Interesting. A bit sensationalist. And I think it gives Trump - essentially a bumbler with money - far too much credit for orchestrating a large-scale disruption of a complex set of systems he has little to no real understanding of how they work, or what they do. It's the other snakes in the pit that scare me. Like Dubya, some seriously bad people with bad intentions for the state and the American people, now have a puppet that can control, who has completely self-isolated himself from all reasonable and measured inputs. There is no longer anyone with a reasonable mind speaking into Trump's ear. (And by "reasonable" I'm including the incredibly horrid Paul Ryan, who - in the last 3 months - has begun looking like a fucking Boy Scout, after being an epic shit for his entire life.) Either they are dumb enough to think they can turn the ship of government in a couple of weeks, or they are intentionally driving it on the rocks, just like they promised when campaigning. Either the Republican Senate and the DHS (and other branches) grow a pair and say NO, or the entire power structure comes tumbling down. Because the whole secret to the entire US Government is that it is run on the base assumption that nobody is really going to do anything bad. Everyone trusts that people are in their positions because they are good at what they do, and have good intentions. We now have actively bad actors, with bad intentions, holding the levers of power, and there really is no recourse. Individuals within agencies can hide documents, dodge phone calls, "forget" to do things they have been asked to do - in other words, make dumb ideas get mired in bureaucracy - and block the bad actors. Or someone can go to court. And fight for what's right. And take YEARS to get to a ruling. Which cannot actually be enforced by anyone. So great. The Supreme Court decides that Trump is a terrorist, and he is convicted. Who, EXACTLY, walks up to the White House, armed, gets past Trump's personal security detail that are on HIS payroll, and puts the cuffs on the motherfucker and takes him to jail? See? The government is designed to work as long as everyone pretty much acts like reasonable people. But the unreasonable are now in power.
IMO the government is designed to make sure that unreasonable people don't hold power. The fact that it takes a while is part of the reason that reasonable people can and usually do. We are a nation of laws, not rulers. Trump is currently a US president. If he wants to be a ruler, it is going to be an arduous process on his part. I am not saying that it isn't possible, but the question is whether he can defeat the legal system before it defeats him. The fact that it is difficult to remove a bad president is what creates stability for the good ones.
He's also playing a game as a Level 1 newb while surrounded by career Level 80 arch-mages. They've opted not to frag him so far but they can change their mind whenever they want. Oh, look at that. The Attorney General has ordered the Justice Department not to defend Trump's muslim ban in court.
The advantage of a bureaucracy is that it has more inertia than a glacier. They are not particularly prone to shock. This is literally the way the process works. Someone does something crazy, someone else issues an injunction, someone else calls an emergency session to debate it, meetings are had and laws are passed. Perhaps you're forgetting that Congress passed a fucking act over Terri Schiavo. It'd be one thing if the whole apparatus were suddenly Trump-crazy. But Team Trump is pulling inward, not reaching outward. They've basically said "you're with us or you're with the terrorists" and then not waited for an answer. Is that a rhetorical question? Because it doesn't really matter. The discussion at hand right now is whether the DHS is bound by law to answer to the Executive, even in the face of district court rulings. We see defiance. I reckon they see "clarification." When it happens, Trump has either more power or less. If he ends up with "more", it becomes a congressional problem. If "less", it sets a precedent for future grabs. Suppose Trump is impeached and refuses to go. Wouldn't be the first time a despot refuses to step down. That's very different from the point where the despot is no longer in charge.Because the whole secret to the entire US Government is that it is run on the base assumption that nobody is really going to do anything bad. Everyone trusts that people are in their positions because they are good at what they do, and have good intentions.
Who, EXACTLY, walks up to the White House, armed, gets past Trump's personal security detail that are on HIS payroll, and puts the cuffs on the motherfucker and takes him to jail?
My concern is more Bannon at the head of the Military. The military is a bunch of serious motherfuckers who have vowed an oath to defend the constitution above all. They also strictly follow the command structure. Which now has them reporting to Bannon, and him to Trump. So they issue a blatantly unconstitutional order to block all immigrants at the border, and the DHS (aka: TSA) holds legal Green Card holders at the airport. THIS is the practical aspect that worries me. Trump says something dipshit loony, and the guys with the guns and no training jump to fulfill his orders without the honor, respect, training, or skills of the military. Nobody at the DHS said, "Ignore that order, because it is stupid and unconstitutional, and has no practical methodology for implementation." THIS is our concern, dude.
'member back when McNamara decided we needed "launch codes" in order to start a nuclear war and Curtis LeMay had them set to all zeroes because no pencil-neck actuarial geek was going to tell him who he got to bomb? It's not that he didn't take the job seriously. It's that he took the job more seriously than Robert McNamara. Bannon had the Joint Chiefs removed from the National Security Council. The military reports to the Joint Chiefs, not to Bannon. The Executive has JSOC - which is probably why we ran a dunderheaded SEAL Team Six raid into Yemen that involved 30 dead civilians, two injured pilots, a scuttled V-22 and a dead SEAL. The guys that popped bin Laden without so much as a scratch and we're pantomiming Carter's hostage rescue. Clearly, they're playing whatever GI Joe games they can. But the conventional military structure? I mean, we didn't even go play saber-rattling games in the Gulf or anything. We're talking about hair-on-fire constitutional crisis over one religion, seven countries. We're talking about guys at the DHS saying "follow that order, because stupid and unconstitutional as it is, it was given to us via a constitutionally sound process and until this shit gets sorted out, we gotta do the thing." I can see the argument that it is of a kind with the New World Order marching on California but in much the same way that budgies and velociraptors are of a kind.