If we currently had a king, would the US giverment be shutdown?

People are not protesting because we already have a king, they’re protesting because Trump wants to be one and is actively pushing his administration in that direction.

Signing executive orders that blatantly violate the constitution, signaling that he might not follow SCOTUS orders, federalizing troops and sending them into US cities over the objections of those states governors and mayors, flagrantly weaponizing the DOJ against his political opponents while pardoning not only his allies but people who committed political violence on his behalf, threatening to withhold funding against his political opponents if they don’t do his bidding, threatening universities and law firms that do not acquiesce to his political agenda, taking away due process from millions of person’s in this country, etc.

These tactics are nothing new, every fascist dictator who came to power over the past century or more did most or all of the same things. Recognizing that and protesting against it doesn’t mean one thinks the wannabe king is all powerful.

Democrats have not thought this protest through. What are you waiting for? Capitulation that we elected a king? Absurd.

Let me try to dumb it down far enough that you might be able to understand.

What they call it doesn't really matter, other countries that joined the protest called it "No Tyrants", "No Dictators", and other such names, in general we are resisting your movement's attempt to replace democracy with authoritarianism and fascism, the reasons we are protesting is multifold:

1. We are trying to save democracy, you and the other MAGA extremists supported a violent insurrection that attempted to overturn a free and fair election, you are disenfranchising American voters through gerrymandering, voter registration purges, and other nefarious efforts to keep people from voting, or to keep their votes from counting. Trump promised he would be a dictator on day one if elected, he also said we would never have to have another election if he won, you elected him on such promises.
2. We are fighting against racism, you and the other MAGA extremists have made your white supremacist ideology mainstream, you would rather have a dictator than diversity. The racist foundation of the movement is unmistakable; despite the way you pretend your racism is patriotism. This is why you sound like Rainman with the word "woke", why you see DEI as the primary issue, and it's why it's not about political ideology anymore, nobody is falling for that big lie, it's a culture war motivated by hatred and hostility towards the stereotypical targets of white supremacism.
3. We are trying to stop the country from descending into fascism, your MAGA movement has rejected the Constitution and wants to deny equal rights for all Americans. We see all of the usual tactics of fascism being deployed, suppression of freedom of speech, persecution of dissenters, weaponized justice departments against political opponents, use of violence and scapegoating, opposition to liberalism, attacking non-traditional gender roles, and denigrating the free press.
4. We want to save lives, Trumps attempt to take away health care from 15% of the country will cause approximately 50,000 unnecessary deaths a year, that is too high a price to fund a trillion-dollar tax break for the wealthiest 1% of the country.
5. We want to defend law and order, your MAGA movement is a fundamentally criminal movement, your cult leader was elected despite a history of lawlessness, 34 felony convictions, dozens of sexual assault charges, desperation to suppress evidence of his pedophile activities, he's an adjudicated rapist, and every week the courts rule his actions to be illegal.
6. We want to save morality: you and your MAGA partners support Trump despite his felonies, rape, sexual assault, pedophilia, multiple fraud convictions, pathological lies, marital infidelity, and general moral bankruptcy.
7. We want to stop the attempt to establish an American Theocracy. Trump is implementing the astoundingly unconstitutional Project 2025 Plan, which is a plan to establish a Theocracy of Christian Nationalism, which is not Christian at all, it is fascism masquerading as Christianity.

Wouldn't Eisenhower have made an AI video of him wearing a crown and flying an airplane and dropping shit on people?

Didn't your president say he was enjoying the shutdown as it allowed for unrestrained firings using the uncontestable reason being "well, there just isn't any money"...And I suppose since slavery is illegal in the USA, they have to set them free.

You're right; verbosity is dumb.

You're right; verbosity is dumb.

Fascism and Racism are really dumb.

I am neither, so I cannot be that dumb. In fact, one of those is non-extant. You figure it out.

I am neither, so I cannot be that dumb. In fact, one of those is non-extant. You figure it out.

A racist that says racism doesn't exist, and a fascist that claims he isn't a fascist, real big surprise there.

It goes with the MAGA guy that says he's not MAGA.

Dimocrats give.

And Robpublicans taketh away.

And giveth it to themselves.

We too have a King, with a lot of big houses and gifted wealth at his disposal...(And also a dodgy prostate).

Whereas King Trump is generally dodgy.

Though peace in Gaza seems to be going well.

Peace in Gaza...As if.

And feeling Hungary for more success, he's off again, to put Vlad straight on a few more things.

Good fun good fun.

Nope. Fail. Race is declared non-extant by the Human Genome Project in 2003; a full generation ago. Did you miss that one, boyo? Ask mommy.

Not all Trump voters are MAGA. I'm one of the non's. Even Dems voted for him. I also voted for Billy Clinton in his 2nd term. You and R two little peas in a pod. Envious green that I am Indie. Political parties ought to be extinct, as well.

Nope. Fail. Race is declared non-extant by the Human Genome Project in 2003; a full generation ago.

