“A second Trump administration would be very different from the first,” wrote Moynihan. “Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts.”
The first part, he wrote, is to install a “deep bench of loyalists” into government positions, something for which the Heritage Foundation is already helping him recruit. The second part is to bring back his proposed “Schedule F” designation, demolishing merit-based hiring in the civil service and making tens of thousands of career government workers subject to dismissal and replacement based purely on loyalty to the president — effectively replacing their oath to the Constitution with an oath to Trump.
Doing this, writes Moynihan, would be “a catastrophe for government performance.”
The third and final part, he warned, is to “create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval,” installing loyalists in key government lawyer positions that would otherwise block his plans as unconstitutional.
Ultimately, wrote Moynihan, “When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.”
On Saturday, Trump lashed out on Truth Social, writing, “It’s so good to see how badly the THIRD RATE MAGAZINE, The Atlantic, is doing. It’s failing at a level seldom seen before, even in the Publishing Business. False and Fake stories do it every time! They’ve got a rich person funding the ridiculous losses, but at some point, rich people get smart also. Steve Jobs would not be proud of his wife, Laurene, and the way she is spending his money. The Radical Left is destroying America!”
That post was attributed to Trump reportedly seeing — and unlikely reading — Wehner’s column titled, “Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?” which delved into his increasingly open admissions that he is a fan of authoritarianism.
After Scarborough harshly criticized Trump’s threats to have military officials executed for treason for opposing him and making jokes about an assistant attacking Nancy Pelosi’s 83-year-old husband with a hammer, Wehner theorized that the former president is simply a sociopath.
“There is a long history of this dehumanization, these passions consuming people, including people of faith,” Wehner said of Trump’s rabid fanbase. “That’s why I think there has to be such a pushback from others, to try, in a sense, to shake them and say, ‘Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what you’re a part of? You’ve jettisoned everything you claim to most cherish in your life to make inner peace with this man who is a sociopath, an unfiltered sociopath.’”
“And he is undisguised in who he is and what he wants to do,” he worried. “That not only pushes them away, but it brings them toward him. It is a sickening episode in the history of American politics and the history of American Christianity.”
Trump furiously denies he’s ‘cognitively impaired’ in rambling Truth Social post
“Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left ‘Disinformation Machine,’ go wild saying that ‘Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden He must be cognitively impaired,’” wrote Trump. “No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country. Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it. Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House.”
Koko the gorilla reportedly had an IQ in the 70-90 range which, if compared to a human child her age, would be deemed slow for her age. That said, there are parts of this particular test that Koko could’ve “aced.”
“In some types of questions, Koko did better than human counterparts of her age. At age four-and-one-half, she scored better than the average child of six in her ability to discriminate between same and different, and in her ability to detect flaws in a series of incomplete or distorted drawings,” Patterson wrote of Koko in her book The Education of Koko. “She astonished me with her ability to complete logical progressions like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test.”
Koko for President is just an unfulfilled internet dream.
If you had almost 100 million worshipers hanging on your every spew, and a national media which aired/printed everything you disgorge, and could threaten individuals, groups, and incite your followers to violently attack your enemies, you might get an enlarged ego too!
Well, while Trump did not start any wars, he fails greatly in comparison to Napoleon in important ways.
From The Economist:
For whereas many tyrants over the course of European history have fought wars and ruled impetuously, not to mention imperiously, few have marked modern Europe—and the world beyond—so enduringly. Forget Bonaparte the general, the Napoleon that really matters was the fellow who held dozens of administrative gatherings from which emanated the laws and institutions that hundreds of millions of people still live by today.
The continued import of Napoleon to France is visible across daily life there: teenagers study for the baccalauréat he devised in lycées he introduced, tourists stream to his imposing mausoleum, lawyers study the thick Code Civil of rules he brought in.
But the introduction of the civil code that Bonaparte championed—he chaired many drafting sessions personally, and in time called it the Code Napoléon—was a turning point for Europe. Opaque customary laws that were imposed by local grandees on some citizens but not others were replaced by transparent statutes written so as to be understood by the (educated) public. Superstition and tradition were replaced by “sublimated common sense”, perhaps the most French thing ever. Forget the privileges accorded to nobility or the church: the only source of authority was to be the state. The landed gentry lost their privileges (plenty had already lost their heads), as did the clergy and the urban oligarchy of guildmasters who throttled innovation and kept the little people in their place. In the administration meritocracy flourished.
And Napoleonism’s reach extends beyond his home continent: the legal systems in much of Latin America and the Middle East are variations of the code he created.
Al Fresco 7 months ago
Napoleon had his Waterloo and all be got was ABBA.
Radish the wordsmith 7 months ago
“A second Trump administration would be very different from the first,” wrote Moynihan. “Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions. It has three major parts.”
The first part, he wrote, is to install a “deep bench of loyalists” into government positions, something for which the Heritage Foundation is already helping him recruit. The second part is to bring back his proposed “Schedule F” designation, demolishing merit-based hiring in the civil service and making tens of thousands of career government workers subject to dismissal and replacement based purely on loyalty to the president — effectively replacing their oath to the Constitution with an oath to Trump.
