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Wendy Shelley's avatar

Great news for Canada and NATO. Glad they’ve wised up to FF47’s dazzling charisma and are going their own way! Not only have they been paying attention to the rest of the world’s problems but are completely discounting the disgusting traitor in the WH. Can’t wait for his final comeuppance!

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elliott oberman's avatar

Jamelle Bouie

ICE Will See You Now For President Trump, the United States is little more than his personal playground, Mar-a-Lago gone national.

In his mind, the nation has become his private property and he is entitled to do with it what he pleases. Accordingly, Trump seems to lack any sense of obligation or responsibility to the public. His chaotic and haphazard policymaking — if you can even call it that — is as disrespectful to the American people as any imaginable insult.

The president’s sense of his total impunity extends beyond him to his allies and agents. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the roving bands of immigration agents tasked with seizing anyone deemed “illegal.” In cities across the country, masked men and women are snatching people off the streets, forcing them into unmarked cars to be detained, without offering them the chance to contact family members or a lawyer. Just last week, bystanders captured footage of Narciso Barranco, a landscaper, being pinned down and battered by a group of masked agents. His son reported that Barranco was working when several masked men approached him. When he quite understandably ran away, his son said, he was pepper sprayed and beaten.

That ICE has claimed this right to anonymity — which is to say, the right to evade responsibility for its actions in the field — is a testament to the ways that Trump has, in his pursuit of impunity, warped and undermined the idea of a public trust.

What Trump has done, building on decades of near impunity for wrongdoing among American officeholders, is completely invert this dynamic in the most egregious way imaginable. Accountability separates those who govern from those who rule, and Trump, of course, intends to rule. It is fitting that on the other side of the president’s authoritarian contempt for responsibility, accountability and the public trust is his demand for total compliance from ordinary people, under threat of state scrutiny and harassment.

The SAD FACT is that it is difficult to extricate a nation from authoritarian habits of mind and reorient a people toward liberty and equality. It takes time and effort to dismantle a democracy, but if you can bend citizens into subjects, then you’ve already won the most important battle, if not the war.

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