Is MAGA still pretending they're not an fascist authoritarian movement?

Author: Double_R

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#121
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@fauxlaw
But those laws do not supersede my quotations from the Constitution. When the citizens of any State are threatened, the 
president has authority to act, and he has.
Yes, he has the authority to act... Under the laws he swore to uphold. He doesn't have the authority to unilaterally decide whatever force he deems necessary. That's not constitutional government, that's dictatorship.

All you did in your prior post was cherry pick certain parts of the constitution that fit the narrative you wanted to create. You ignored the most basic principals of the constitution, one of which is that it exists to ensure the protection of everyone's rights, not merely the president's authority. These rights also include Congress role in defining the limitations of executive authority in situations like this. That's why we have the inserrection act and the posse comitatus act in the first place, and no one has ever questioned their constitutionality before until a moron like Trump came along and continues to drag the rest of us into Idiocracy.

what's going in in  L.A., my hometown, as it bappens], is not peaceable assembly. period.
Irrelevant. The bar for which the President is authorized to trample over state's right is not and cannot be the point at which a protest turns violent. That's absurd, and you would never support that notion of it were a democrat in office.

We now have an true executive in the Oval
You mean a wannabe dictator


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#122
Double_R
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@Greyparrot
He didn't. You know there's video of this incident right?
yah, I saw the video. They asked for physical ID, and he pulled the "do you know who I am?" card.
Then he pushed through anyway and FAFOed.
This is why our country is so fucked.
#123
ADreamOfLiberty
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@Double_R
Read that last paragraph as many times as needed to make it stick.
You never let "paying your lawyer with your own money" penetrate your skull.

#124
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@ADreamOfLiberty
No matter how many times you repeated that.
#125
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@Double_R
You mean a wannabe dictator
A country with no functioning executive branch is toast. Democracy can't work if an executive leader can't dictate the will of the people. This is why you really haven't thought out the imminent disaster it is to replace the executive branch with district judges. That's the end of democracy and the start of rebellion.

Hamilton in Federalist No. 70
“A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.”

Washington:
“Laws can only be executed in a spirit of moderation and justice when resistance to them is forcibly checked.”
“Whereas combinations to defeat the execution of the laws... do exist, and open resistance to the execution of the laws has been manifested... such proceedings are subversive of good order and government.”

Trump is channeling Washington's vigor as when he crushed the Whiskey rebellion with an iron fist.


#126
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@fauxlaw
If one's fear of dictatorship leads a nation to dismantle executive authority altogether, you’re not saving democracy. You’re burning it down.
#127
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In a December 2023 interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that if he were to win the presidency again, he would act as a dictator for "one day" to implement his agenda. 
Topic's author
#128
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@Savant
Trump isn't the first president to take aggressive military actions or challenge the checks and balances on his office, nor the first politician to stretch the law to attack his political opponents. Maybe it's simply the case that Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, Lincoln, Truman, and FDR are all fascists, but if one authoritarian action makes someone a fascist, then I'm not sure how useful the term is, or how consistent it is with how other political descriptors are used.
This is really nothing more than an attempt to equivocate by rendering the term fascism meaningless. First off, I never said or implied that anyone becomes a fascist by one single action and it is dishonest to frame your argument as a counter to that idea.

Fascism has a number of specific identifiable traits (which I will spare for now), the way we determine whether a movement qualifies under any rational assessment is to see how many of the boxes they check. If they check the overwhelming majority of them (as MAGA does), you cannot tell me that doesn't qualify.

So in just the past week Trump has deployed the US military onto US streets
Is that fascist? An appeals court temporarily allowed this, so I think that's a stretch.
It's merely one example. The question isn't whether it is fascism, it's whether or meaningfully fits into the label. Given the circumstances, like the fact that we're talking about nothing more than a protest that turned violent as well as the fact that state and local officials not only didn't ask for them to be there but asked for them to leave... Yeah, this is an example.

And you're misrepresenting what has happened in the courts. The decision regarding the military was that they weren't on the ground yet, so they didn't weigh in on it. They did weigh in on Trump's federalization of the national guard, and the lower court emphatically ruled it unlawful. The appeals court reversed the order, not because they assessed it as wrong but to give it time to be worked out before taking the drastic step of changing the hands of leadership only for leadership to be changed again should they or the SC disagree, which is a perfectly normal and sensible thing the courts often do.

