Slate - "Of Course Trump will Provoke a Constitutional Crisis" [View all]

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_good_fight/2017/07/we_re_headed_for_a_constitutional_crisis.html

A Constitutional Crisis Is Inevitable

At this point, why would we expect anything else?

By Yascha Mounk

A good ending, aspiring screenwriters have been taught for generations, should be “surprising yet inevitable.” If everyone sees the ending coming from a mile away, there is no suspense. If the ending seems arbitrary, or runs counter to the grain of the story and the character arc of its protagonists, it undermines the suspension of disbelief. Only when the ending is surprising enough to feel fresh, yet inevitable enough to reveal the protagonists’ deepest nature, do the final scenes leave the viewer satisfied.



For the last year, U.S. politics has felt very much like the plot of a madcap TV show inspired by hysterical realists like Zadie Smith and Don DeLillo. “I’m starting to think that this is the last season of America and the writers are just going nuts,” comedian Jake Flores joked on Twitter in more innocent times, when it still looked as though Donald Trump might still be stopped from winning the Republican nomination.

Since then, America’s plot twists have only become crazier. And yet, they have so far stuck to the maxim repeated over and over in writing workshops: Each unexpected twist and turn has revealed that the nation’s political protagonists are even more depraved than we had thought—and each time it felt as though we should have known this all along.

Does that give us any clue for what hysterical horrors might await us next? All the recent storylines, and every piece of character development, is pointing in the same direction: We are headed toward a constitutional crisis. Why else would Donald Trump violate one of the few constitutional norms he has not yet obliterated by asking naval officers to take a partisan position at a ceremonial event? Why else would he keep repeating that he has the power to pardon anyone he wants—including himself—for any reason at all? And why else would he and his associates be launching one trial balloon after another about firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller?



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