Trump Makes Another Big Authoritarian Move

Yesterday, Donald Trump tweeted a rather extraordinary tweet, even by his own execrable standards:


Leah McElrath quickly noted:


Which is absolutely spot-on. I further observed:


I don't know what's going to happen next — how or when Trump will follow through on his threat. But I do this with absolute certainty: It isn't going to happen randomly.

Donald Trump, so goes the narrative, provides precious little evidence of long-term strategy. That narrative is totally wrong. I cannot state this more urgently.

Trump has been toying with a presidential run for decades, and he became the acolyte of Roy Cohn to learn politics. A very specific kind of dirty, unethical, scorched-earth politics. As a developer in NYC, he cultivated relationships with both Democratic and Republican politicians for decades — but, when it came time to run, there was no question at all for which party he was going to run as a candidate. There was only party whose base was going to buy what he was selling, which itself was shaped to appeal to very particular people in a very particular way at this particular time.

He now sits in the Oval Office, one of the most powerful men on the planet.

That was the plan. He didn't achieve it by accident.

Trump might not be sitting in the Oval Office without intervention from the Russians, but that is not an argument that he had no long-term plan on which he was executing. To the contrary, it's an argument that collusion became part of the plan.

The sooner this notion that the authoritarian Trump is just "winging it" dies a deserved death, the better.

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