When this is all over, we must seriously consider a Constitutional Convention. It's been 236 years since the Constitution was ratified and adopted, and Trump has exposed significant shortcomings. The next iteration of the Constitution should focus on imposing limits on the executive branch. As a single individual, a rogue president can cause substantial harm in a short period.
Purges of anyone who would object in the government, open defiance of any checks and balances, mass arrests, full penetration of nearly every significant and highly secure digital infrastructure, and the head of state literally referring to himself as the king.
In any other country, we would call this a coup.
I really wish I shared the optimism. Trump is talking about taking over USPS directly. The new head of the FBI just announced he wants to send agents after "legacy media". We had an EO saying the president is the sole arbiter of truth in the Executive and installs Apparatchiks into each department for overseeing compliance. And then the official white house communications channel said "long live the King". Republicans are looking at lifting the term limit for him.
In 2020, Trump directed a mob to overthrow the US government to prevent the ratification of an election he lost. In return, SCOTUS granted him absolute immunity for "official acts" that they get to define on an arbitrary basis.
I really think it's over this time. He once told an audience of Christians that if they voted for him, they never had to vote again. Yeah...
The american populace just gave trump and right wing authoritarianism a "strong" democratic mandate (don't act like ~2% isn't HUGE in modern elections). He's actually getting more popular in the face of his current "deconstruction of the nation state". You might try to meme this away as "political honeymoon" but I'm sure that this is durable.
https://abcnews.go.com/538/trump-popular/story?id=117620918
https://www.vox.com/trump-administration/395804/trump-mandat...
Right now, if you hold a constitutional convention, you're getting to get a whole lot of the sheep further voting for wolves, and you can kiss everything you love about "liberalism" goodbye from existing within the united states.
Americans hate empathy, compassion, precieved "beta" weakness, and helping our allies. We also learned this election that Mexican immigrants really hate immigrants from the rest of south and Latin America, and that those same Mexican immigrants hated precieved "wokeness" so much they'd literally mass abandon catholocism and mass convert to evangelical Protestantism over it. The American people want a boot on their face to lick. The people will vote for Trump's agenda. Democrats are in shambles with zero real leadership and no path forward.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024
It's also not that large historically speaking:
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5094602-a-landslide-jus...
Also, his popularity has been dropping, even among voters who voted for him:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-approval-rating-slip...
Finally, a lot of voters seem to be disapproving of what he's doing even if they don't disapprove of him. DOGE is becoming unpopular for example, even among people who support Trump.
I agree with your skepticism about a constitutional convention, but I also think something of that scale is necessary. I don't see how the US can continue on this path with blatant disregard for the constitution.
From my perspective, the problem currently isn't with the US constitution per se. The problem is people ignoring it. Maybe that's part of the same problem, but it seems to me any legal system breaks down when everyone is ignoring the law.
seriously, dang, why are you doing nothing about the concerted attack on HN?
Flagging should absolutely have to be public, at a bare bare minimum.
This thought calls into question why conservatives should even support academia in general, especially liberal arts academia, which shuns conservative thought like the plague while having massive influence upon the culture. At least STEM has measurable value.
