Essay: "In Donald Trump, the Cult of the Presidency Finds Its L. Ron Hubbard"

[EasyAce]

By Matt Purple
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435868/donald-trump-executive-power-conservatives-will-regret-bush-years

Conservative acquiescence to the growth of executive power comes home to roost in Trump.

It was 2002 and officials in George W. Bush’s administration were weighing a tricky question: Should they use the
American military to break up a suspected cell of al-Qaeda collaborators — not in Helmand Province, but in
Lackawanna, N.Y.?

The answer should have been a firm “no.” The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the federal government from
deploying troops on American soil (with an exemption for the National Guard). But advocates of boots near Buffalo
had a fig leaf: a Justice Department memo from late 2001 that granted the president latitudinous authority against
domestic terrorists. They also had a powerful advocate in Vice President Dick Cheney.

President Bush ultimately overrode Cheney and sent in the FBI, but it wasn’t the last time his administration would
hold a candle too close to posse comitatus law. Following Hurricane Katrina, Bush asked Congress to pass legislation
allowing the military on American soil in the aftermath of a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

The principle behind the Posse Comitatus Act is a sound one: The military is a wartime instrument free from many
'legal constraints, while law enforcement is charged with policing the homeland — mix the two and you have a recipe
' for domestic tyranny. To illustrate, let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: The public elects as president a mercurial
' man-child who possesses enormous self-regard, acts almost entirely on caprice, and has contempt for the rule of
'law. We’ll even complete the banana-republic imagery by giving him ridiculous hair.

Aren’t we better off knowing our imaginary potentate can’t deploy the military to Lackawanna or Los Angeles? And
shouldn’t we avoid setting such a precedent?

Today, we’re forced to consider the possibility that Donald Trump might be sitting in the Oval Office next year. Many
conservatives are horrified that this could happen, and have rightly denounced Trump as a red-alert threat to small-l
liberalism. What they miss is that — by so often siding with Cheney and supporting the Bush administration’s executive
enlargements — they’ve given a hypothetical President Trump ample precedent for abuse he might otherwise not have
had.

Think back to some of the controversies of the War on Terror. Should anyone trust Donald Trump with his personal
'metadata, collected in bulk by the NSA? Especially after Trump gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal cell-phone
'number? What about our e-mails and browsing history? Are we better off knowing that Trump could seize suspects
'and send them to Guantanamo Bay? How about the power to issue signing statements that circumvent the law? And
'what about Hillary Clinton? Can anyone sleep well knowing she could indefinitely detain American citizens? Justice
'Scalia certainly didn’t.

The Bush administration’s apologists justified those policies by observing that we live in a post-9/11 world — a
shifting of epochs on par with the end of the Cretaceous Era — where government needs to be nimble in its response
to terrorism. The problem is that human nature in the post-9/11 world looks an awful lot like human nature in the
pre-9/11 world, and American power is only as beneficent as the man wielding it.

Donald Trump may not be an American Caesar — after all, Julius Caesar went through the trouble of serving in the
military, and Bellum Gallicum is far more literate than The Art of the Deal — but he’s certainly the sort of strongman
our Founders feared would hijack the system they created. This is the same guy whose henchman, Roger Stone,
suggested CNN’s broadcasting license be revoked because Stone didn’t like its coverage of Trump. It’s not reckless
surmise to say a Trump administration would govern like authoritarians: They’ve openly promised to do so.

America is a good country with a brilliant Constitution and an unprecedented standard of living, but it’s subject to
Burke’s fears and Acton’s axioms just the same.

We’re no more immune to spasms of unreason than were France and Germany. And if a leader riding the mob
arrives in high office to find he can wage war without legislative approval and send in EPA SWAT teams, well, that
just makes his job all the easier, doesn’t it? The best hope of mitigating a Trump win in November would be for
the other branches of government to check and balance him. Thanks to the expansion of the powers of the
executive, that will be far more difficult to do.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama deserve particular blame for our engorged executive, but the
problem runs deeper than that, into the bedrock of our political culture. We’re all culprits here. We lambaste
“do-nothing” Congresses for not regularly ramming through gargantuan overhauls of society. We prefer the
singular and expeditious displays of power that come from our presidents, whom we revere. Our most over-
exalted leader, so godly he can be conjured up by only the initials “JFK,” is remembered as sitting at the head
of his own Camelot — fitting, in that this sort of monarch worship hearkens back to the Dark Ages. It’s always
 easier to vest one’s civic pride in a figurehead rather than a squawking gaggle of legislators, but the president
is no mere figurehead. Unlike, say, the queen of England, he commands the awesome apparatus of
government.

