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‘Authoritarian Takeover’: Legal Scholars Warn of Trump’s ‘100 Days of Lawlessness’
The New York Times Opinion editors have gathered responses from nearly three dozen top legal scholars assessing what the paper calls President Donald Trump’s “first 100 days of lawlessness,” with many warning—one bluntly—that “no U.S. citizen is safe” if Trump can act “in violation of the law.”
These top legal minds—and the Times’ editors—use phrases about Trump and his administration’s actions such as “disregard for law,” “flagrantly lawless,” “anti-constitutional,” “quasi-authoritarian,” and “unconstrained by the Constitution.”
Columbia University Professor David Pozen warned: “More important than any specific example of unconstitutional conduct is the overall pattern. The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime. That is the crucial thing to see.”
“The disregard for law is itself part of the agenda,” offered Harvard Law School Professor Jody Freeman. “They do not seem to care whether they violate the Constitution and statutes, make mistakes, do irreparable harm. That recklessness itself sends a message.”
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The Times editors noted that many of the scholars first flagged the Trump administration’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, calling the move, “a direct assault on the Constitution,” and “an extraordinary thing” done in “his first hours back as president.”
“From there,” the editors noted, “it’s a straight shot to deporting people without due process.”
“Due process dates back to Magna Carta,” wrote one expert, Professor Kim Wehle of the University of Baltimore School of Law, “it is the essence of liberty. Without it, America is not a democracy as freedom itself is at the arbitrary whims of a malevolent ruler.”
Stanford University Law School Professor Shirin Sinnar added, “If the administration can simply spirit people outside the United States in violation of the law and then disclaim any power to bring them back, then no U.S. citizen is safe from similar actions.”
Experts also sounded alarms over Trump and his administration attacking law firms, universities, and the Associated Press, and the firings at independent agencies. Also, the “defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms,” and, “the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power.”
The Times notes also that there are “concerns about whether court orders will be ignored by the Trump administration or the courts will be undercut by Congress, which controls their budgets and can, under the Constitution, largely dictate which cases federal courts can hear — and can’t.”
The Times, and the experts, suggested Trump’s use of tariffs is suspect.
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“Most important is the coming showdown over the president’s asserted power to impose, rescind, raise and delay tariffs on imports,” wrote Stanford Law School Professor Michael McConnell. “The administration can point to broad statutory language authorizing specific import restrictions under emergency circumstances, but the president has no inherent constitutional authority to tax imports. No statute expressly authorizes the president to impose tariffs for the nonemergency purposes of raising revenue, improving our long-term balance of trade or winning unrelated concessions on miscellaneous issues.”
And on the “Big Picture,” Rutgers Law School Professor Katie Eyer added: “The use of the levers of government to exact retaliation for private vendettas — sending people to foreign prisons without due process, dismantling agencies and refusing to spend appropriated funds, and pervasive retaliation for the exercise of First Amendment rights … are the actions of an authoritarian government, not a liberal democracy.”
Professor David Pozen concluded “that the U.S. constitutional system is on the verge of an authoritarian takeover. ‘Authoritarian constitutionalism’ is not an oxymoron; unless the Trump takeover is repelled, our system will retain the familiar constitutional forms while becoming ever more illiberal, undemocratic and corrupt.”
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President Donald Trump is under fire after a New York Times bombshell revealed he wants $230 million from the Justice Department over two investigations targeting him during his campaign.
The Times explained that there is “no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims.” The paper of record also called it “the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.”
Critics are blasting the president.
“It’s hard to think of an action more purely corrupt than a …. president ordering the executive branch to pay him hundreds of millions of dollars,” wrote David French, a New York Times opinion columnist. “I cannot wait to read the MAGA defenses of this (and there will be many). They’ll display Soviet levels of sycophancy.”
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Attorney Andrew Weinstein, a former Obama and Biden appointee, noted that “$230 million could feed every homeless veteran in America for more than 3 years.”
Jesse Lee, a former Obama and Biden official, remarked, “What a g– crook.”
Marlow Stern, who teaches at the Columbia Journalism School and is a former Rolling Stone senior editor, asked, “now he’s extorting… the u.s. justice department?”
Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman quoted the Trump White House Press Secretary: “’I think it’s frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit,’ Karoline Leavitt said in May. ‘He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service.'”
