget that in his first term Mr Trump was the first US President in eons not to take the US into a single new war or send troops to a single new venue – making it ironic that what many today dislike is that he’s not warlike enough, not enough in favour of war to want to keep sending hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars to prop up Ukraine in a war it can’t win. The US taxpayer pays over 70% of NATO funding, while Europeans pay next to nothing, meaning poor taxpayers in Arkansas are in effect funding the bloated German welfare state.
Or, heck, let’s keep it easy, come back to me when Trump has come close to doing what the Biden administration did in terms of weaponising the US judicial system to bring lawfare and patently bogus criminal cases against its main political opponent so as to bankrupt him and to put him in jail for hundreds of years. By the way, Trump had a clear case of illegality to prosecute against Hillary Clinton when he came into office the first time in 2017 and he explicitly opted not to try to prosecute her.
In large part I was motivated to write this reply to Roger by his over-the-top resort to Guardianista-style hyperbole. Anywhere, anytime, I am available to debate whether there is any remotely convincing analogy between Team Mussolini/Hitler and Orange Man Bad Trump. Because there simply is not. The bold assertion by Roger that Trump’s assaults “threaten democracy itself” is, in my view, arrant nonsense.
Let me respond to some of Roger’s more specific, less bombastic, grievances.
1) The 14th Amendment claim: Roger asserts that Trump is trying to rewrite the 14th Amendment by executive decree. In my view that is not remotely a fair categorisation. Here are the relevant words:
All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.
Yes, the US has birthright citizenship. It is the only democracy I know of to have such a frankly idiotic policy in place. But in law the substantive merits of a policy – all of which strike me as against birthright citizenship – are neither here nor there. The question is whether that outcome was laid down in the US Constitution and thereby taken out of the hands of the elected branches so that only a constitutional amendment could reverse it.
Roger just assumes the meaning of this part of the 14th Amendment is self-evident and that this result has been constitutionalised. But anyone reading the subordinate clause would see that it is not that simple. Nor has this issue ever – ever – been tested in the US Supreme Court. More than a few US legal scholars think Trump could win in court. This even includes a Democrat or two. And it most definitely includes a lot of what are known as originalists who – like me, and I had thought like Roger – believe that the meaning of a legal text (or for me, any text at all) is determined by what those who had been given the legitimate, lawful authority to make that law intended it to mean, and what any well-informed person at the time of enactment – not today – would have understood it to mean.
So did the post-Civil War drafters of the US 14th Amendment intend to cover illegal aliens? This was back when no one travelled to have ‘anchor babies’ to get citizenship or snuck in illegally to do so. Did they intend subject to the jurisdiction thereof to encompass such a broad, wide-ranging outcome covering illegal aliens? Maybe they did and that’s what was understood at the time. But maybe they didn’t. Regardless, I would put money on the fact that when this gets to the top court in the US it will not be a unanimous decision in favour of birthright citizenship.
If the legal outcome is in doubt, not conclusively self-evident (at least outside the pages of the Guardian and New York Times), then why not an executive order stopping it? That would be step one in getting the meaning of the constitutional provision tested in the courts and, eventually, before the Supreme Court. It is not “rewriting the 14th Amendment by executive decree” because any time a law is uncertain governments will proceed with their understanding of it until gainsaid by the courts. If you want to find an actual instance of ‘rewriting the Constitution’ chutzpah you have to look to the last days of the Biden administration, when Old Joe tweeted the claim that the Equal Rights Amendment had passed (it had not) and that it would be treated as having passed. Everyone ignored Mr Biden and just treated this as the further fruit of senility.
2) All things US border related: I think any fair-minded account of Trump’s executive orders in regard to the US borders would start by noting that in his first term Mr Trump substantially brought down the numbers crossing illegally. In Mr Biden’s first week in office he rescinded some 92 executive orders – including stay in place in Mexico – and thereby unleashed the biggest tsunami of illegal aliens coming into the US in history. Estimations vary over Biden’s four-year term from 12 million who got in to more than 18 or 20 million.