Sure, let's grant that this is authoritarian. I think the bar for fascism is probably higher than that, given that he's not the first president to make vague and likely unenforceable threats.
Yes, the bar is much higher than that, that's why I listed multiple examples which you spliced into pieces only to act as if each piece individually doesn't cross the bar. Not only does that fail to address my point (having listed everything together) but I also pointed out that all of this was just in the last week. Obviously, if this is just over the past week there's a much longer and more potent list of actions I could have provided.

He said he wasn't arrested. But sure, let's grant that forcibly removing him from a building is authoritarian.
They through him down on the floor and handcuffed him.

I'd say Trump is more authoritarian than some presidents and less authoritarian than others. Arguably FDR (or any president to fight a world war) has a better claim to being fascist than Trump. If we're calling Trump fascist for what he's doing now, you definitely can't give a pass to FDR for internment camps or to Washington for owning slaves or to Abraham Lincoln for forcing Native Americans out of their land.
You’re conflating leaders who made immoral or authoritarian decisions in specific moments with a leader whose entire political identity is built around the core features of fascist ideology. Yes, FDR authorized internment camps (a terrible abuse of power) but that was a single policy during wartime, not part of a broader effort to undermine democracy itself.

Washington owned slaves, Lincoln displaced Native Americans. Both indefensible, but they weren’t building movements to dismantle democratic institutions or install themselves as unaccountable rulers.

Again, you don't assess whether someone is fascist by pointing to one action, you have to look at the totality of the actions and their ideology.

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#129
Double_R
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@Greyparrot
Democracy can't work if an executive leader can't dictate the will of the people.
This is one of the dumbest things you've ever said to me, and that's saying something.

Executive leaders do not "dictate" the will of the people. That's called a dictatorship, the literal opposite of democracy.

Executive leaders carry out the will of the people - in accordance with the constitution and laws they are sworn to protect.

That's why we have judges. It turns out that laws are quite meaningless when it's up to the executive leader to decide for himself whether he's acting in accordance with them.
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#130
Double_R
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@ADreamOfLiberty
You never let "paying your lawyer with your own money" penetrate your skull.
Oh I did, and I explained why you are wrong over and over again. The penetration of skull problem isn't on my end.

Go ahead and revive that thread, I will happily show you why you're wrong, again.
Topic's author
#131
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@FLRW
In a December 2023 interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity, Trump suggested that if he were to win the presidency again, he would act as a dictator for "one day" to implement his agenda. 
And Congress would then define one day as the rest of the term
#132
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@Double_R
Your ability to gish gallop is irrelevant.

If I were to grant that you were right and Trump is wrong simply because you have the gall to gaslight to the very end and I don't gaslight at all, that would mean people like you win the culture war.

That is why I will consciously not give a shit when Trump twists the law and says absurd things.

This is the respect for the law that people like you have earned. Enjoy.
#133
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@Double_R
This is really nothing more than an attempt to equivocate by rendering the term fascism meaningless.
I'd argue that if most politicians are as authoritarian as Trump, then using the term fascist to describe him does render the term meaningless, or at least reduces its meaning to a great extent.

a leader whose entire political identity is built around the core features of fascist ideology
You picked a few examples, but I don't think it's fair to say Trumps entire political identity is built around them. Most of these things are in response to the protests in LA. I'm sure you would say similar things about his responses to the BLM protests/riots, but Trump didn't use those to become a dictator, and his actions then are largely disconnected from his actions now. If the idea is that this is all part of a plan to become a dictator, then there's not an observable multi-step plan yet, just a potential one.

