I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I share my in-process thoughts.
On Saturday, the president all but declared war on a U.S. city:
I suppose Trump’s followers would say, “He’s just kidding around! He’s an entertainer.” And they would cheer how he is “owning the libs.”
But this is treason, not entertainment. The US Constitution, Article III, Section 3, Clause 1 (1789) says:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them .
Northwestern University law professor Paul Gowder comments:
The first thing that the treason clause says about that crime is that it’s constituted by levying war against the United States. I don’t understand how we can interpret that threat as anything other than a threat to levy war against a city in the United States.
The picture of an American city in flames with the statement that Chicagoans are going to see why it’s called the Department of War is a quite clear implication that it’s a threat to wage war against the city of Chicago.
Robert B. Hubbell writes, “Among the thousands of idiotic, offensive, and unlawful things Trump has said, his threat to wage war on the City of Chicago—and hence the state of Illinois—has to be a contender for the worst.” Indeed, among the many flagrant violations of the rule of law and, more important, the rule of morality we’ve seen from the president and his cronies, this is one of the worst. As Heather Cox Richardson writes, “this open attack of the president on an American city is a new level of unhinged.”
The Posse Comitatus Act, a U.S. federal law enacted in 1878, prohibits the use of Department of Defense (er… excuse me, Department of War) to enforce domestic laws, such as those around immigration or crime.
I see no boundary that this administration will not cross in its quest for power, money, and vengeance against who it thinks are its enemies.
And despite Trump’s ongoing teardown of morality and the rule of law, 41% of Americans approve of him. MAGA cheer him on. In the 2024 election, he received 49.8% of the popular vote, despite his encouraging a riot at the nation’s capitol to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.1
He showed who he was in his first term, and now he’s emboldened in his second to push the limits further, step by step, so that people don’t realize our country’s becoming a fascist dictatorship instead of a democracy.
Fortunately, despite general Democrat weakness, there are a couple of state leaders standing up to Trump: Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker. In response to Trump’s war on Chicago post, Newsom tweeted, “The President of the United States is deploying the military onto US streets and using our troops like political pawns. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME NUMB TO THIS.” And Pritzker tweeted, “Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.”
And, he tweeted, “Authoritarians thrive on your silence—be loud—for America.”
- It’s impossible for me to understand how anyone who has respect for law voted for him in 2024, no matter their policy preferences. ↩︎