People also differ on whether this was negligence on the part of the Democrats or was intentional in order to import people who would be likely to vote for them in future. Either way, you simply cannot understand Mr Trump’s executive orders related to the border without that background. More to Roger’s point, quite a few people consider the porous state of the border under Biden to be an emergency situation. I would certainly characterise it as such. Roger, given his strident criticisms of Trump’s executive orders, implicitly would not. Fine. Either way it is worth acknowledging that because of Mr Trump’s executive orders – and in just one month in office – the more than 10,000 daily illegal alien crossings under Biden have today, as of right now, gone down into the low hundreds.
Roger’s dislikes the threat of a 25% tariff on Mexico, yet this was explicitly used to get Mexico to enforce its side of the border and to deploy its troops to do so. It worked. And yes, I know these tariffs look really stupid as regards Canada, and probably relate in part to Mr Trump’s visceral dislike of Justin Trudeau who, after Trump’s first term, called him all sorts of names, from ‘white nationalist’ to worse. Just remember the story of the New York City Mayor who was campaigning and said to a voter “If you like seven of my 10 main policies, vote for me. If you like all 10 you need to see a psychiatrist”. I am not here to defend every single thing Mr Trump has done. In fact for a long time in his first term I was a big critic of his caving-in to the Covid lockdown thugs, though to be accurate Trump sided with freedom way, way more than Boris, Justin Trudeau, Scott Morrison and galaxies more than Jacinda Ardern. Today, in implicit atonement, Trump is unwinding any and all of his lockdown errors. But again, if the test is ‘do you like every single thing politician X is doing’ then no sane person can answer yes. I am not doing any such thing.
However, back to this debate. I understand that many people do not agree with me about wanting to shut the US border vis-à-vis unvetted illegal aliens. Roger may agree with me. He may not. I don’t know. What is pertinent in this debate is that Mr Trump signalled on this and much else what he would do if elected and he did so in clear, specific terms. Hence voters knew this before the election, the one in which he won a massive victory – indeed, Trump completely jettisoned the usual ‘small target’ playbook of conservatives around the Anglosphere and made a wide-ranging array of promises to voters. And now he is doing his darndest to deliver on those promises.
I know that all of us conservative voters have been habituated to politicians who promise things before an election and never do them. Still, when a politician does set out promptly to do what he told the voters he would do, then I think there is plenty of ground to contest Roger’s characterisation of this somehow being ‘a threat to democracy’ — the following of the Hugo Chavez playbook, for haven’s sake — in keeping with the writings of Carl Schmitt or any of the other morally pregnant descriptions above.
3) Tit-for-tat reciprocity: Here’s another matter that seems to get under Roger’s skin. Mr Trump is firing bureaucrats and intelligence service officers here, there and all over the place. Some of it looks vindictive. Well, I think there is a reciprocity element involved. Whether it is wise and furthers constitutionalism depends on whether you believe Mr Trump is responding to what was done to him.
The 51 former intelligence officers flat out lied about the Hunter Biden laptop and arguably influenced the 2020 election. The FBI had the laptop since 2019 and everyone, all 51, clearly knew it was not Russian disinformation. I have no problem with all of them having their security clearance removed. The FBI knowingly lied to the FISA courts and its top leadership played a role in the Russia collusion scam. In other words, its senior people looked to me to be pretty darned partisan.
And don’t get me started on the Department of Justice. Look, I’m pretty much the most pro-American law professor in the non-US Anglosphere. But the US criminal justice system stinks and I mean even before we talk about anything related to Mr Trump. No Kiwi, Brit, Aussie or Canadian would think it worthy of anything. At the federal level prosecutors have a success rate over 99%. That is not something a country should be proud of. Conrad Black and Mark Steyn have detailed the myriad deficiencies in the US criminal justice system chapter and verse. So it’s terrible to start with. Throw in a politicised desire to go after one’s political opponents and the system really is putrid because the tools of offering even liars immunity and making plea deals to get the testimony you want are potent tools.
Mr Trump knows – as Roger and I know – that most civil servant lawyers lean to the political Left big time. The law schools are worse. In the US political donations are public information, and a couple of years ago an academic trawled through six years of donations from US law professors and found a political party ratio of 36:1 I’m betting I don’t have to tell Roger whether that’s 36 times more Democrats or more Republicans.
