But as those opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the status quo ante. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new game with their own boutique rules.

And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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    5 hours ago

    As a European living in Canada, it seems like outside of the States there’s a lot of talk about figuring out how to just carry on without America. And this is going to sound harsh, but TBH even when the US being more chill it’s still kind of a pain in the ass to other countries around the world. There’s always some war that they start and expect everyone else to get involved in or something like that, and for the last decade or so they’ve been flipping between sensible people and Trump every 4 years which makes the whole country wildly unpredictable to deal with. It’s hard to get any sort of international agreement going when it takes a year or two to negotiate, and you know it’s just going to get tossed out a couple of years later anyway.

    Also, as a non-American if you complain about the president or say something like “You guys should vote for Harris” during an election, there’s always a swarm of Americans who show up and tell you to butt out and mind your own business, but they don’t seem to get that it is our business because when you elect someone like Trump it fucks up the world. I’m sitting here in Canada, wondering when the tariffs are going to kick in or if America is going to try an annex us, whether the US is going to start a war with the EU over Greenland, or if they’re going to seize the fucking Panama Canal in the next couple of years, which are all things that the president of the USA has openly talked about doing. Not to mention there’s an unelected ketamine-addicted billionaire Nazi running around installing servers in all the government offices with nobody stopping him, who’s also talking about overthrowing the UK government and trying to get the AfD elected in Germany, so who knows what that’s going to do around the world.