Make sure you tell everybody at your next Klan meeting.

Signing executive orders that blatantly violate the constitution,

signaling that he might not follow SCOTUS orders,

federalizing troops and sending them into US cities over the objections of those states governors and mayors,

flagrantly weaponizing the DOJ against his political opponents while pardoning not only his allies but people who committed political violence on his behalf,

threatening to withhold funding against his political opponents if they don’t do his bidding, threatening universities and law firms that do not acquiesce to his political agenda,

taking away due process from millions of person’s in this country

Ah yes! Lincoln, the most popular American president. It's clear where Trump is drawing his inspiration!

Would you like to pick just one of your false equivalences so you can explain how what you allege is even in par with what Trump is doing? Or would you rather just hide behind a collection of vague photos that might imply some sort of wrongdoing if you don’t look that hard?

It doesn't seem that false to me. Law breakers and insurrectionists of Lincoln's day fervently called him a tyrant until decades after that generation died off. The same is likely to happen today. I don't really get the hype supporting the assault on your law enforcement officers just because you don't like the words of your president. It's seems to me like it's asking for a repeat of your civil war, whether you want a civil war or not. That's what we call up here "taking the law into your own hands." I suppose being a Democrat back then must have not been without some hype to have your country devolve into a civil war over federal laws and "states rights."

Honestly, I think a lot of your progressive mayors made sanctuary cities mostly as a campaign stunt in the past, but now your president has apparently trolled most of those mayors into taking a hard stance against federal immigration laws, and from up here, law breakers usually don't win popular support either locally or globally.

Because we have a king Trump in America, the government is shutdown.

Signing executive orders that blatantly violate the constitution,

Rex, I suggest you re-read the Constitution. You may have the opinion that by signing EO's, the President [whoever he is] may violate the Constitution, but until a court determines that outcome, it remains personal opinion only, and until a court has a case before it to adjudicate, it cannot declare such, even the Supreme Court. Name the case before the Supreme Court, or any court, that alleged either example of a president in your photo/accusations. No court, even the Supremes, can summarily pronounce a ruling without a case before it. By the way, the President having that accusation against him began with George Washington when a few people had a burr up their arse that he was beyond constitutional power in making an executive order, not called such then, so this has been an argument of longer duration than Bush 43 or Oba'a.

federalizing troops and sending them into US cities over the objections of those states governors and mayors,

Before you accuse a president of that "violation," re-read Article II, Section 2, Clause 1 of our Constitution. "Commander-in-Chief" is not a whimsical, suggested title of some government functionary. It is an explicit function of one man [so far] at any given time during a presiency. State and municipal functionaries do not have power exceeding a President.

Stop believing what you hear in the media [any media, including "social"], and read the Document for yourself with some degree of comprehension. I made a commitment over 40 years ago to read it front to back on a monthly basis, minimum, and I feel like I am still just scratching the surface of its content. You?

Last year, a survey of more than 150 historians ranked Trump as the worst President in American history.

What does that say about the generation of Americans that follow Trump?

Yesterday's Lincoln haters are tomorrow's Trump lovers.

My point is that you're hysterical and historically illiterate - not just in the long term, but in the short term. The 'imperial presidency' is a longstanding political trend, and I'd agree it's worrying, but Trump is not a unique iteration of it. I personally remember liberals justifiably, in my view, mockingly referring to George W. Bush as 'King George', while conservatives hurled the equivalent moniker at Obama. There are plenty of things that Trump is doing that I object to and places where he oversteps. But to inflate him into some unique threat to 'democracy' is loony and dangerous when the real threat is this long-standing trend in American legal structure which Trump is merely taking advantage of. It implies that if Trump goes away the threat is gone because it originates in his person, and so I view it as an attempt at redirecting an important discussion into misleading partisan hackery. I also view it as disingenuous when the same people trumpeting about it were so often silent during the Biden years - it's just another iteration of both sides screeching about how tyrannical the other is when they are out of power, only to crack down on the opposition as hard as possible and excuse it once they're back in the driving seat.

Much worse threats have existed. Lincoln dragged a prominent sitting Ohio legislator before an army court for publicly expressing opposition to the Civil War and had him exiled from the country (Clement Vallandigham, who was exiled to the Confederacy after being denied a writ of habeas corpus and then moved to Canada). Lincoln then wrote an infamous letter, the Birchard Letter, to several Ohio Democrats in which he offered to suspend this exile order of their faction leader if those Democracts would move to support his war effort, essentially using his exercise of extraconstitutional and extrajudicial power to bend the arm of the opposition party.

Lincoln also had newspapers editors imprisoned in Fort Lafayette for criticizing the war. Woodrow Wilson threw socialists publishing in Yiddish in jail for opposing the draft during WWI. FDR attempted to pack the Court because he refused to accept the court limiting his power. Andrew Jackson flat-out ignored the Supreme Court. Lincoln used a military court to try Vallandigham specifically to avoid the possibility to the Supreme Court exercising judicial review over the case, which is exactly the reason that they cited when Vallandigham appealed his restoration of habeas corpus. Obama and Bush have both also undermined habeas corpus. All of these are way more dangerous than anything Trump has done.

