President Donald Trump publicly vented at Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday, saying the lack of criminal charges against top adversaries was “killing our reputation and credibility.”
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump posted on Truth Social in a message directed to “Pam.” “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” He specifically lamented the lack of criminal charges against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, three of his most prominent political antagonists.
It’s a minor miracle that the law even matters anymore. Are the courts not completely captured now? How?
The US, for better or worse, really is a very distributed system. It’s the only possible way that a single endeavor can grow to this size, you just can’t have it all centrally managed and have anything at ground level still make any sense or get done well. It also has a pretty valuable property that a lot of the people operating it really believe in the mission of what they are doing. Prosecutors believe they’re putting bad people away, grand juries believe they’re making decisions about justice, National Guard people believe they’re protecting the country. It’s not always true (which carries its own variety of problem), but quite a lot of the time, it actually is (partly because it’s kind of a self fulfilling prophecy as people are motivated to fix it at the local level if things go off the rails).
Trump doesn’t understand any of that, which is why even medium-sized enterprises he’s ever been involved with have always been a clusterfuck. And now he’s driving the world’s biggest robot, and surprise surprise, the controls aren’t simple and it’s not doing what he wants. We’re just lucky that this decades-in-the-making fascist coup came to its climax with Angry Facebook Grandpa at the wheel instead of someone who knew what the fuck they were doing. Even Trump is having quite a bit of success with it. If it had been someone qualified, we’d have no chance at all I think.
Exactly. Just wanted to say I found this insightful. A key part of historical American success is that every branch, department, and individual completes their role in the same true reality. They may differ in political opinion, but they all have the same facts.
Trump mucks it up by asserting a different, false reality every day. Nobody can guess for sure what it will be, except MAGA 🙄.
Honest people, regardless of poltics, will eventually find themselves an enemy of the clown.
This is all backwards. Those are the things that allowed it to become this size; there’s nothing that says they have to stay because of its size, and the size could shrink to accommodate the new functioning (or lack thereof) of the courts.
100% true
Not sure where you got this part, since what you just said is precisely what I said
Also true
Exactly.
It’s true that the supreme court often bows to Trump, but the DOJ has lost frequently this year in the lower courts. Even there, traditionally the DOJ wins nearly all their cases. However, Bondi’s DOJ has been so incompetent that they’ve lost a record number. So many, that DOJ attorneys are losing their deferential rapport with judges.
It’s not perfect, and justice remains incomplete and slow, but the courts are jamming up the overreaches.
One great source of information and hope is Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket series which frequently covers these topics.