Doing this, writes Moynihan, would be “a catastrophe for government performance.”
The third and final part, he warned, is to “create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval,” installing loyalists in key government lawyer positions that would otherwise block his plans as unconstitutional.
Ultimately, wrote Moynihan, “When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.”
Radish the wordsmith 7 months ago
On Saturday, Trump lashed out on Truth Social, writing, “It’s so good to see how badly the THIRD RATE MAGAZINE, The Atlantic, is doing. It’s failing at a level seldom seen before, even in the Publishing Business. False and Fake stories do it every time! They’ve got a rich person funding the ridiculous losses, but at some point, rich people get smart also. Steve Jobs would not be proud of his wife, Laurene, and the way she is spending his money. The Radical Left is destroying America!”
That post was attributed to Trump reportedly seeing — and unlikely reading — Wehner’s column titled, “Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?” which delved into his increasingly open admissions that he is a fan of authoritarianism.
After Scarborough harshly criticized Trump’s threats to have military officials executed for treason for opposing him and making jokes about an assistant attacking Nancy Pelosi’s 83-year-old husband with a hammer, Wehner theorized that the former president is simply a sociopath.
“There is a long history of this dehumanization, these passions consuming people, including people of faith,” Wehner said of Trump’s rabid fanbase. “That’s why I think there has to be such a pushback from others, to try, in a sense, to shake them and say, ‘Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what you’re a part of? You’ve jettisoned everything you claim to most cherish in your life to make inner peace with this man who is a sociopath, an unfiltered sociopath.’”
“And he is undisguised in who he is and what he wants to do,” he worried. “That not only pushes them away, but it brings them toward him. It is a sickening episode in the history of American politics and the history of American Christianity.”
Radish the wordsmith 7 months ago
Trump furiously denies he’s ‘cognitively impaired’ in rambling Truth Social post
“Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left ‘Disinformation Machine,’ go wild saying that ‘Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden He must be cognitively impaired,’” wrote Trump. “No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country. Also, and as reported, I just took a cognitive test as part of my Physical Exam, and ACED it. Also ACED (a perfect score!) one taken while in the White House.”
Koko the gorilla reportedly had an IQ in the 70-90 range which, if compared to a human child her age, would be deemed slow for her age. That said, there are parts of this particular test that Koko could’ve “aced.”
“In some types of questions, Koko did better than human counterparts of her age. At age four-and-one-half, she scored better than the average child of six in her ability to discriminate between same and different, and in her ability to detect flaws in a series of incomplete or distorted drawings,” Patterson wrote of Koko in her book The Education of Koko. “She astonished me with her ability to complete logical progressions like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test.”
Koko for President is just an unfulfilled internet dream.
XF8U-3 7 months ago
Napoleon was actually tall for his time – more British propaganda…
Honorable Mention In The Banjo Toss Premium Member 7 months ago
“The bigot’s mind is like the pupil of an eye – the more light you pour on it, the more it contracts.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
moosemin 7 months ago
If you had almost 100 million worshipers hanging on your every spew, and a national media which aired/printed everything you disgorge, and could threaten individuals, groups, and incite your followers to violently attack your enemies, you might get an enlarged ego too!
Free Radical 7 months ago
So it is possible to have a Napoleonic Complex just by having small hands…and mind
Baslim the Beggar Premium Member 7 months ago
Well, while Trump did not start any wars, he fails greatly in comparison to Napoleon in important ways.
From The Economist:
For whereas many tyrants over the course of European history have fought wars and ruled impetuously, not to mention imperiously, few have marked modern Europe—and the world beyond—so enduringly. Forget Bonaparte the general, the Napoleon that really matters was the fellow who held dozens of administrative gatherings from which emanated the laws and institutions that hundreds of millions of people still live by today.
The continued import of Napoleon to France is visible across daily life there: teenagers study for the baccalauréat he devised in lycées he introduced, tourists stream to his imposing mausoleum, lawyers study the thick Code Civil of rules he brought in.
But the introduction of the civil code that Bonaparte championed—he chaired many drafting sessions personally, and in time called it the Code Napoléon—was a turning point for Europe. Opaque customary laws that were imposed by local grandees on some citizens but not others were replaced by transparent statutes written so as to be understood by the (educated) public. Superstition and tradition were replaced by “sublimated common sense”, perhaps the most French thing ever. Forget the privileges accorded to nobility or the church: the only source of authority was to be the state. The landed gentry lost their privileges (plenty had already lost their heads), as did the clergy and the urban oligarchy of guildmasters who throttled innovation and kept the little people in their place. In the administration meritocracy flourished.
And Napoleonism’s reach extends beyond his home continent: the legal systems in much of Latin America and the Middle East are variations of the code he created.
smithsilverstrea 7 months ago
and his hands were bigger!
FreyjaRN Premium Member 7 months ago
Too right!