Finally, I'd argue that the most dangerous things that he's doing are continuations or escalations of Bush-Obama-Biden policies which have become thoroughly normalized. These things are often not the focus of the ongoing protests, or if they are they are undermined by the perceived hypocrisy of the accusers. It's why what is needed is not a hyper-partisan 'anti-Trump' movement but a collection of principled free speech, rights of the accused. etc. movements.

Why Trump needs a ballroom in the White House?

https://share.google/images/rYW48KhiUqfOJabJi

All of these are way more dangerous than anything Trump has done.

This is exactly why I asked you to pick *one* of your examples to defend as being functionally equivalent to what Trump is doing, because it’s pointless to try and address every one of them at the same time. Every single example you laid out is a false equivalence.

Again, pick one and we can dig further.

The 'imperial presidency' is a longstanding political trend, and I'd agree it's worrying, but Trump is not a unique iteration of it.

He absolutely is. What I will say about your examples is that every single one of them is a matter of executives overstepping their institutional authority in order to advance some questionable political agenda. That is qualitatively different from what Trump is doing.

Jailing political opponents because they’re political opponents isn’t a policy goal. Deploying the U.S. military against peaceful citizens isn’t a policy goal. Trying to overturn an election you lost isn’t a policy goal. These aren’t abuses of power for an agenda, they’re abuses of power for self-preservation.

The problem isn’t that Trump is expanding presidential authority, it’s that he’s warping it into a tool of personal loyalty. We’ve never had a president who demanded personal fealty from officials, filled key posts with blatantly unqualified sycophants, overtly used the justice system to punish his critics, pardoned those who committed crimes in his name and for his benefit, or openly mused about using the DOJ to enrich himself.

None of this is normal, and none of this aligns with the imperial presidency issue you raised. Calling Bush or Obama tyrants was hyperbole. Trump is what those cries pretended to warn about. He’s turned this story into the boy who cried wolf, and you’re the villager.

Rex, I suggest you re-read the Constitution.

They weren’t his words, they were mine. He was quoting them to raise objections (with false equivalences I would argue).

You may have the opinion that by signing EO's, the President [whoever he is] may violate the Constitution, but until a court determines that outcome, it remains personal opinion only, and until a court has a case before it to adjudicate, it cannot declare such

An executive order isn’t an opinion, its direction given to the rest of the executive branch, in the case I was referring to that direction was to blatantly violate the constitution. And no we don’t need a Supreme Court case to adjudicate cause they already did.

Jailing political opponents because they’re political opponents isn’t a policy goal. Deploying the U.S. military against peaceful citizens isn’t a policy goal. Trying to overturn an election you lost isn’t a policy goal. These aren’t abuses of power for an agenda, they’re abuses of power for self-preservation.

I'd have to agree with you. Trump is unique in that he is not trying to hide what he is doing unlike his predecessors. He also makes his staff changes very public unlike before. I'm sure you won't recognize many of these names. I sure don't.

Obama Administration

Gerald Walpin (Inspector General, CNCS)

General Stanley McChrystal (U.S. Afghanistan Commander)

Shirley Sherrod (USDA official)

Desiree Rogers (White House Social Secretary)

Van Jones (Green Jobs Czar)

Dennis Blair (Director of National Intelligence)

General David McKiernan (U.S. Commander, Afghanistan)

Rick Wagoner (CEO, GM — requested resignation)

Charles Freeman (National Intelligence Council nominee withdrew under pressure)

Christina Romer (Council of Economic Advisers Chair — forced resignation)

Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO — left amid controversy)

Biden Administration

Peter B. Robb (NLRB General Counsel)

Alice Stock (Deputy General Counsel, NLRB)

Andrew Saul (Social Security Administration Commissioner)

David Black (SSA Deputy Commissioner)

Fired 18 Trump appointees on military academy advisory boards

Fired Five White House staffers fired over marijuana use

Dr. Rachel Levine’s predecessor at HHS removed early in transition

Several ICE and Border Patrol leaders replaced in early 2021

Michael Pack (U.S. Agency for Global Media CEO)

Sharon Gustafson (EEOC General Counsel)

Victoria Spartz appointees at SBA and other agencies replaced early 2021

Substantial staff turnover among senior advisors and press team (Psaki, Bedingfield, Ricchetti aides, Klain replacement phase)

Last year, a survey of more than 150 historians ranked Trump as the worst President in American history.

What does that say about the generation of Americans that follow Trump?

It follows that they are the worst Americans in American history.

I'll bet all the Southern Historians rated Lincoln the worst president ever in 1865. Give Trump 100 years, and he will be number one.

They also rated Canadian Prime Ministers; it was a 23-way tie for worst prime minister.