Did Trump's fascist trial run have a camel on the front? [View all]

[jmowreader]

I suspect that Trump's opening shot in his war on democracy happened when he raised the smoking age nationally from 18 to 21.

Consider: When the drinking age was raised nationally, the states themselves made the change...okay, there was significant arm-twisting in a promise to pull a state's highway funds if they didn't do it. But the states could have easily said "no, we don't need your filthy money, we can get it back by raising taxes on alcohol, so we'll leave things the way they are."

Not with smoking and vaping. Trump just came in and said, "the smoking age nationwide is 21 and no one is grandfathered in." And it happened...right fucking now, no "we'll give you a week to stock up," no nothing.

And he had the perfect countermove for this - if a state would have wanted to set its own smoking age, the Orange Monster would have been all "I see that East Carolina thinks kids should smoke!" He also knew that no one would fight back on this, or be able to - the people so affected, basically everyone between 18 and 20 who'd just been turned into a criminal, don't have the money to hire enough of a lawyer to take this into the federal courts or enough time to get a case through the court system before they aged out of the class. On the other hand, if they WOULD have taken this into court they had a decent chance of getting it stomped on Tenth Amendment grounds.