FDR authorized internment camps (a terrible abuse of power) but that was a single policy during wartime
It's also only one example. Expanding the court was stretching his power, and he broke precedent by running for more than two terms. Some would argue the draft was authoritarian. Which made him a potential fascist, since people at the time had no way of knowing how much he would try to expand his power.

building movements to dismantle democratic institutions or install themselves as unaccountable rulers
See, this is where I think Trump is held to a different standard than the other presidents mentioned. When they were in power, FDR and Lincoln would have been accused of the same thing for court packing and fighting to preserve the Union. But they never made themselves dictators, so you can't call them fascist in hindsight, and you couldn't call them actual fascists at the time. There are leaders like Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin who did authoritarian things and then became dictators, but you don't know which leader is going to become a Hitler and who's going to just be an FDR until the complete takeover happens. Trump is a potential fascist, he's not an actual fascist until he becomes a dictator. And most politicians are potential fascists to some extent.
#134
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@Double_R

Executive leaders do not "dictate" the will of the people. That's called a dictatorship, the literal opposite of democracy.

Executive leaders carry out the will of the people - in accordance with the constitution and laws they are sworn to protect.

That's why we have judges. It turns out that laws are quite meaningless when it's up to the executive leader to decide for himself whether he's acting in accordance with them.

DoubleR, your entire argument hinges on a cartoonish misunderstanding of democracy, the kind that sounds good in a freshman poli-sci seminar but collapses under the weight of actual day to day governance. Okay, you say, “executives don’t dictate the will of the people" as if the word dictate implies dictatorship by default. But the root of “dictate” simply means to declare or carry out with authority. In a republic, the executive HAS TO dictate, not arbitrarily, but decisively, in order to fulfill the mandate granted by the people through election. Otherwise, he's a ceremonial puppet, not a president. (like Biden)

You claim that laws are "meaningless" if the executive decides for himself whether he's acting within them. But that’s not how the system was designed. The president doesn’t wait for pre-approval from district judges. He acts. The courts may later evaluate legality, but that's review, not permission or authority. What you’re promoting is a perversion of checks and balances, where the judiciary gets to preemptively neuter the executive branch any time it disagrees politically. That’s not democracy. That’s a judicial oligarchy. Far worse than anything you accuse the executive branch as being.

The Founder Fathers justifiably feared legislative and judicial overreach just as much as tyranny from above. For example: Washington crushed the Whiskey Rebellion not because he hated dissent, but because he knew the republic wouldn’t survive if people could decide which laws to obey and which leaders to ignore. He didn’t hand that rebellion over to a circuit court. He handled it with force, and with legitimacy. If you think that made him a dictator, you should probably stop quoting the Constitution you clearly haven’t read. There's many similar times Lincoln had to do the same.

And Hamilton is the guy who literally wrote the playbook on executive power. The guy said energy in the executive is essential to good government. Not a threat to it. He warned against a feeble presidency, because he knew delay, hesitation, and judicial meddling would destroy the unity and direction a republic needs to function. What you want isn’t democracy with accountability. What you are asking for is a democracy without authority. That’s just chaos in the streets, or the status quo.

So no, DoubleR, we don’t need an executive leader who waits around patiently while every policy gets chopped up by partisan judges. America needs one who can act decisively within the limits of the law and defend the Constitution not just in theory, but in motion. If that scares you, maybe you don’t trust the people as much as you pretend to. maybe you don't trust democracy. Maybe you don't trust the freedom of the public to make rules to secure our country. Or maybe it’s because you only like checks and balances when they check your enemies and balance your ideology. Yeah, that's probably it.

When every executive action gets blocked by cherry-picked district judges, instead of checks and balances, what we have is one branch nullifying another. Disaster.
#135
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Well at least Trump made H L Mencken's prediction come true.
#136
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Remember that John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men.
#137
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Mencken created Trump. Hail Menkin.

Remember that John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men.
Yes, John Adams famously said, “We are a government of laws, not of men.” It sounds noble, like nobody is above the rules, and everything should be fair. But if you take that too literally, like some retarded people do, you start thinking that laws magically enforce themselves and we don’t need leaders of law to actually carry them out. Laws are like blueprints for a house, they tell you what should be built, but they don’t build anything by themselves. You still need someone with tools, materials, and the authority to get the job done. If everyone just stares at the blueprint and argues about it, nothing ever gets built. That’s why a government can’t run on laws alone, you need people of law and in charge to carry them out, or they’re just dead words collecting dust. John Adams wasn’t saying laws work in a vacuum, he was saying the law must guide the people in power, not replace them.

