How a conservative legal doctrine — and his own 'stupidity' — could topple Trump
President Donald Trump is unique among “tyrants” — both in his cruelty and his “stupidity,” Guardian foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall writes.
“Measured by willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation, Trump is uniquely dangerous — and ever more so by the day,” according to Tisdall.
Given Trump’s massive effort to consolidate executive power, The Guardian foreign affairs correspondent wonders if the president’s “premeditated swinging of a wrecking ball at US democracy, laws, values and dreams [can] be halted.”
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“How may what remains of the international rules-based system be salvaged?” Tisdall asks. “Who or what will dethrone him?”
According to the correspondent, “policy failures and personal misconduct do not usually collapse a presidency.”
Still, Tisdall points to a recent op-ed from University of California, Davis law professor Aaron Tang, who last week wrote an op-ed in the New York Times suggesting “the Supreme Court-tested 'major questions doctrine' could bring [Trump] to heel.”
“[The doctrine] requires the government to demonstrate a ‘clear congressional authorization’ when it makes decisions of great ‘economic and political significance,’” Tisdall writes of Tang’s analysis.
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“Of all the tools in the tyrant-toppling toolbox, none are so potentially decisive as those supplied by Trump’s own stupidity,” Tisdall adds. “... Corruption on this scale cannot pass unchallenged indefinitely. Avarice alone may be Trump’s undoing."
“All this points to one conclusion: as a tyrant, let alone as president, Trump is actually pretty useless – and as his failures, frustrations and fantasies multiply, he will grow ever more dangerously unstable. Trump’s biggest enemy is Trump.”
“But right now, the best, brightest hope is that, drowning in hubris, Trump will destroy himself,” the correspondent concludes.
Read the full op-ed at the Guardian.