Trump faced mounting losses this week in court on numerous fronts, both personal and presidential. An appeals court rejected Trump’s efforts to revive his defamation suit against CNN, a federal judge ruled against his deployment of National Guard troops to Washington, DC, and another judge ruled he likely violated the law when trying to cut millions in funding to local governments unless they followed conditions related to immigration enforcement. Former White House lawyer during Trump’s first term, Ty Cobb, joins “The Weekend” to discuss.
The founding fathers were well aware.
People have this impression that the founding fathers wanted to put strict limits on what government was “allowed” to do, so that everyone in government would follow the rules and we wouldn’t get Trump. That is adjacent to what they thought, but it’s not what they thought. What they thought was, more or less, that the natural state of government is something akin to Trump, and if it gets that bad, it’s your job as a citizen to get organized and fucking get rid of it. That’s what they did. They just also tried to set up a balanced system for the people who came next, and explained why they were doing it in a lot of detail so people could understand and get behind it. And, they thought, if you don’t do that, then you get what you get.
(And also you will deserve it, but that’s not the important part. It’s more about the reality than the “deserve.” And the reality is, change things or they won’t be changed. No one “deserves” something like Trump, but that’s not the question at issue.)
(They would be surprised and saddened by Trump, I think, but I think more so about the population who let things get so bad that he came to power than about the surprise that there were very bad people doing very bad things with government. Like I said, they were completely aware of things like ICE and how those things operate. That’s why they fought the war.)