“In a blizzard of executive orders and emergency declarations, President Donald Trump has taken a hatchet to the American government and the global order. He is wrecking the administrative state, shuttering entire agencies and departments, laying off federal workers, firing inspectors general. He is deporting permanent residents for speech protected by the First Amendment, revoking visas from international students, sending immigrants to the military camp at Guantánamo Bay and a mega-prison in El Salvador, and trying to eliminate birthright citizenship. He is defunding research universities and attacking the legal profession. He is threatening draconian tariffs on the country’s closest allies and neighbors, demeaning their leaders, and pulling the United States out of longstanding international commitments. Every day, he launches another unprecedented offensive or changes course; he creates ambiguity and fuels confusion, leaving his critics to second-guess themselves while giving himself cover. “
“In fact, the Trump II administration represents the demolition phase of a new offensive in a decades-long counterrevolution. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo said in a recent interview with the New York Times: “What we’re doing is really a counter revolution. It’s a revolution against revolution.” Mr. Rufo added: “I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.” In effect, President Trump’s actions during the first hundred days of his second mandate are the latest episode in a vast and coherent modern counterrevolution with a longer historical arc and a broader global reach.”
” The only counterpower in the U.S. at this point seem to be the lower federal courts, which have preliminarily enjoined over a dozen executive orders. The sole form of concerted resistance are the many lawsuits brought by Democratic attorneys general, legal nonprofits like the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, civil rights lawyers, and some law firms; and they have been effective at impeding or delaying the demolition phase that is Trump II, at least at the federal district court level. So far. It is uncertain how long the executive branch will abide by or enforce federal district court orders enjoining it. The constitutional crisis that many legal scholars fear may still be in the offing. The Trump administration is, for example, defying the federal courts on two deportation cases. And Vice President Vance has advised President Trump: “when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
posted by f.sheikh