Laws are just words on paper until a real person like a cop, a judge, or yes, a president, men of law, gives them life. Imagine if Mom made a rule that you can’t eat cookies before dinner, but then she leaves the kitchen and nobody’s watching. You eat the cookies anyway. Who enforces the rule? Not the rule itself. Someone has to act. That’s why Adams helped create an executive branch in the first place because laws need enforcemen by men of law.

Now imagine if every time Mom tried to stop you, your older cousin, let’s call him Judge Joey, says, “Hmm, I’m not sure if Mummmy’s allowed to stop you. Let me think about it for a few months. In the meantime, eat as many cookies as you want.” That’s what happens when judges start overruling the executive branch before anything even gets done. That’s not a country ruled by laws, that’s a country ruled by delay and dysfunction. That's the chaos of unstoppable men in robes Adams warned us.

The Founders didn’t want kings. But they also didn’t want a government so weak and chaotic that mobs, courts, or bureaucrats could ignore the people’s chosen leader. They created a balance: the executive carries out the laws, the legislature writes them, and the courts interpret them when there's a real conflict. Not whenever a district judge feels like it. If you flip that balance and let district judges run the show, then we’re not ruled by laws, we’re ruled by whoever can file the first lawsuit with the right judge.

So yes, Adams was right that the law should rule. But also by men of law. Without strong, lawful leadership, without someone willing to act boldly within bounds, then laws become suggestions, and democracy becomes a game of who can gum up the system fastest. And that, little one, is how you lose your republic while thinking you're using chaos to save it.

Topic's author
#138
Double_R
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@Greyparrot
DoubleR, your entire argument hinges on a cartoonish misunderstanding of democracy, the kind that sounds good in a freshman poli-sci seminar but collapses under the weight of actual day to day governance.
Ok chatGP.

You claim that laws are "meaningless" if the executive decides for himself whether he's acting within them. But that’s not how the system was designed. The president doesn’t wait for pre-approval from district judges.
No one claimed this. You are as usual, arguing with yourself.

What you’re promoting is a perversion of checks and balances, where the judiciary gets to preemptively neuter the executive branch any time it disagrees politically. That’s not democracy. That’s a judicial oligarchy.
This is just plain stupid.

What I'm promoting is a system where the executive has some check on his power. If the president acts illegally and no one can intervene and say that's illegal, then the legality of his actions is irrelevant and by extension, so are the laws limiting his authority.

MAGA loves to pretend this is some grave injustice of a purported Democratic system, which is ridiculous and goes to show what unprincipled hypocrites you all are. When the courts were striking down Biden's actions none of you took issue with it, suddenly now that Trump is president he becomes the lone voice of the people and anyone who stands in his way is a traitor I the country. This is exactly the fascistic crap I'm talking about.

This isn't to say there isn't an issue with district judges unilaterally striking down a president's policies, of course there is. I never argued the system is perfect, I'm responding to your stupidity claiming that the country should go to war all because Trump's actions were dare deemed unlawful. That's what fascism looks like.

So no, [imaginary] DoubleR, we don’t need an executive leader who waits around patiently while every policy gets chopped up by partisan judges.
Fixed.

America needs one who can act decisively within the limits of the law
No shit, that's the point of having a judiciary - to ensure that's what actually happening.

If that scares you, maybe you don’t trust the people as much as you pretend to. maybe you don't trust democracy.
Trusting democracy has nothing to do with allowing an executive to govern unchecked. Your entire issue with my position is made up.
#139
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@Double_R
From your #121:

That's not constitutional government, that's dictatorship.
There is a lot of law beneath the Constitution that still must be considered relevant, including  the Posse Comitatus Act [PCA] of 1878 limits the president's authority in using the military domestically for law enforcement, but there are exceptions. Further, Congress has done nothing legislatively with the Act since 2021, when it modified the Act to expand, not contract, authorization of military use to the Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force, in addition to Army and Air Force already authorized by PCA, so how did this restrict the president's authority?
Further, the Insurrection Act  is the most notable exception to PCA allowing greater expansion of presidential authority relative to military deployment for specific domestic conditions of lawlessness, such as:

1. Supress insurrection in a state, upon request of state gov't.
2. Enforce fed law or suppress rebellion against fed authority with or without state gov't approval.
3. enforce fed law or suppress rebellion against fed authority in a state, with or without state gov't approval.
4. protect the civil rights of a people when state bov't is unable or unwilling to do so.
5. The president has authority to deploy military domestically against citizens who overwhelm the capacity of local or state civilian authority [police] to manage.

