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the savage continuum of pseudo-democracy.....U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest defiance of the courts — this time refusing to follow an appellate judge’s order to halt migrant deportations — has triggered another round of liberal outrage. Critics are calling it an authoritarian move, a blatant assault on the rule of law, and a warning sign that American democracy is on its last legs. But if this is the end of democracy, it’s been ending for a long time. And not just at Trump’s hands.
Trump’s Rule by Fiat a Bipartisan Legacy By Vinnie Rotondaro
The central truth we keep missing — especially on the left — is that Trump is not an aberration. He’s a grotesque continuation. The playbook he uses was written by both parties over decades of eroding democratic norms, consolidating executive power, and circumventing meaningful checks on authority. Trump didn’t invent the impulse to rule by fiat; he just brings it out into the open. If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere. Consider the legal justification Trump has floated for ignoring the courts: The United States is “at war.” Therefore, he claims, wartime powers apply — even domestically, even over immigration courts. To many, this sounds like a dystopian twist. But it’s eerily familiar. Because the same logic has been used, repeatedly, by both Republican and Democratic administrations since 9/11. Congress Granted War Powers After the attacks on the Twin Towers, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which gave the executive branch sweeping powers to pursue terrorism around the world. That one document has served as the legal scaffolding for 20-plus years of undeclared wars and covert operations in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere. [Related: The War on Terror Is a Success — for Terror] No further congressional approval was needed. The public never had a say. The war powers clause of the Constitution became symbolic — if not obsolete. Former President Barack Obama inherited that framework and expanded it. His administration developed the now-infamous drone kill list, justified targeted assassinations (including of U.S. citizens) and defended the government’s right to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects without trial. Obama didn’t officially suspend habeas corpus, but in practice, he upheld a system that made the writ meaningless for hundreds of detainees held at Bagram and Guantánamo. The position of his Department of Justice was clear: The executive has the authority to detain and kill, beyond judicial oversight, because we are at war. This is the true bipartisan legacy that paved the way for Trump. The removal of checks and balances didn’t happen overnight. It was built incrementally, piece by piece, under the banner of national security — with the cooperation and silence of the same liberal establishment that now acts scandalized by Trump’s every defiance. In Yemen, Trump Resumes Forever-War Posture It’s worth asking: Why wasn’t there more pearl clutching when the executive branch was unilaterally deciding who lived or died abroad, without congressional debate or judicial process? Why didn’t more alarm bells ring when Democrats joined Republicans in handing over war-making powers and then refused to take them back? Why was it acceptable to rule by emergency decree when the emergency was foreign — but suddenly unacceptable when the same logic is turned inward? Trump is now openly talking about “eradicating” the Houthis in Yemen — an aggressive military escalation that directly contradicts the MAGA-era promise of no new foreign wars. So much for populist anti-interventionism. In lockstep with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, Trump appears eager to resume the forever war posture. And once again, no one’s talking about congressional approval. This is the cycle we’re caught in. Trump exposes the tools others helped create. He strips them of their moral veneer, revealing the ugly core. And rather than confront the system itself, liberals point at Trump as a singular villain — as if everything was working just fine before he came along. The truth is harder to face: If we want to stop the next Trump, or the next expansion of executive lawlessness, we can’t keep pretending he came out of nowhere. We need to reckon with the fact that our democracy has been undermined from within — by both parties, for years. We need to challenge not just the man, but the machine. And that’s something the Democratic Party, in its current corporate and security-state-aligned form, seems unwilling — or unable — to do. It would require renouncing its own legacy, from the Clinton-era crime bill to Obama-era surveillance and drone wars. It would require fundamentally rethinking how power is distributed in this country, and how easily it can be abused. Until that happens, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next Trump defies the next court order. We shouldn’t act shocked when the language of war is used to suspend due process. We shouldn’t cling to the fantasy that our institutions will save us, when those institutions have been hollowed out by decades of bipartisan compromise. Trump didn’t break democracy. He just took the mask off. Vinnie Rotondaro’s work has appeared in Vox, Vice and Narratively, where he won the 2014 New York Press Club award for “best internet feature.” Currently, he is a doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he is studying the intersections of identity, power structures, and historical consciousness, with a focus on the Italian American experience. This article is from Common Dreams. https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/28/trumps-rule-by-fiat-a-bipartisan-legacy/
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
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time to change....
It’s Time for Europe to Do the Unthinkable
Brussels has slavishly followed Washington for too long—and forgotten how to advance its own geopolitical interests.
By Kishore Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. And as my geopolitical gurus taught me, one must always think the unthinkable, as Europe must do now.
