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Just before the dawn of the Trump administration, journalism in Washington, DC, faces an existential crisis -- but virtually no one in the profession is willing to diagnose it.
Here it is: For the first time, words don't matter. In August, as a guest on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily, I noted that voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously.
[...] And journalists keep falling for it because they, like politicians, over-value words -- and they are now covering a politician who does not. President-elect Trump still takes the same cavalier approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that's yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don't seem to mind. Trump has spent a career interacting with journalists, but as the first president never to serve in the military, the cabinet, or another public office before his election to the White House, he's never been immersed in the word culture that drives political journalism. [...] Most recently, when Trump announced he had chosen South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, journalists raced to re-tweet a March rant from Trump in which he said the people of South Carolina should be embarrassed by her.
[...] Writing endless columns on this or that flip-flop based on Trump's conflicting rhetoric is wasting the time of the readers and viewers who have decided that's not what matters with this particular President-elect. [...] If the press covers Trump the way it covered prior presidents -- too literally -- it may find its own customers take journalism itself a lot less seriously.
Source: CNN
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday December 01 2016, @06:57PM
what has really been missing in the (what I consider to be) excessive alarmism over Mr. Trump's election is a recognition of the inherent limitations of the executive to actually accomplish his goals. Even with both houses of the Congress, there are still serious speedbumps in the way of the executive, not the least of which include the filibuster, the judiciary, and the federal bureaucracy.
I tend to agree that -- at least so far -- there's been "excessive alarmism" until we have a better sense of what Trump will actually do.
However, while we have a government structure that is notorious for its "checks and balances" (and having more of them than most democratic countries), there are a couple problems.
(1) The Executive Branch has seen almost continuous expansion in its power in the past 75 years or so. Congress used to have the power to declare war. Now Presidents just send troops wherever for whatever indefinite period of time, and Congress occasionally passes a bill of support if they want. The regulatory mechanisms that are now created through Executive orders -- given the sheer size of the Executive Branch compared to the rest of the government -- give the President huge power over most of the government's everyday functions. Up until the early 20th century, that just wasn't much of a concern, since the "enumerated powers" of the Constitution were taken more seriously, and the federal government was so much smaller. Now, it's huge, and the President basically runs it.
And that doesn't even get into the details of the more disconcerting actions that recent Presidents have taken under executive order, without explicit legislation authorizing their actions -- from massive surveillance programs to the unilateral killing of American citizens by drone strikes without trial under the current administration.
Trump is thus inheriting an Executive branch that has a LOT more power and leeway than any President before in history.
(2) Historical precedent tells us that none of those "checks and balances" really matter if the President wants to ignore them and the right circumstances occur. Especially when the public is sufficiently scared, enraged, or otherwise upset, they won't object to almost any abuses of Executive power. Two words are only necessary here: Abraham Lincoln.
Yes, Lincoln was a "great President" in many ways, and we generally now praise his leadership through arguably the darkest era in U.S. history. But Lincoln also brought us the closest to a tyrannical dictatorship that the U.S. has ever been too. In the early days of the Civil War, he unilaterally suspended habeas corpus (which is supposedly a power left to Congress by the Constitution) and then proceeded to throw anyone who objected to the war or his methods into military prison, which was effectively an indefinite sentence without habeas corpus. It started with protesters in Maryland, then expanded to Maryland local officials, then a sizeable chunk of the Maryland legislature (keep in mind that those legislators had decisively voted AGAINST secession), then judges who attempted to approve habeas petitions, then journalists who tried to publish newspaper articles on the abuses that were happening. At one point, there was serious concern that Lincoln might throw the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court into prison for attempting to compel a writ of habeas corpus. (Some close to Lincoln's cabinet claimed this was seriously considered; others just say it was a rumor of the day based on the other actions Lincoln was taking. Whatever the case, Lincoln summarily ignored the writ.)
I'm not going to get into a debate about whether such actions were "justified" given the circumstances -- my point is that if things get "sufficiently dire," those checks and balances may mean quite little. And what does "sufficiently dire" have to be? I don't know, but I doubt it would take full-blown civil war. Perhaps a couple major terrorist attacks, coupled with some other stuff... and the public might be afraid enough to go along with dictatorial actions.
I'm also NOT saying Trump would necessarily do stuff like this. I simply don't know. But one thing we can say about him is that he's the biggest "wildcard" ever put into the position of President, and as this story points out, we can't really figure out what he's going to do on the basis of what he says. That's not a comforting thought IF something bad happens which might seem to justify unilateral action. At that point, I think all bets are off... yes, there will likely be acts of Congress and the judiciary will sort it out, but if it's like the Civil War, all of that will happen years after any actions have actually taken place. With Lincoln, eventually there was a hope that he'd reasonably curtail his "war powers" after the crisis is averted, though we'll really never know since he was assassinated before we could really see his post-war policy.
That was the hope of the Roman Republic in creating temporary "dictators," who'd serve just for a short time with basically unlimited power to resolve a crisis, and then return that power to the state. It all worked fine until some of the dictators (Marius, Sulla, and ultimately Julius Caesar) didn't give the power back. A similar trajectory accompanied the rise of Hitler. Again, I'm NOT -- like some -- comparing Trump to those people, because I think so far he's a "wildcard" where we don't know exactly what he'd do.
But just depending on the normal functioning of our government to keep us out of tyranny... historically, that's NOT how things work, particularly if a crisis emerges.