Heck, even the lawyerly caste is these days a standard of deviation or more to the Left of the median voter. Want to find the most woke, ‘you must wear your pronouns on your shirt’ employers in lots of cities? Just pop in to one of the big law firms in Sydney. Or in Auckland. In that context, and given the clear promises Trump made before the election, Roger sees root-and-branch firings as ‘chilling’. I don’t. Remember the lessons of game theory or evolutionary biology: there are two strategies that can work and one that never works. The one that never works is to be nice, always ignoring the bad things done to you. Well, to my way of thinking, that just encourages future Democrat administrations to behave as Biden’s did, all the while thinking to themselves ‘My Lord, those Republicans are pathetically weak!’
The winning strategy (not morally but in terms of standing the test of time) is to be a bastard all the time. Again, look at Trump’s first term and this was not the case. He was flat out generous to Hillary in declining to prosecute her. The other winning strategy, the far more common one, is to go with reciprocity or reciprocal benevolence: I’ll be nice to you and generous as long as you are the same to me. But cross me and I’ll reciprocate at least as hard. I can’t speak for Roger but that would be my approach to the CIA, to the FBI and to the Department of Justice. And what Trump has done is to remove security clearances and fire people. There is no scope for him to go person-by-person through a Washington DC bureaucracy in a city that went 94% for Biden. So every DoJ lawyer hired by Biden is now gone.
Roger acts as though this sort of clearing out of political opponents from the bureaucracy is unheard of elsewhere. Or hasn’t been done before in the US. It will certainly be harsh on some. But people lose their jobs all the time. No one is being indicted (and some could be in my view). I am not saying I’d draw the line where Trump did. What I am saying is that Roger getting on his high moral horse and painting this as chilling, autocratic, an undermining of the constitutional order is wholly unpersuasive.
Look, if everyone (either conservative or progressive Lefty) who now indulges in hyper-moralised criticisms of all things done by Trump had been making the same criticisms of the Biden administration – which fired Trump-linked federal prosecutors and set out with gusto to weaponise the courts – I’d cut them some slack. I’d disagree while appreciating the consistency. Was Roger equally adamant about Team Biden supposedly taking America to some ‘inevitable tyranny’.
4) Ignoring lower court injunctions: As I mentioned above, Roger is particularly aggrieved about Vice President J.D. Vance’s suggestion that in extremis the Trump administration might just ignore some of these sweeping, nationwide injunctions issued by lower-level federal court judges. So, as a thought-experiment, I wonder what Roger would say about the mooted situation where pre-Civil War southerners went to rogue federal judges in the south – ones they knew supported them – in order to get injunctions to stop anything an anti-slavery administration tried to do. Would Lincoln stand for that? I ask because we know that there is a huge amount of forum shopping going on in terms of finding sympathetic judges to issue these injunctions.
How is democratic decision-making and the US’s separation of powers set-up – where all executive government is vested in the President – consistent with that sort of arrangement? It’s relatively new of course. And my bet is that Vance’s comments are intended to spur the Supreme Court to sort out these lower-level federal court judges. These are single judges issuing countrywide blanket and forward-looking injunctions.
As Roger knows better than anyone, imperial judges who feel few constraints about imposing their own moral druthers on the elected branches are very, very difficult to deal with. And I’m willing to bet that the Trump administration will get one of these cases to the Supreme Court as soon as possible and ask them to stop this practice. It is in no way a necessary feature of a constitutional government that first-instance judges can block some executive action across a whole country. I am moderately confident that the Supreme Court will put a stop to this practice. We’ll see. As for the related issue of Elon Musk’s DOGE getting access to the records of federal bureaucracies, how is that remotely a grave constitutional concern? In my view, a far bigger threat to the US constitutional order (and to Australia’s and to NZ’s) is the unaccountable administrative state. Roger seems to assume that the President, the sole source of Executive power, cannot use that power to look into unaccountable bureaucratic actions and sift through the data they have collected. Whether someone believes this might “destabilise critical government operations” (really?) or not, in this straight up question of greater constitutional legitimacy I don’t see how it can be with the bureaucracy and not the President. The vast preponderance of Americans agree with me. Indeed, these Musk-led revelations are immensely popular with the American voters. Sure, statutes of Congress beat executive orders. But the President and what he wants as the head of his – yes, his – bureaucracies is surely constitutionally entitled to send in anyone he wants to look at anything at all. Unless there is a statute of Congress prohibiting it. As far as I am aware there is not. Otherwise there is some fourth branch in the US constitution called the ‘Administrative State’ that is a power unto itself and in effect outranks the President.
