A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Friday, February 6, 2026 18:30
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Thursday, February 5, 2026 5:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States

By Jamelle Bouie | Feb. 4, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-co
mments.html

A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are more American than others, and that this is a function of race and allegiance to Trump.

Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”

Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.

You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”

What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”

It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major American city. And if Trump were only targeting undocumented immigrants, he could look to cities in Texas and Florida as well as those in California and Illinois. But Trump targeted them all the same, sending the National Guard to occupy each city and unleashing federal immigration agents to harass and abuse immigrants and citizens alike.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump mused on his Truth Social website in September. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The administration’s attack on Minnesota, and especially on the city of Minneapolis, is more of the same, less law enforcement than a combat operation aimed at a set of Americans whose governor opposed the president in the last election or who belong to a disfavored racial, ethnic and religious minority

At the risk of cliché, most presidents do not speak like this about their fellow Americans. The presidency is a national office, and even the bitterest struggles for this highest prize of American politics tend to end with an appeal to union and common ground from the eventual winner. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the wake of an election so hard fought that it nearly turned to violence. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”

John Quincy Adams won the presidency in what his chief rival, Andrew Jackson, condemned as a “corrupt bargain.” In his Inaugural Address, Adams made it a point to reach out to those Americans who wanted a different man in the White House. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” Adams said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”

Abraham Lincoln ended his first Inaugural Address with a famous appeal to the common history that tied Americans to one another. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he said. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Lincoln’s heartfelt call to his Southern brethren to heed “the mystic chords of memory” fell on deaf ears. Five weeks later, a South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter. Not long afterward, Union volunteers met soldiers from the newly formed Confederate States of America in a field just north of Manassas, Va. And so began four years of the worst bloodletting in American history.

Trump rejects this legacy of his predecessors. The rhetorical tools of the presidency are, for him, a means to divide Americans and sort them according to hierarchies of status. Trump sits atop the national government, but not as a national leader. His is the logic of the separatist, even of the secessionist. “There was no privilege without persecution, no winner without a loser,” Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison write of the ideology of the Southern “fire-eaters” in “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776.” In their worldview, “political relationships within nations were always hierarchical; some group was always enslaved by or beholden to some other more dominant group.”

The fire-eaters hoped to instantiate this vision in a new nation founded on a cornerstone of racial subjugation. But what if you could secede without secession? What if you could cleave the nation off from its egalitarian aspirations? What if you could bring the spirit of separatism to bear on a government tasked with representing a single people?

That is the Trump administration. That is the work of a White House that sees vast numbers of Americans not as friends, but as enemies. And that is a work of a president who will destroy as many symbols of national unity as he can to satisfy his bottomless ego, cruel appetites and unquenchable desire to “win” at the expense of the people he purports to lead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 6:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 6, 2026 8:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
New START Treaty expires, freeing Trump from nuclear arms restrictions

"If it expires, it expires," U.S. President Donald Trump said in his interview with The New York Times when asked about his intentions to extend the New START treaty that officially ended on Feb. 5.

https://kyivindependent.com/new-start-expires-releases-us-russia-from-
decades-of-nuclear-arms-restrictions/

We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
The founders wouldn’t recognize the executive branch’s monstrous powers

by Dan Carlin | February 5, 2026

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-presi
dential-power-nixon-steroids-1235511366/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/we-are-witnessing-the-imperial-
presidency-on-steroids/ar-AA1VKrjv

While the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn't hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn't even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?

The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that's a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.

Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.

While it's both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it's simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn't recognize - and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome's Republic?

To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate's supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that's the only way to repair things?

If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact - and that's far from guaranteed - we should use any pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to "fix" things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the "legitimate" powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.

Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the "imperial" Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it's willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it's done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can't be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members' reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals - often using executive orders - that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn't favorable.

But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren't good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had "a republic, if you can keep it." Congress, with its many members, isn't likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive's powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.

Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn't efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic "Red Scare" era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?

The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation's tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.

We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it's too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one's worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet's ecosystem. That's clearly too much power for any human being, isn't it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 9:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's push to rename Dulles and Penn Station after himself

Feb 6, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/schumer-trump-penn-station-dulles-gat
eway

President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

• Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.

Why it matters: Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.

• The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.

• The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.

• The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.

The big picture: Trump and Schumer have cut high stakes deals for government funding over the last year. They remain at a stalemate over a project critical for Schumer's state.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 6:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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