From betraying Ukraine and dispatching masked agents who killed Americans to deporting US citizens and pulling out of accords controlling climate change and Iranian nuclear weapons, the list of Donald Trump’s abuses is long and growing still longer, seemingly by the day.
Looking back decades from now, historians will see that at the top of this shameful list is Trump’s utter abuse of his pardon power. It started on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists who, on 6 January 2021, had stormed the US Capitol.
More recently, as documented in astonishing accounts by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and 60 Minutes, Trump has overseen a robust pardons market in which friends or relatives of criminals offer to pay millions for presidential clemency.
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I don’t think US founders ever expected that such a moron would manage to be elected, and use that power for himself.
If you had just overtrown the british crown to be a “no king” republic in that big land you just colonized and emptied from its people, you would expect that no one would ever act like a king here, right? …right?
We need the midterms to allow for a possible reform of the constitution, if it is even still possible…
Within a single presidency, you had early Americans calling one another idiots, tyrants, and foreign plants. Washington himself wasn’t above suspicion.
Everyone from Patrick Henry to Aaron Burr reviled one another and accused each other of plots to reinstate some kind of monarchy.
That won’t happen. The American system will continue to revert to the 19th century mean, until the bureaucratic mechanisms fail completely.
It’s crazy how they weren’t able to create a completely flawless founding document governing a new nation of 4 million that then grew into 340 million over centuries and became the richest and most powerful country on Earth on the first try.
That is not how any of that worked.
American Exceptionlism is summed up neatly as a continent of stolen land and a legacy of warmongering and genocide.