The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform

[justaprogressive]

Donald Trump is teaching us about the limitations of America’s constitutional system. We may have believed that the Constitution’s separation of powers, checks and balances, and guarantees of rights would protect us from a president with authoritarian and corrupt ambitions. But the framework we have counted on is failing.

Trump’s abuses of his office have met no effective opposition from the other branches of government. As he has overreached his executive powers, Congress has done nothing to deter him, and the Supreme Court has done more to embolden than to contain him. In his first term, the “adults” Trump appointed to top positions had some cautionary influence on him, but he has now thrown off restraints and surrounded himself with sycophants, enablers, and ideologues. Only half a year into a second term, he is acting, in the words of the conservative former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, with “utter contempt for the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

Trump governs like a monarch, issuing proclamations—143 executive orders in his first hundred days—that assume he has unilateral power to abolish federal agencies, nullify or suspend laws, impound congressionally authorized spending, and defy the Constitution. He has attacked universities and law firms, denying them due process and demanding concessions to which the government has no right; sent noncitizens to foreign gulags, also without due process; deployed the military in an American city based on the false claim that protests were out of control; and launched a trade war against practically the entire world, partner and rival countries alike, based on a fictitious economic emergency. The world, even his own party, hangs on his whims, unsure what he will do next.

These usurpations have enabled Trump to turn the White House and his private clubs into an itinerant royal court, where people come to beg for favors and he basks in their subservience and exploits the presidency for profit. Most dangerously, he has appointed partisans to top positions in the Justice Department and FBI and singled out enemies for them to investigate and prosecute, while he pardons supporters for their crimes. His use of the presidency for personal ends is undisguised; the corruption is open and at an unprecedented scale.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-31-premature-guide-to-post-trump-reform/]

[Hugin]

1. Post-Trump Punks all marching to the motto...

"Flush that bowl!"

[usonian]

2. I'm ready to fight Vance after his Bitcoin Coup.

They bought an election, and suffered setbacks with the war on immigrants and the slashing of R&D, both of which harm Silicon Valley and the Bitcoin Mafia, but they are ready to pick up the pieces once the dead skunk is buried. They are playing the long game.

The Bitcoin Coup: How Crypto Accelerationists Engineered America’s Financial Collapse
https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-bitcoin-coup-how-crypto-accelerationists

When you control the currency, you control the world.

[Fiendish Thingy]

3. Two essential steps to undoing the damage:

Step one: kill the filibuster, and ram through numerous laws reversing the damage from Trump, protecting voter rights, reproductive rights, raising the minimum wage, etc. and most importantly, restricting presidential powers (like repealing the moronic law that gave Trump authority to implement tariffs after declaring a phony emergency). If this is done swiftly and fearlessly, and implemented in a way that quickly brings tangible benefits to working Americans, Dems can rest easy that Republicans won’t use the extinction of the filibuster to undo it all without facing the wrath of the electorate (think how long Social Security has been the third rail in politics- Dems should create dozens of “third rails”- want to lower the minimum wage? Go ahead, make my day!)

Step two: expand and reform the courts, adding at least five new seats to SCOTUS, with tough, enforceable ethics rules that include suspending judges/justices from the bench who don’t comply, without the need for impeachment. This way, the laws passed in step one can’t be easily undone by the MAGA majority on the Roberts court.

Of course, this must be predicated on electing Democrats who are willing to do both steps one and two.