These 5 conditions blow your following claim out of the water [also from your '121]

The bar for which the President is authorized to trample over state's right is not and cannot be the point at which a protest turns violent.

The authority granted to the president by the PCA does not "trample over state's rights," or it would not have passed Congress, your apparent hero who did not support your claims by the legislation you want, which is unconstitutional to be directed at a single individual. And that's been tried and failed.  Get it? Yet?
#140
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@Greyparrot
Sorry, I';m not sure where your #1265 is coming from, but I agree with your statement.
#141
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@Double_R
That's absurd, and you would never support that notion of it were a democrat in office.
By the way, the relevance is that in 2021, there were violent protests underway in NYC, Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and.... oh, yeah. L.A. In case your recent presidential history is not that accurate, the recent 2021 update of PCA I mentioned last night was during the administration of a Democrat president, derelict though he was, campaigning  actively, on several occasions in 2019 and 2020 for the US Senate... you know, the actual legislative body, not the executive.
Topic's author
#142
Double_R
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@fauxlaw
These 5 conditions blow your following claim out of the water [also from your '121]
So you went from arguing that the constitution effectively renders the PCA and inserrection act unconstitutional to now arguing that Trump's actions are lawful because they are in line with these very laws. Well, that's progress I guess...

Now the problem is that none of your conditions are met. What happened in LA is a priest that turned violent. That's it. That doesn't qualify as a rebellion under any stretch of legal imagination, it's not an insurrection, it's none of that. The president doesn't just gey to declare it so, that's not how the rule of law works.

The authority granted to the president by the PCA does not "trample over state's rights
I never argued it did, pay attention.

I'm talking about Trump's actions, such as federalizing the national guard over the governor's objections, without a valid legal basis from which to do so.

By the way, the relevance is that in 2021, there were violent protests underway in NYC, Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and.... oh, yeah. L.A. In case your recent presidential history is not that accurate, the recent 2021 update of PCA I mentioned last night was during the administration of a Democrat president, derelict though he was, campaigning  actively, on several occasions in 2019 and 2020 for the US Senate... you know, the actual legislative body, not the executive.
What on earth are you talking about?
#143
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a priest that turned violent. That's it.
That's a funny unintended autocorrect :D

I'm talking about Trump's actions, such as federalizing the national guard over the governor's objections,
Under 10 U.S. Code § 252–254, If Trump declared that there was domestic violence, the governor's permission is not required to federalize the national guard.
#144
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@Double_R
When did I say
that the constitution effectively renders the PCA and inserrection act unconstitutional 
I never said that. I never believed either are unconstitutional, I just cited other constitutional tidbits directly affecting my main point that Democrats are sky-screaming and have no argument, and that Biden was a poor candidate and the Big zero in the Oval. In fact up until his last two months, he was almost never seen in the Oval, preferring to sit at that little-boy deck in a dark basement studio somewhere. look about as presidential as Elmer Fudd.
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#145
Double_R
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@fauxlaw
When did I say
that the constitution effectively renders the PCA and inserrection act unconstitutional 
In Post 65:
Yeah, I know that. But those laws do not supersede my quotations from the Constitution. When the citizens of any State are threatened, the president has authority to act, and he has.
I asked you if you knew there were laws regulating when and under what circumstances the president has the authority to federalize the national guard or deploy the military on US soil and you responded by saying they don't supercede the constitution. The only rational interpretation there is that they would have to supercede the constitution to be applicable, which  would make them unconstitutional by definition.

my main point that Democrats are sky-screaming and have no argument
They're arguing that Trump's actions are illegal, because they are and your attempt to refute had fallen flat on its face.

and that Biden was a poor candidate and the Big zero in the Oval
Irrelevant partisan opinion.