Rule of Law in Tatters: Our Era of Strategic Neglect

 

Rule of Law in Tatters: Our Era of Strategic Neglect

“I spent much of my childhood in the very house where Donald grew up. The cruel, weak, and deeply insecure man who brought our democracy to the brink of disaster is the same man I have always known.”

Dr Mary L Trump, PhD (Psychology), the President’s cousin

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” 

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger … nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

US Constitution, 5th Amendment and, by extension to the states, the 14th Amendment.

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” 

US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1

So much of the MAGA/Project 2025 agenda is not possible unless the entire basis for the United States is dramatically restructured via constitutional amendment. The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (which has not happened since the earliest years of the republic) or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.

Suffice it to say that constitutional amendment, in highly polarized times, is not possible. The exceptions to the above constitutional requirements literally demand an insurrection, invasion, war or in the case of matters ceded by Congress to the President, very limited tariff power, a very specific emergency, which, by definition, cannot mean a sudden presidential awakening to his perception of long-standing pan-global “unfairness.”

So, to achieve those MAGA/Project 2025 objectives, nothing the President has mounted by executive order rises to the level an insurrection, invasion, war or a sudden global emergency targeting the United States by a severely limited single nation or nations. A logical President, being of sound mind, would be stymied to implement those changes without such an amendment. But as Dr. Trump would be willing testify based on direct observation, Donald Trump suffers from a compendium of mental disorders, ranging from obsessive compulsive (as with his misdefinition of the true nature and impact of tariffs), narcissism, and anti-social personality disorder… and perhaps exacerbated by onset dementia associated with his age. He’s the perfect autocratic leader to lead a bloodless clue to usurp and reinterpret the US Constitution, as his cult-controlled GOP congressional contingent supports his every whim, and as the once functional federal bureaucracy is dismembered and defunded.

We know what happens with bad leadership, but we have never faced a time of purposeful “no leadership,” especially when there is obviously no intention to replace it. We are left with presidential whim and the sycophants he has appointed or supported for election who are willing to reach into the garbage pile of justifications to support those whims. Writing for the May 9th The Hill, Aron Solomon, chief strategy officer for Amplify and who has formerly taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, opines: “There’s an old adage that says you can tell a lot about a country by how it governs in a crisis. But lately, it’s hard to shake the feeling that America isn’t being governed at all.

“Whereas the media often frames the administration’s problems as incompetence or deliberate chaos , I think the truth might be more alarming: What if it’s not that the car is being driven poorly, but that no one is even in the driver’s seat?

“Take, for instance, the hollowing out of federal agencies. During President Trump’s first presidency, there was a well-documented purge of career civil servants, scientists, diplomats and department heads. But what followed wasn’t a thoughtful reconstruction, however ideological. It was a slow fade into nothingness. Positions simply weren’t filled. Appointments were left pending for months, even years. Entire sections of departments, like at State and the EPA, became ghost towns… This wasn’t sabotage in the traditional sense — it was more like strategic abandonment.

“In Trump’s second term, the administration is doubling down on its strategy of management by absence. The presidency — and now the president’s party — is defined not by a coherent philosophy but by a refusal to govern unless there is something immediate to gain from it. It’s government via headline. An illusion of action only when the cameras are rolling… We see this neglect everywhere. In public health, lessons from COVID-19 have evaporated into a partisan fog, such that pandemic preparedness offices remain underfunded. In environmental policy, regulations are repealed but no new frameworks are proposed. In immigration, cruelty often seemed like the point, but even cruelty requires planning. Now the system is simply jammed — not out of some calculated malevolence, but because nobody showed up to fix it.

“You don’t need a grand conspiracy to get government dysfunction. You just need people to stop doing the work. And when apathy trickles down from the top, the rot spreads quickly. Mid-level managers take their cues from the inaction above. Good-faith civil servants burn out or check out. Soon, systems very finely and intentionally designed to respond, regulate and reform start wheezing like old radiators in an abandoned house. And when the alarm bells go off — a train derails, a border crisis flares or a hurricane hits — there is no one to pick up the phone, much less coordinate a response.

“Of course, the Trump administration, like every administration, has its die-hards, its loyalists, its cult of true believers. But increasingly, their job seems less about governing and more about defending the lack of it. They hold press conferences, write posts and give interviews not to lay out plans or update the public, but to justify why good, functional governing isn’t happening.”

Whether it’s economy destroying illogical tariffs, arresting and incarcerating people on US soil and transferring them to foreign concentration camps without any effort towards a trial or depriving persons facing horrific imprisonment of any semblance of access to due process, a psychologically unfit president decimates our governance, with full complicity of a GOP congressional contingent ready to sell their nation down the river with the receding hopes of being reelected... and with way too many judicial rulings that offer way too much deference to a rogue, scoff-law President, we are sailing a massive combat vessel is rough seas… without a crew. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Andrew Solomon says, “At the end of the day, a democracy can survive bad drivers. What it can’t survive is nobody driving at all.”