Lawless Feudalism

We've tried this before

In my forthcoming book, My Cult, Your Cult: How Cults Destroy Truth and Bolster Authoritarian Power, I review the pitfalls of authoritarianism and the crucial importance of the rule of law. It was mostly written as a stern warning before the election—and months before Trump and Musk started napalming the inner workings of the US Federal Government.

Those chapters now seem woefully out of date. No rewrite could help. The removal of any guardrails on the Presidency by the Supreme Court, along with a fully prostrate GOP ensures that we can’t even imagine what fresh outrages will be in store by the time my book goes to press. My warnings have become a requiem. The rule of law dies when it’s not enforced. And that happens when the enforcers declare loyalty to the sovereign over the Constitution. Making the Justice Department subordinate to the White House is the same as having no law enforcement at all. Justice has left the building, along with those 1,600 pardoned rioters.

What else can a President do with full immunity, a toady Justice Department and pardon power? We just found out. Barely ten days into his term, Trump pulled off the heist of the century. Like many observers, I’ve stood aghast as the techno-coup eclipsed even the madness coming out of the Oval Office. Suddenly malicious hackers were being deliberately walked into our top agencies under Presidential authority and given access to our most vital systems—the ones that process all payments, foreign and domestic.

It’s tough to imagine a more frightening scenario than putting the actual crooks in charge of our money system, with the capacity—if not the explicit authority—to bypass Congress and refuse to pay the government’s bills. To cancel leases, fire employees and shut down departments, even locking out Senators and Congresspeople from those buildings.

Until yesterday.

Trump exceeded all expectations by announcing in a joint news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, that he would “clear” Gaza and redevelop it. That the US would “own it.” Boys and girls, that’s genocide under international law.¹ It’s also the end of the concept of national sovereignty, and the UN declaration on Human Rights—maybe of the UN itself. What’s the point of an international body or International Court of Justice if everyone ignores it? Trump was vague when asked where Palestinians would go. “Somewhere in Jordan or Egypt” doesn’t sound very much like an equitable resolution to an ancient conflict. Of course “condos for Gaza” has been the plan all along—just not for actual Palestinians. Solving problems is “easy” if you just ignore treaties and peace deals and everyone’s rights and interests except your own.

This is happening so fast, all we have are hot takes. As usual, the best ones are coming from Heather Cox Richardson, Rachel Maddow, and the scores of newly minted independent journalists that have fled spineless genuflecting legacy media outlets still chasing the fantasy that they can retain their dignity while pleasing the regime. At least we still have Substack, until Elon or Trump’s “Sovereign Wealth Fund” buys that, too.

The chessboard has been tossed into the air, and we still don’t know where the pieces will land. But we know it will probably be “checkmate-in-two” for the rule of law.

There are flurries of lawsuits in the works. Maybe the rule of law isn’t quite dead yet. Perhaps the Magna Carta itself won’t follow the rest of the legal tradition into Trump and Musk’s grand oligarchic shredder and dumpster fire.™ But you have to ask yourself this question: What happens when SCOTUS rules against this administration, and Trump and Musk raise their middle fingers?

Who will dare enforce a SCOTUS ruling against a team that now controls the money system of the world’s largest economy, its law enforcement, and the world’s most powerful military?

We had two chances to stop this coup and we blew both of them. A vote for Hillary or Kamala would have preserved the world order, along with human rights, and our legal system.

But no. We couldn’t have women running the world. That would have been “too dangerous.” How’s that protest vote feeling now, suckers?

1. Article II(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." Forced displacement, when carried out with the intent to eliminate a group, has been recognized under this definition in international law. In Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) ruled that "the systematic expulsion of a group from their homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement, among other acts, constitute the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the group." This precedent confirms that forced relocation, when used to deprive a group of basic survival needs, qualifies as genocide under Article II(c) by creating conditions that lead to their physical destruction.