Roger says he wants to reduce the bureaucratic leviathan but when President Trump takes action to bring in an Elon Musk, well, that sort of ‘let’s reveal to Americans what is really going on with their money’ is characterised in terms that I think few would find convincing. Certainly this sort of transparency was not the hallmark of the Mussolini regime. Nor can I struggle to see it as any sort of threat, at all, to a democratic constitutional order.
All up then, I think there are plenty of reasons why so many conservatives find themselves thinking that Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to Western values and Western democracies in many decades. (I haven’t mentioned that Trump and Musk have double-handedly done more for free speech in the Anglosphere than all the judges and all the other conservative politicians put together.)
Do I like everything Trump has done or is doing? Of course not. That New York Mayor was right. But I am right now putting what I like at about 8.5 or nine out of 10. That’s about the best tally of my lifetime for any Anglosphere politician. Yes, yes, yes — Mr Trump is bombastic. Boorish. Crass. He says patently ridiculous things – I’m a native-born Canadian and the one getting people riled up in the Great White North is Trump’s mocking of Justin Trudeau and of Canadians generally with the jibe that Canada would make a great 51st state. Come on! Anyone with a functioning brain knows, for certain, that Trump does not really want to encapsulate into the US some 38 million Canadian voters who are, on average, a good deal to the Left of Californians and would make Democrat Presidencies a sure thing far into the future. I know it. Trump knows it. So it will never happen and Trump doesn’t want it to happen.
Does he have to be so mocking, mean and willing to break the conventions of politeness? No. But that’s the kind of guy who is psychotically brave enough to have withstood what Trump has endured these last four years. We’re not talking about inviting the man to a dinner party.
To conclude, there are plenty of arguments for voting for someone other than Mr Trump. Or not liking his agenda. But Roger’s attempt to characterise the man and his actions this past month in some sort of beyond the pale, hyper-moralised and almost fearmongering way is wholly unconvincing.
Trump is a disruptor. To date he’s been very successful in terms of winning over the American voter (since his popularity is far higher now than at any time in his first term and at more than 60% with men). But he has not moved the US into “the realm of constitutional crisis”. You might hear that on daytime TV, but the claim isn’t remotely plausible.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Quadrant.
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Trump can be a perplexing character because there is nothing consistent about him. He is a channeler. That is why he he says the most imbecilic things, clearly has no interest in reading about geopolitical complexities – this isn’t just him blustering the things coming out of his mouth are what I would call the holy spirit in the sense that when mankind is facing imminent death a force comes in and manifests in the most surprising of ways. You must never think that you can approach him via rationality.
Say what you like about Trump and his crassness but he is not a worshipper of death.
He says some great things, like “there are only two genders”.
So from that moment onwards, if anybody has a problem with that, you can just shrug: “if the president of the US can say it, why can’t I?”
Perhaps they arewise enough to avoid the traps and pitfalls at the end of empire. Hope so. I don’t like to see the Yanks on their knees because the Yanks are the opposite of that by definition. They will wake up America is a beautiful unexplored continent.
RFK Jr is also a disruptor.
https://www.thefocalpoints.com/p/breaking-hhs-rightfully-halts-barda
Wow, thanks for that. An oral covid 19 ‘vaccine’ definitely halt that, it’s just carrying on the propaganda to benefit pharma. Plus no placebo, not that a placebo is worth anything as they fudge that too. Sadly as one commentator to the article said:
“10,000 people deciding to get into this trial. You can’t fix stupid.”
No idea what ‘Alt Left’ even is but I was of the understanding Trump is considered ‘Right wing’, however, this here seems just like something he and his voters would agree with. It’s something I agree with and say similar on here regularly. The Woke/Leftards want to eradicate the sexes, cause division and demasculinize/defeminize society. Trump has done more for the betterment of the American people in mere weeks than the Demtards did in four years so the future will be very interesting indeed;
”This is something we need to start talking about on the left, this constant shaming and demonization of young men – especially young white men – that is causing them to leave the Left in droves. The Political Left simply has nothing to offer them. It’s “yes, you’re welcome here, so long as you sit in the corner, shut your mouth, and defer to your Identity Superiors in all things” and who is going to stick around for that?
We need to stop demonizing men and masculinity, and we need to start celebrating it. Young men are hardwired towards masculinity; not the neutered, emasculated version of it offered to us by the Woke Left, but the real thing. Real masculinity is not toxic and it is not a poison. On the contrary, it is a beautiful thing and is necessary for a healthy society. Any society needs a balance of masculinity and femininity in order to itself be healthy and functional.
Masculinity – typically expressed through men – sits atop society like a blanket; it protects and keeps safe. It provides and guides. Femininity – typically expressed through women – is the glue that holds it all together. It nurtures, it connects, and bonds.
Society without masculinity is listless, meandering, unfocused and with a deep sense of malaise. Society without healthy femininity is cold, distant, unconnected and meaningless. We need both. We are equal partners in this journey together, not competitors and certainly not enemies.
Anybody who says the political left hasn’t been demonizing, silencing and sidelining men over the past twenty years hasn’t been paying attention. The Alt Left rejects that toxic and divisive culture. We reject identity politics, and the idea that a person’s value only boils down to their immutable identity traits.
We believe that all voices should be assessed on the validity and merit of the ideas expressed, period. The identity of the person speaking is utterly irrelevant, all that matters is the words that they speak. THAT’S how you create the truly equal society that we all want.”
https://x.com/The_AltLeft/status/1894772662670361043
If you can’t view the comments this also relates to an earlier article from today regarding why many men don’t vote for the Left parties;
”I discussed this exact thing on the show the other day. Masculinity has been baked into DNA over millions of years of evolution. If we don’t give young men examples of healthy masculinity to aspire to, they will go after the UNhealthy versions, the Andrew Tates of the world.”
https://x.com/The_AltLeft/status/1894774033989714166
Could someone perhaps enlighten me how America pays 70% of NATO leads to Arkansas taxpayers fund the German welfare state¹?
¹ Which – in turn – funds mostly legally and illegally immigrated foreigners, including a good deal of recently naturalized such immigrants. All Ukrainian refugees and deserters who made to Germany, by the way, enjoy preferred access to it, at the same level as German citizens, except with a lot less bureaucratic hurdles to clear.
Some numbers on this: According to the Military Balance Blog, total defence spending of all NATO members was 1382.7 billion USD in 2024. The USA spent 968 billion of this which is 70.008%, making this 70% for all practical purposes and not over 70%. It follows that the European NATO members must have spent the remaining 30%. 30% is 43% (rounded) of 70% and referring to this as next to nothing is certainly not appropriate. In particular, the UK spent 77.9 billion, 5.63%, Germany 76.5 billion, 5.53% and France 63.4 billion, 4.59%. More than 5% of something is also significantly more than next to nothing,
especially considering that all three countries are smaller than the USA, have smaller economies and less population. Lastly, Germany must not have more than 370,000 soldiers, of which at most 345,000 may be army and air force and must not own or control any nuclear weapons (2 + 4 treaty, Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany). Despite this restriction, which makes any meaningful contribution to the NATO military effort essentially impossible, German defence spending is nevertheless 29.7% of German welfare spending.
This knee-jerk anti-German jibe from an another anglo German hater thus seems seriously unfounded, although in line with the overall quality of the article.
Obama said that the “Ship of State” was near impossible to turn around. Trump is doing it.
Obama meant, “The “Ship of State” was near impossible to turn around, ie prosper, when your goal is to destroy it”.
Quite frankly, this is starting to feel boring.
We need to accept that for some people it is an article of faith that Trump can’t do anything good. Even if he created world peace, general prosperity and then donated all his money to an orphanage, they would still hate him.
The same people would smile and clap their hands if Biden pooped his pants, then scooped out the excrement and smeared it all over their faces. (Which, to be fair, would not have been too much of a surprise.)
