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Trump Shares Post About How He's ‘Purposely Crashing the Stock Market’
(www.rollingstone.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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politics
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He is setting tariffs on his own, a power designated solely to Congress by the Constitution.
He is having masked police kidnap people off the streets without warrants and shipping them to an overseas gulag without trial or even charges.
He is illegally refusing to distribute money allocated by Congress to certain states in order to punish them for not doing his bidding.
And when the courts have ordered him to stop doing the above, he has willfully ignored those court orders with no repercussions.
Exactly what more needs to happen for this to be a dictatorship?
Firing judges who resist him
Dissolution of Congress
Deployment of military on US soil to control citizens.
Alteration or abandonment of the Constitution.
You're right we are definitely on the spectrum of dictatorship, but it can get much much worse.
And I think it will get worse
If we compare the United States to the Empire in Star Wars, we're somewhere past the end of Revenge of the Sith. Palpatine has declared himself the Emperor under the guise of needing to protect the Republic from an existential threat. He has already announced his intentions, taken personal control of key institutions, and started to strip power away from any institution or individual that he thinks can seriously oppose him.
He hasn't yet given up the facade of democratic legitimacy. He doesn't do that for 19 years in Star Wars. Hitler never abolished the Reichstag in 12 years of dictatorial rule. Russia still has a parliament and a nominally independent legal system 25 years after Putin first rose to power. The Roman Senate continued to exist for hundreds of years after Rome became a dictatorship, and even outlived the existence of the empire as a unified entity, and the Byzantine Senate (the legislative body of the Eastern Roman Empire) lasted until the 14th century.
Suspending elections.
We have never missed an election in nearly 250 years of existence, even during the Civil War. If he does that, then America no longer exists, and we have no obligation to pay taxes, respect the laws, pay our debts, etc., and most especially acknowledge the government.
It is every man for himself.
You might as well be waiting for someone to go on TV and look directly at the camera and say, "I am a dictator" (which Trump even kinda did). We're always going to have elections because they're a valuable tool of controlling the population. Nearly every country in the world has them, including ones that are generally considered dictatorships.
Without elections, the only vehicle of change or expressions of popular will would be actions, and those actions are generally more disruptive and effective than voting is. We didn't always have elections in the first place, and we didn't vote our way out of monarchy.
With elections, people put their anger on hold for years, waiting for the appropriate time to express it, and the way it's expressed is by choosing a different corporate lackey to support. Gerrymandering, corporate finance, a compromised press, etc ensure that will be the case. Even better, they get people forming their whole political identity around their preferred corporate lackey and half the population hating the other half for it, making organizing on a large scale extremely difficult.
It's a very silly place to draw a red line. Even if it happened, you'd still "have to" pay taxes for the same reason you do now, because of force. What, are you paying taxes and following laws and shit right now because you think the US government represents some kind of moral authority?