Gene Healy has dubbed this the “cult of the presidency”; in Donald Trump, the cultists have found their L. Ron
Hubbard. The entire Trump phenomenon is premised on the exercise of power by a single virile figure, cheered
on by the masses. “I will fix,” Trump regularly pronounces on Twitter — no details required, and with an emphasis
on the first-person pronoun. It should go without saying that this monocratic approach is incompatible with
our delicately arranged form of government.

Defending classical liberalism must mean more than firing off hash tags about Charlie Hebdo; it means defending
all our rights, including the less convenient stuff about warrants and trials. It means remembering Madison’s
warning that “power is of an encroaching nature,” and keeping the presidency off of Congress and the states.
And it means the sort of constitutional housekeeping that frustrates those who only want to focus on the big
issues.

Too often, we’ve abdicated those duties in favor of an executive who we imagine can end inequality and evil. Donald
Trump is a chilling reminder that we can’t afford to make that mistake any longer.

— Matt Purple is the deputy editor of Rare Politics.

[Bigun]

The great republic that so many have fought and bled for is officially dead if either Trump or Hillary become president this time around.

[Wingnut]

[Act II]

[SCENE NINE]
[A TOKEN OF MY EXTREME]

Arriving at L. Ron Trumps modernistic office cathedral ware-house and condominium complex,  Average Joe is greeted by a pre-recorded message and a dramatically illuminated image on a wall-sized TV screen...

[L. RON TRUMP:]
Welcome to the First Church of Trumpology!

[JOE:]
Oh oh oh
Mystical Advisor
What is my problem, tell me
Can you see?

[L. RON TRUMP:]
Well, you have nothing to fear, my son!
You are a Latent Trump Fetishist, It appears to me!

[L. RON TRUMP:]
A Latent Trump Fetishist
Is a person who refuses to admit to his or herself
That sexual gratification can only be achieved
Through the use of Orange Spray Tan... Get the picture?

[JOE:]
Are you telling me
I should come out of the closet now Mr. Trump?

[L. RON TRUMP:]
No, my son!
You must go into THE CLOSET
And you will have
A lot of fun!
That's where they all live
So if you want an
Trump Groupie to love you
You'll have to go in there
N' get you one

[JOE:]
Well...that seems simple enough...

[L. RON Trump:]
Yes, but if you want a really GOOD one,
You'll have to learn a foreign language...

[JOE:]
German, for instance?

[L. RON TRUMP:]
That's right...
A lot of really cute ones come from over there!
(Fifty bucks, please)

And a cheerful group of Trumpologists dance into the room wearing
aluminum foil lab smocks, lock arms in a circle around JOE, making
sure he pays in full, all the while singing with L. RON as he delivers
his final instructions...

JOE leaves the First Church of Trumpology and sets out to try L. RON s expensive advice.
 Joe has just learned to speak
German Now, get this, heres why he did it! He's gonna go to this club on
the other side of town, it's called THE CLOSET...
And they got these Trumpologists in there that really go for a guy dressed up
like a housewife who can speak German (you know what I mean)... so
Joe's learned how to speak German, he goes in this place and he sees
these little Trump Machineries dancing around with each other, and he
sees this one...that looks like it's a cross between an industrial vacuum
cleaner and a chrome piggy bank with marital aids stuck all over its body...
it's really exciting...and when he sees it, he BURSTS INTO SONG...

[roamer_1]

The public elects as president a mercurial
' man-child who possesses enormous self-regard, acts almost entirely on caprice, and has contempt for the rule of
'law. We’ll even complete the banana-republic imagery by giving him ridiculous hair.

uh-oh...