The author seems to be badly out of touch with what is happening in Canada under Adolf Trudeau and the surging support for his opponents.
In suggesting Canada becomes the 51st state I think DJT misspoke. He should have instead invited each Province to apply. The leftist eastern ones would not have done so but those East of Lake Superior would have thought long and hard about it.
“The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 to address the civil rights of formerly enslaved African Americans after the Civil War.”
It was obviously never understood or intended to grant citizenship to everyone who happened to be passing through.
The office of POTUS may have more power than the UK PM as the PM needs the support of a Parliamentary majority, but any PM who can command an obedient majority has far more power than Trump because Parliament is sovereign. The executive branch of the federal government has very limited powers, and state power is shared between the federal executive, legislative and judicial branches, as well as those same branches in the individual states.
That is such a refreshing article to read. Agree with Professor Allan’s view 100%.
I have marked it as a reference, for those I meet that need it as an explanation of Reality.
I didn’t understand Trump until I read a book on Game Theory. In the past the US always signalled what was the worst deal that they would take, with Trump you get the idea that he is just working out what the worst deal is that the opposition will take.
Trump’s not a dictator. He’s The AntiChrist, worshipped by Hindus as “Vishnu”, and has just put a gigantic gold statue of himself in his “Trump Gaza” video, like Nebuchadnezzar’s gigantic gold statue in the Old Testament, described in Daniel 3. But hey, just carry on sleeping.
There’s certainly something like inverse Trump derangement syndrome, namely, assuming that everything Trump does must be perfect and wonderful because he did it. Many of the so-affected also don’t seem to be Americans and unable to understand that he isn’t their president. From my perspective, Trump is another head of government of a state that’s principally hostile to Germany and has been principally hostile to it since at least 1915.
Vance making loud noises about freedom of speech in Munich while German lower courts order punishment of people for publishing historical photos in the context of historical articles on Facebook despite that’s explicitly allowed by German law, still using Allied Control Council directive 24/ Law 104 as excuse for that, is a particularly poor joke. It basically amounts to throwing someone into the prison and then calling him morally repugnant for missing his son’s birthday.
With ‘allies’ like that, we [Germans] certainly don’t additionally need enemies.
Shouldn’t German citizens and the AfD be loudly calling for the Abolition of the Allied Control Council Directives as OBSOLETE?
It is unjust of you to keep blaming British, French, American or other wartime allies now for these post-war “Revenge Laws” in Germany that few people in the West have ever even heard of, just as they’ve never heard of the horrors of “Hellstorm”, and cannot be held responsible for them.
It’s like blaming the West for slavery, and every other bad thing that ever happened on the planet.
That’s a bit difficult to do because they’re (by reference) part of the German basic law which means it’s principally illegal to want to change them. The present and (according to rumours) also next German home secretary, Nancy Faeser, who’s convinced that holding the – despite all her efforts – ever increasing Nazi threat at bay is her most important duty, also seriously wouldn’t like that.
This is not comparable to slavery because slavery was abolished while de-nazification is supposed to continue in perpetuity and it was tacitly agreed that the situation mentioned in the original article 146 which declared the basic law a provisional constitution supposed to end when the German people had voted in favour of a German constitution for Germany must never actually take place.
BTW, the AfD is very much in favour of celebrating our Russian liberators whenever the opportunity arises and there was at least some amount of Russia-associated propaganda¹ during the recent election campaign which basically threatened all German who didn’t “vote right” (that is, vote AfD) with a Russian attack on Germany. German nationalists these are not and calling them German patriots is at least a dubious claim. They’re not as rabidly anti-German than the western establishment parties but that’s about it.
¹ Distributed by people who claimed to be current or former Russian soldiers.
It seems he intends to build a New Babylon in Gaza, the ancient home of the Philistines, biblical enemies of the Israelites. And then set up his “World Ruler” capital in Jerusalem, forcibly carrying out old prophecies, the way most prophecies end up being carried out: planned and deliberate, not miraculous at all.
Trump the AntiChrist…?
No, he’s just a very naughty boy!
Fantastic piece: clear, concise, unpatronisingly intelligent – the right of centre in a nutshell. Something we’ve got to quietly shout.