Drag them and burn them he says
Trump Attorney General Hopeful Vows to Drag Bodies Through the Street
Mike Davis, a right-wing activist considered a leading candidate for Trump’s attorney general, on Wednesday threatened to (legally) “drag their dead political bodies through the streets” and burn them, referring to enemies of Trump and the right.
He did say that.
Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch who calls himself “Trump’s viceroy,” is not likely to show any restraint in exercising retribution on behalf of the president. He’s already threatened special counsel Jack Smith, who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as well as his mishandling of classified documents, to “lawyer up.”
The fact that a legal troll like Davis is considered a front-runner to head the Justice Department reveals how many conservative lawyers Trump burned through during his first term and after his attempts to cling to power following his 2020 election loss. Many of these lawyers either want nothing to do with him now, or are facing disbarment and criminal charges for their efforts to help Trump. The lawyers who have stuck around are more MAGA true believers than top conservative legal minds.
These lawyers will be tasked with tearing down any legal obstacles to Trump’s agenda as well as that of his far-right allies. These include whatever checks on the presidency exist in law, and whatever regulations stand in the way of business leaders tied to conservatism. As Davis’s post demonstrates, they will also help to bring the full force of the DOJ against Trump’s enemies.
Even if Davis isn’t picked to be the next A.G., he will undoubtedly be a part of Trump’s legal army, which will have a big agenda. There’s already talk of a mass pardon of January 6 rioters, and other Trump allies have enemies lists of their own. A plan to purge the federal workforce of those who would oppose him has already been devised, too. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, Trump faces few, if any, legal constraints, and we’re about to find out what still stands in his way.
Convicted felon wins election, high jinks ensue.
I’d like to think that, because Trump actually broke many laws and yet four years wasn’t a long enough time to prosecute him for them, that the many Democrats on his Enemies List, who didn’t actually break any laws, should also be able to hold off prosecution for four years.
As Timothy Snyder put it, they are clearly (from memory) preparing the ground for worse things to come. I don’t know to what degree it’s a conscious strategy (as opposed to instinctual, trial and error etc.), but anyway it’s a prime example of the weaponization of cognitive dissonance: Signal your illiberal and authoritarian agenda in advance while making sure there is just enough plausible deniability to give you an alibi (”it’s just trolling”, ”not to be taken literally” etc.). Get your followers into the habit of going along with, excusing or explaining away, even actively applauding increasingly dehumanizing and violent rhetoric, unambiguous, shameless lies, blatant corruption, openly authoritarian and illiberal behaviors etc. until such trangressions have definitely become normalized, legitimate, within the range of acceptable behavior. Then, once the actual violence begins, your followers have no face-saving way of turning back. Claiming ignorance is definitely not an available option at this point, nor, for that matter, has it been since before Trump was first elected back in 2016. The guy is many things, but subtle is not among them.
I take no comfort in the idea that there will be another election in four years, nor in the idea that a president can only serve for two terms. That was under the old rules. The rewriting of the rule book has already begun, and with foxes now in complete control of all the henhouses the way things have always worked in the past is hardly a reliable indicator of what can or cannot happen in the future. The same trends we have seen in the U.S. have already killed democracies elsewhere, and judging by everything we have observed so far I see little to support the American exceptionalist idea that ”it can’t happen here”.
I often worry that I’m becoming a bit of an ”alarmist”, a ”doomsayer”, an ”apocalypticist” etc., but in this case, as it turns out, even my pessimism didn’t go far enough. As I have previously stated, I would have been surprised if Trump didn’t win the election, but I also predicted that he wouldn’t win the popular vote. I stand corrected.
Of course Trump himself is not going to live forever, but Trumpism is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, and with a popular majority now having a stake in defending their choice, just like the other frequently prophesied ”Peak Tr…”, I wouldn’t count on ”Peak Trump” to happen anytime soon.
Bjarte – during the Iran-Contra hearings newspapers accused the Reagan Administration of preparing something called “Operation Garden Plot” or the “Martial Law Plan”, where during a severe emergency, the Administration would suspend the US Constitution and place the United States under indefinite martial law (Colonel Oliver North denied that there was such a plan).
In 1991 Ross Gelbspan of the Boston Globe claimed that the US Army had discussed a military intervention in Central America, part of which would have involved the internment of US anti-nuclear activists, environmentalists and refugee support advocates.
https://www.google.ie/books/edition/The_Social_History_of_Crime_and_Punishme/vs9wCQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22oliver+north%22+%22martial+law%22&pg=PT1347&printsec=frontcover
No doubt members of the Trump Administration may be considering a similar plan. I speculate that Trump and Vance could launch a big US war (possibly again Iran, or even against Mexico). They might then use the resulting climate of jingoism to try to supress all dissent, similar to what happened in the US in WWI, Vietnam and the Second Gulf War.
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