Crying Out for a Tyrant

Rand Paul has waited until the last moment to announce that he will vote against Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration, all but insuring that the Senate will officially reject the presidential power-grab. In response, Trump’s cultists and other Republican establishment lovers are taking to the internet to decry Paul’s treason — not treason against the United States, or against the Constitution, but against Trumpism. 

This is one of those increasingly common instances in which the former “grassroots conservative” movement reveals itself a little too plainly. They do not care about questions of constitutionality or harbor any concerns about setting dangerous precedents. They, following their lord and master, think only of one thing: “winning,” which they now define entirely as Trump getting what he wants today, regardless of what it is, or what might result from it. This means they are no longer functioning as the adult citizenry of a republic. They are now effectively nothing but a mob chanting adoration for their savior and hatred for all who would thwart him.

Anyone who cannot see the danger of this transformation of America’s grassroots resistance to the Democratic Marxist Party into a populist demagogue’s angry flock of blind followers needs to take a moment to examine the nature of modern despotism, and also to get over the myopic fantasy that somehow America — “the land of rugged individualism” — is immune to such forms of social collapse. That America is long dead, and its tradition of rugged individualism has raised hardly a peep for nearly a century now.

As for Trump’s national emergency declaration, the objections to it, leaving aside the motives of those raising the objections, are fairly straightforward:

  1. Trump stood before the press the day after the declaration and directly told the nation that there is no emergency, hence establishing from the outset that his reasons for this extreme measure were illegitimate and purely pragmatic. He flat-out said so: “I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster … I just want to get it done faster.”
  2. The argument, exploited by the rank and file cultists, along with Mark Levin and other fame-whoring, bootlicking toadies, that this executive emergency power is established law which has been used by presidents for fifty years, is quite disingenuous and convenient coming from people who used to believe (or claimed to believe) that the expansion of executive authority over the past fifty years was a violation of the letter and spirit of the Constitution’s separation of powers.
  3. To grant a Republican president carte blanche to declare an emergency as a means of appropriating revenues from various sources, even when the context of the declaration is admittedly and expressly not a national emergency, and when the Constitution specifically commands that it is the role of Congress to appropriate revenues, sets a precedent even more dangerous than the one Trump’s Marxist predecessor set for Trump. This establishes a new historical standard for the executive branch to merely grab the People’s money without just cause, and without the intermediary of the People’s representatives, whom the Framers of the Constitution saw should always have control of the purse strings, lest anyone not directly answerable to each state’s taxpayers simply make off with their money for his own purposes. Does anyone believe that the next president, who is fairly likely to be a hardline communist, will hesitate to exploit this new power on a regular basis? And when that communist and her supporters say “But these emergency powers have been used for fifty years, and the last president established that no actual national emergency is needed to trigger their use,” what will the Trump cultists and bootlicking toadies — not to mention the constitutional lawyers and elected members of Congress — have to say against it?

A final thought. During his whirlwind Surrender-to-Communism-Forever tour of East Asia this past week, Trump took the time to throw Kim Jong-un and the Chinese communists a freebie, namely cancelling the annual U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises, which he fears make his dear friend Kim unhappy. His official reason offered for cancelling the exercises — which he in fact promised to do as a concession to Kim last year — was that they are “too expensive.” 

I have to wonder whether part of his calculation was his consideration of where the national defense budget could be pinched to find the money he has decided to steal from it for his “national emergency.” But it makes no difference. His adoring idolaters will have no objections to his abandoning longtime allies and insulting his military commanders for the sake of advancing his pet project, his cult-engendering fake “Wall.” 

When they are prepared to throw the U.S. Constitution onto the fire of their idolatry, what’s a little sell-out to communist dictators?

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