One – withdrawal from NATO or licking boots?
First, Europe should announce its willingness to quit NATO. A Europe that is forced to spend 5 percent on defense is a Europe that doesn’t need the United States. Five percent of the combined EU/U.K. GDP in 2024 amounts to $1.1 trillion, comparable to U.S. defense spending of $824 billion in 2024 (In 2024, the EU and U.K. combined spent around $410 billion on defense.). Eventually, Europe need not quit. But only a credible threat to leave would wake up Trump (and Vice President J. D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth) and force him to treat Europe with respect. By contrast, the insistence of the Europeans on staying in NATO after Trump’s provocative actions gives the impression to the world that they are licking the boots that are kicking them in the face.
What shocks many in the world is that Europeans didn’t anticipate the quagmire they’re in. One of the first rules of geopolitics is that we must always plan against worst-case scenarios. After the Ukraine war broke out, all European strategic thinking was based on the best-case scenario of the United States being a totally reliable ally, despite having experienced Trump’s first term and his threats to pull out of the world’s biggest military alliance. For a continent that has produced strategic minds like Metternich, Talleyrand, and Kissinger, there has been almost infantile strategic thinking on Ukraine and its long-term consequences.
Two – come to bargain with Russia
If Metternich or Talleyrand (or Charles de Gaulle) were alive today, they would recommend unthinkable option 2: Work out a new grand strategic bargain with Russia, with each side accommodating the other’s core interests. Many influential European strategic minds would balk at these suggestions, because they are convinced that Russia represents a real security threat to the EU countries. Really? Which is Russia’s most fundamental strategic rival, the EU or China? With whom does it have the longest border? And with whom has its relative power changed so much? The Russians are geopolitical realists of the highest order. They know that neither Napoleon’s troops nor Hitler’s tanks are going to advance to Moscow again. The Europeans don’t see the obvious contradiction between exulting in Russia’s inability to defeat Ukraine (a country of 38 million people and a GDP of about $189 billion in 2024) and then declaring that Russia is the real threat to Europe (which has 744 million people and a GDP of $27 trillion in 2024). The Russians would likely be happy to work out a fair compromise with the EU, respecting current borders between Russia and the EU and a realistic compromise on Ukraine that doesn’t threaten either side’s core interests.
In the long run, after some strategic trust has redeveloped between Russia and a new strategically autonomous Europe, Ukraine could gradually serve as a bridge between the EU and Russia rather than as a bone of contention. Brussels should consider itself fortunate that, in relative terms, Russia is a declining power, not a rising power. If the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a relatively weaker regional organisation, can work out a long-term relationship of trust with a rising power like China, surely the EU can do better with Russia.
Three – compact with China
And this leads to unthinkable option 3: Work out a new strategic compact with China. Again, in the realm of the ABCs of foreign policy, there’s an important reason why geopolitics is a combination of two words: geography and politics. The geography of the United States, which faces China across the Pacific Ocean, combined with Washington’s urge for primacy, explains the hostile relationship between the United States and China. What geopolitical pressures have caused the downturn in EU-China relations? The Europeans foolishly believed that a slavish loyalty to American geopolitical priorities would lead to rich geopolitical dividends for them. Instead, they have been kicked in the face.
The remarkable thing here is that China can help the EU deal with its real long-term geopolitical nightmare: the demographic explosion in Africa. In 1950, Europe’s population was double that of Africa. Today, Africa’s population is twice as large as Europe’s. By 2100, it will be 6 times larger. Unless Africa develops its economies, there will be a surge of African migrants into Europe. If Europeans believe that Europe will never produce leaders like Trump, they are clearly being delusional. Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire supporting far-right parties in Europe.
To preserve a Europe run by centrist parties, Europeans should welcome any foreign investment in Africa that creates jobs and keeps Africans at home. Instead, the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot by criticising and opposing China’s investment in Africa. Just this one act demonstrates how naive long-term European strategic thinking has become. Brussels is sacrificing its own strategic interests to serve American interests in the hope that geopolitical subservience would lead to rewards.
Clearly, it hasn’t. Two thousand years of geopolitics has taught us a simple and obvious lesson: All great powers will put their own interests first and, if necessary, sacrifice the interests of their allies. Trump is behaving like a rational geopolitical actor in putting what he perceives to be his country’s interests first. Europe shouldn’t just criticise Trump – instead, it should emulate him. It should carry out the currently unthinkable option: Declare that henceforth it will be a strategically autonomous actor on the world stage that will put its own interests first. Trump may finally show some respect for Europe if it does that.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/18/europe-eu-nato-us-russia-ukraine/?
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.