The Editors of Project Syndicate:
With his unprecedented effort to push the limits of executive power, explains Richard K. Sherwin of New York Law School, Trump is “seeking to alter America’s constitutional framework of checks and balances among co-equal branches of government” – a change that he “lacks constitutional authority to execute.” With the Trump administration indicating that it will not listen to the courts, restoring the US “democratic republic” will require the American people to assert their “original sovereign power, through elections, mass protest, or other forms of collective action.”
But effective collective action requires the public to know what is going on, and as J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, points out, it is difficult to “inform the public and advance public reason” when 10% of Trump’s “performative con-artistry” is “destructive chaos,” and the rest is “mirage.” At the same time, the media is putting too little effort into discerning “which Trump pronouncements are backed by dedicated policymaking teams and bureaucracies with the intent to follow through, and which are not.”
Whatever the details, warns Ian Buruma, Trump’s second presidency will “test, and perhaps destroy, people’s faith in American democracy and its universalist claims.”
More here.
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