Like I have written before, I am truly glad Donald Trump won the election.
However, it appears that The President and the Republicans are reverting back to his antics that happened during his first term.
First there is this, which comes via Molly Ball at the Wall Street Journal:
AUSTIN, Texas—Standing at the wooden lectern at the front of the state House chamber, Republican state Rep. Todd Hunter put the purpose of his legislation to redraw Texas’ congressional map in forthright terms. “The underlying goal of this plan is straightforward,” he said: “Improve Republican political performance.”
What might once have been considered a damning admission was embraced as an explicit rationale as the state House proceeded to pass the map on a party-line vote late Wednesday. Democrats charged that Republicans were shamelessly redrawing the lines ahead of the usual decennial schedule at the behest of President Trump to add five potential congressional seats for their party—and Republicans largely agreed.
The redistricting plan, which is expected to be signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in the coming days, has set off a national partisan arms race, reshuffling the landscape for next year’s midterm elections and potentially permanently altering the parties’ electoral calculations. California has already begun a high-stakes gambit to redraw the massive blue state’s congressional lines in response, while other red states, egged on by the White House, are jockeying to follow Texas’ lead.
The upshot of the redistricting wars looks likely to benefit Republicans overall. And the episode seems fated to stand as yet another illustration of Trump’s willingness to use his stranglehold over his party to maximize his power, polarizing the national landscape and trampling long-held norms in the process, and leaving the opposition dazed.
Then there is this, via the Editorial Board at the Wall Street Journal:
President Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.
His revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Mr. Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone because it was visible and not on her person. Mr. Bolton had already left for his office, which is where FBI agents greeted him.
Kash Patel, the FBI director, sent out a cryptic tweet at 7:03 Friday morning that “NO ONE is above the law . . . @FBI agents on mission.” He didn’t specify to whom he was referring, but the timing is unlikely to have been coincidental.
It’s hard to see the raid as anything other than vindictive. Mr. Bolton fell out of Mr. Trump’s favor in the first term and then wrote a book about his experience in the White House while Mr. Trump was still President. Mr. Trump tried and failed to block publication. The President then claimed Mr. Bolton had exposed classified information, though the book had gone through an extensive pre-publication scrub at the White House for classified material.
The book investigation faded away under President Biden, but now it looks as if Mr. Patel is reviving it. Whether Mr. Trump ordered the FBI probe or not doesn’t matter. Mr. Patel knows what the President thinks about Mr. Bolton, and the President’s minions in Trump II don’t serve as the check on his worst impulses the way grown-ups did in his first term. The presidential id is now unchained.
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The real offender here is a President who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.
It seems the President Trump did not learn the lessons from his first term, that ended up being a disaster in the end. Furthermore, it seems that the President is out for revenge. The simpletons in the MAGA movement think that this is awesome. However, the MAGA movement is not the entire conservative movement; they might think they are, but they are not.
You see, there are principled people, like myself, that see these sort of actions as big Government tyranny. Whether it be on the State level, as in Texas or as in the Federal Government. You see, it seems that this “MAGA” Government and President, have something in common with the Neoconservatives of the early 2000’s —- and that is that the MAGA Government and President, love big Government, as long as they control it and it suits their agenda.
What America needs is a President that will respect the idea of limited Government and respect for our Constitution.
