Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.
Trump and his minions falsely claimed that he won the election, and have kept repeating the Big Lie. And we now know how close he came to subverting the Constitution.
He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.
Donald Trump’s sweeping threats if he wins the presidency again to name a special prosecutor to “go after” Joe Biden and take legal action against other foes would subvert the rule of law in America and take the country towards authoritarianism, former justice department officials and scholars have warned.
Trump’s escalating legal threats have targeted “corrupt election officials” lawyers, donors and others he falsely deems out to steal November’s presidential election, and have popped up variously on his Truth Social platform, at campaign events and at an elite police group he addressed this month in North Carolina.
Trump’s menacing pledges to essentially weaponize the justice department against opponents would mark a sharp break with the Department of Justice’s mission statement, which cites as core values “independence and impartiality”.
Ex-justice officials warn that Trump’s barrage of intimidating verbal assaults is unprecedented, and suggest he would undermine longstanding traditions of justice department independence if he wins the presidency, thus badly undermining the rule of law.
“Donald Trump is making many public threats to use the legal system to punish his enemies, which seems to be anyone who opposes him,” said the former deputy attorney general Donald Ayer, who served in the George HW Bush administration. “This conduct is utterly without precedent in campaign history, threatens all of our freedoms, and violates our basic rule of law.”
In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.
Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.
“How about I do this?” Mr. McGahn told Mr. Trump, according to an account verified by witnesses. “I’m going to write you a memo explaining to you what the law is and how it works, and I’ll give that memo to you and you can decide what you want to do.”
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Interviews, court filings and secret White House documents shed new light on how Mr. Trump’s demands for prosecutions in the spring of 2018 ignited a behind-the-scenes push by some of his top aides to contain his impulses, protect the rule of law and insulate the White House from legal and political blowback — issues that some of them say are arguably even more acute today.
The memo that Mr. McGahn’s lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office produced following Mr. Trump’s April 2018 tirade about prosecuting Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Comey amounted to a primer on presidential power — and the limits on it — when it comes to the justice system, according to draft copies of it.
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Through the rest of Mr. Trump’s time in office, he never let up on pressuring federal agencies to take action against his perceived enemies even as he was counseled against it by aides like Mr. McGahn and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff from the middle of 2017 until the beginning of 2019.
Read the Draft Memos
Excerpts from draft memos the White House Counsel’s Office prepared for President Donald J. Trump outlining the limits of his ability to prosecute rivals.
