Roman dictators have always fascinated me. It worked (for a while at least) because both sides agreed it was necessary and temporary. The people who appointed the dictator knew extreme measures were needed to navigate them through some crisis. The dictator knew if they tried to hold on to power longer than was necessary they would simply be removed or killed, their supreme power only extended through the crisis in which they were needed.
I mean, it may not be a completely solved problem, but you don't have to be too clever to think that perhaps rules similar to the War Powers Act ought to also apply to the President's authority to apply tariffs.
It's a foundational part of the sickness in people like Trump that anything bad is by definition somebody else's fault, and clearly his cultists just keep lapping up his lies no matter how insane and transparent.
This. Anything (accidentally) good was totally intended by Trump. Anything bad was because of evil ultra-leftists sabotaging his intended good, and not because Trump made even the tiniest of mistakes.
To an extent, since we’re all human. But conservatives, regardless of nationality, are unified by one characteristic that makes them more susceptible to this kind of propaganda.
Conservatives lack the ability to empathize abstractly. Due to their extreme emphasis on being self-centered, they are deficient in understanding that what happens to another can happen to them.
Once something bad happens to them, they are able to start to see the threads that bind them to others and society. But it’s only once it’s been made personal that there’s a chance of this recognition occurring.
So “us good, them bad” style of mob thinking is more common in conservatives only because they systematically do not ask themselves “are we actually different from them?”
It's interesting to see it as an answer to the question, how long does it take to turn a well regulated democracy with a powerless head of state into an autocracy.
We've all been learning just how much of the US system runs on assumption of there being some baseline level of competence and good faith. It hasn't been a pretty lesson.
I'm honestly not sure there is another way since laws can't cover all possible future edge cases with effective enforcement mechanisms. The simpler fix is to not elect blatantly corrupt and incompetent leaders, but voters failed that task and now the country is paying the price.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48435