Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics’

Skip to comments.

Posted on 01/10/2025 2:33:00 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum

There’s an old idea about science fiction that I’ve always loved: It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar, so it can be looked at anew.

But sometimes the opposite is needed: We need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar, to see what is old in what feels new.

This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness. It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term: Don’t normalize him. Remember, this is abnormal.

In a way, it’s no less true in his second term: An antivax conspiracy theorist for Health and Human Services secretary? That’s abnormal. A former “Fox & Friends” host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump’s enemies to lead the F.B.I. — and that the Senate would even consider him? Abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the President-elect’s private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal.

Yet we also need to confront the reality that we have seen it all before. Sometimes here — but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks — but we don’t spend much time detailing the rules he obeys.

America is undergoing a regime change. We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power, but I mean it in the sense of the political system itself — the way that power works.

We’re used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call “programmatic political parties” — coalitions bound together by shared interests and goals. They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader. They have large collections of elites...

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...

Click here: to donate by Credit Card

Or here: to donate by PayPal

Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794

Thank you very much and God bless you.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson