I mean. Rationally speaking, shouldn’t Biden do something extreme at this moment?
This is one core problem Kamala had. Her message was “Donald Trump is a Nazi,” yet the entire Biden administration never treated him like some existential threat to Democracy.
You know all those hypotheticals about killing Adolf Hitler? Notice how no one ever discusses the legality of killing Hitler? It’s all discussions of temporal mechanics or the ethics of punishing someone for a crime before they commit it. No one ever says, “no, you obviously shouldn’t kill Hitler before he comes to power, as that would have been against German law.”
Realistically, if Kamala’s rhetoric is factual, Biden should have had Trump arrested on day one of his term, charged in a military tribunal for treason, and convicted and sentenced before the first 100 days were complete. The debate should have been whether to give Trump the death penalty, not whether he had presidential immunity. And what about the Supreme Court? What ABOUT the Supreme Court? Did the Allies give much credence to whatever bullshit rulings the Nazi courts issued? Trump should have been pounded into the dirt, and any SCOTUS justices who dared to intervene should have been charged as accomplices. And anyone remotely involved in the plot should have been similarly purged from civil society. We should have seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of life sentences.
THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You find absolutely everyone involved and throw the book at them. You move quickly and run roughshod over normal judicial procedure. Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned people for running pro-Confederate newspapers. That is what you have to do in times where democracy is truly threatened.
Does Biden actually believe Trump is literally another Adolf Hitler? Then logically, if that is literally true, then Biden should order the military to take him out. Hell, he should do whatever is necessary, upend the entirety of American democracy, become a full dictator if need be. Better a centrist dictator than a Fascist one. In other words, if Trump is literally Hitler, than Biden should be acting right now like our hypothetical time traveler.
In response to a post highlighting examples of pointless, hyperbolic copium, this guy walks in and says, “hold my beer” and then advocates for Biden to (“logically”) launch a cruise missile at Mar-a-Lago. OMG I’m dying 🤣
“Logically” in the sense that this is the actual logical response, if you take the Biden/Harris rhetoric at face value.
I mean, maybe if you yourself are a Nazi, then you see nothing wrong with letting Nazis in power. But for sane people, if you actually believe someone to be Hitler, then you should do whatever is necessary, damn the law and Constitution, to keep them out of power.
The point is not that this is objectively what Biden should do now. The point is that it is IF you assume Harris’s rhetoric is correct, then flagrantly violating the Constitution to keep him out of power is something that should be done. However, realistically, Trump is someone more like Orban or Putin. He does seek to degrade democracy, deport a lot of people, and purposefully immiserate targeted minority groups, but he’s not likely to get the Zyklon B off the shelf any time soon. He’s a monster, but realistically probably not quite at the level of someone like Hitler.
And this is the problem Harris had in the campaign. If you run on a campaign of “my opponent is Hitler,” the voters will rightfully ask, “well, why hasn’t your administration already turned him into a fine mist?” You don’t put Hitler on trial. You kill Hitler. Running on “my opponent is Hitler,” when you haven’t treated him like you logically should treat Hitler, shows you really don’t believe your own rhetoric.
You’re doing a bit of a strawman.
“My opponent is a fascist” =/= “My opponent is Hitler”
Did Harris talk about Trump being a literal copy of Hitler who will genocide millions of people in death camps, or did she assert he’s a fascist and a very real threat to democracy?
Because your rhetoric really only works if you know for a fact that Trump is a literal Hitler. We all know him to be a literal autocrat though.
flagrantly violating the Constitution to keep him out of power is something that should be done
So break democracy to save democracy? Ends justify the means? Hindsight is 2020, so if someone tossed you in a timemachine and you found yourself in the 1920’s, you could have the confidence to actually kill Hitler without any qualms, because you’d know what would happen. But no-one has that. We can confidently say Trump is a demented child-rapist who will fuck shit up and make things worse for everyone except his oligarch friends (which very much includes Putin.) We don’t know how bad it’s gonna get, but it’s clearly a downhill the world is facing with a US president like that.
The problem, I believe, is that most Democrats are institutionalists who will defend the rule of law even when it means handing the reigns over to a group who have openly declared hostility towards it. They are also afraid that using any kind of force to stop Trump and his cronies will trigger violent rebellion and they know who owns most of the guns in this country. They’re playing a trolley problem game but because they don’t really have progressive values they aren’t putting, say, Ukraine, Palestine and the entire fucking climate on the “peaceful transfer of power” track.
We need a party with higher values than just “defending institutions.”
