Convicted Felon Trump's Plans To Usurp The Constitution

 

File these news items under "Believe them when they tell you the first time."  First, a plan for the convicted felon Malignant Loser to take control of Federal spending:

Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.

The Constitution gives control over spending to Congress, but Trump and his aides maintain that the president should have much more discretion — including the authority to cease programs altogether, even if lawmakers fund them. Depending on the response from the Supreme Court and Congress, Trump’s plans could upend the balance of power between the three branches of the federal government. [snip]

... Trump and his advisers have prepared an attack on the limits on presidential spending authority. On his campaign website, Trump has said he will push Congress to repeal parts of the 1974 law that restricts the president’s authority to spend federal dollars without congressional approval. Trump has also said he will unilaterally challenge that law by cutting off funding for certain programs, promising on his first day in office to order every agency to identify “large chunks” of their budgets that would be halted by presidential edict. [snip]

“What the Trump team is saying is alarming, unusual and really beyond the pale of anything we’ve seen,” said Eloise Pasachoff, a budget and appropriations law expert at Georgetown Law School...

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That's within a broader plan to usurp the Constitution, as crafted by a Christofascist loon:

A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”

He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office.  [snip]

“We are living in a post-Constitutional time,” Vought wrote in a seminal 2022 essay, which argued that the left has corrupted the nation’s laws and institutions. Last week, after a jury convicted Trump of falsifying business records, Vought tweeted: “Do not tell me that we are living under the Constitution.”

Vought aims to harness what he calls the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy that stymied the former president by stocking federal agencies with hardcore disciples who would wage culture wars on abortion and immigration. The proposals championed by Vought and other Trump allies to fundamentally reset the balance of power would represent a historic shift — one they see as a needed corrective...

Anyone who takes lightly the convicted felon Malignant Loser's promise to be a dictator on day1 is a fool whistling past the graveyard of American democracy.  There won't be any turning back.  There won't be any restoration of democracy.  That's because there won't be normative guardrails, free and fair elections, or the rule of law.  What there will be will be revenge, retribution, and a descent into fascism for this nearly 250- year- old American experiment.