Political historian Brian Rosenwald commented, “Like come the f– on, this is the most blatant corruption in American history. He’s just stealing from us the taxpayers.”
Derek Martin, founder and president of Pathfinder Research, wrote: “Trump is demanding taxpayers write him a check for $230 million while Republicans tell us they can’t afford to help ordinary Americans pay for health insurance. Cartoonishly evil.”
Jeff Hauser, who writes the Revolving Door Project on Substack, observed: “The dude is desecrating the White House and extorting the Treasury during a shutdown [after] several million Americans protested him. It’s kind of now or never for an opposition party to be provocative in attacking corruption. Trump is too busy enriching himself to govern.”
Media Matters’ Matthew Gertz wrote: “The president of the United States is attempting a smash-and-grab on the U.S. Treasury, and the people with the ability to say no are his former personal lawyers, this is insane.”
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President Donald Trump reportedly appears to be demanding the U.S. Department of Justice pay him $230 million in compensation after multiple investigations during his presidential campaign.
“The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims,” The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reported.
Noting that President Trump has installed his former personal lawyers at the top of the DOJ, the Times called it “the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts.”
Trump, according to the Times, in 2023, submitted a claim that “seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter.”
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Another complaint, filed the following year, “accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents.”
Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University, told the Times it was “a travesty.”
“The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it,” Gershmann said. “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
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Image via Reuters
Does religion drive Americans to support or oppose economic inequality? That’s a question explored by a Ph.D. candidate at The Ohio State University who recently examined ten years of a megachurch’s sermons in a published paper: “‘I Thank God We’re Rich’: Justifying Economic Inequality in an Evangelical Congregation.”
“To investigate how evangelical leaders confront the conflict between inequality and egalitarian passages of the Bible, I conducted a sermon analysis study of New River, a Midwestern suburban megachurch,” wrote Dawson P. R. Vosburg.
“New River’s approach to inequality was one of clear justification of the status quo, centered on the justification of wealth accumulation and the minimization of inequality’s moral importance,” Vosburg added.
The church’s pastors, he found, “justified economic inequality in several ways: proclaiming that God did not condemn ownership of vast wealth; minimizing domestic inequality in comparison to global inequality; selectively spiritualizing economic passages of the Bible; and saying that God owns everything and thus the status quo distribution is justified.”
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Hemant Mehta of The Friendly Atheist examined the paper. He writes that Vosburg found sermons “that discussed anything financial—by searching for terms like ‘rich,’ ‘tithe,’ ‘debt,’ ‘billionaire,’ etc.—and analyzed the results to see how this typical white evangelical megachurch minimized the wealth gap.” He also noted that Vosburg anonymized the name of the church.
Mehta looked at the four ways New River downplayed wealth inequality:
“They condemned ‘rich shaming’ anyone”
The pastor, Mehta found, “delivered an anecdote about a rich couple that left another church and came to his because they felt personally attacked when their previous pastor condemned wealth from the pulpit. (At their new home, of course, their tithes would go into New River’s coffers.)”
“They downplayed U.S. inequality by focusing on global inequality”
Essentially, pastors told congregants that compared to the world’s poor, they were doing quite well.
“They re-interpreted Bible verses about poverty—even the direct ones”
When it comes to preaching about the poor, Mehta wrote, the pastor was “not talking about financially poor people, he’s talking about spiritually impoverished people.”
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Vosburg told Mehta that pastors stressed tithing “over 150 times across 16 separate sermons.”
“They said God owns everything, anyway”
Ultimately, Mehta explained, the pastor’s point was to not be mad “at people with private jets and yachts and multiple summer homes.”
“The takeaway from all this,” Mehta wrote, “is that conservative policies that benefit the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else in society are going to be supported by congregations like this one that are being brainwashed into thinking God loves the rich and the poor deserve their lot in life.”
Mehta also blasted the New River pastor.
“Pastors like this one hollow out Christ’s teachings until all that’s left is a gilded throne for the wealthy. In their hands, Scripture is a weapon to shame the poor, a shield to protect billionaires, and a drug to keep their congregations quiet while the cancer of inequality grows around them.”
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Image by Mor via Flickr and a Creative Commons License
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‘Smash-and-Grab’: Trump Torched for ‘Corrupt’ $230 Million Payout Push
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