The Memo: Trump knocks over the guardrails, deepening Democratic panic

President Trump is pressing full steam ahead with an agenda that Democrats worry has an increasingly autocratic bent.

But right now, there’s not much they can do about it.

News emerged late on Monday afternoon that the Justice Department was firing more than a dozen officials who had been part of the attempt to prosecute Trump, led by former special counsel Jack Smith.

That move, apparently spearheaded by Trump’s acting attorney general, James McHenry, looked to critics like the latest attempt by the president to take vengeance on his enemies, reward his friends and kick away the guardrails of civil society.

In his first week back in office, Trump has pardoned almost all the people convicted of Jan. 6-related offenses, while commuting the sentences of a handful of others. The total of more than 1,500 people includes several convicted of seditious conspiracy and a larger number found guilty of violent attacks upon police officers.

Trump’s administration has also removed roughly 17 inspectors general from their roles overseeing government departments; removed security details from former government officials who have crossed him; and instructed the attorney general to root out anything he deems to be political bias in work conducted during former President Biden’s administration.

It’s enough to magnify the chill many Democrats felt at the possibility of Trump resuming power.

Biden, while still a candidate, warned about “ultra-MAGA Republicans” whom he portrayed as a danger to American political norms.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris held her final rally of the campaign at the Ellipse, near the White House, aiming to remind voters of Trump’s conduct in and around the 2021 Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Former President Obama warned during the campaign that Trump “sees power as nothing more than a means to his ends.”

None of it kept Trump from winning a second term, and with a better performance than in either of his two previous presidential campaigns.

Democrats have very little leverage to prevent Trump from enacting his agenda, given that there are GOP majorities in the Senate and the House, and that the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, thanks in part to the three justices Trump nominated in his first term.

For the moment, the lower courts seem to offer Democrats and liberals a faint glimmer of hope.

When Trump announced last week he was seeking to end the concept of “birthright citizenship” — the automatic qualification of people born in the United States to be citizens, regardless of the immigration status of their parents — 22 Democratic-led states joined lawsuits to stop him.

They got a boost when John Coughenour, a federal district judge in the western district of Washington, ruled in their favor. Coughenour, nominated to the federal bench by former President Reagan, paused Trump’s order on the basis that it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Otherwise, Democrats for the most part have been restricted to throwing verbal barbs in Trump’s direction.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Trump’s actions in firing the inspectors general “a chilling purge” that he contended was “a preview of the lawless approach Donald Trump and his administration is taking far too often as he is becoming president.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) responded to the same event by calling it “alarming” and posting on social media, “This is what you do when you don’t want someone watching what you’re doing.”

After Trump announced his mass clemency for people convicted or charged for Jan.6-related offenses, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — the House Speaker at the time of the riot — accused him of acting in a “shameful” way and delivering “an outrageous insult to our justice system.”

Influential voices in the broader liberal community have sounded even more ominous notes.

Former Biden White House press secretary Jen Psaki hosted Norm Eisen on her MSNBC show on Sunday. Eisen, a White House ethics lawyer during the Obama administration and a well-known liberal commentator, alleged that Trump had “promised to be a dictator on day one, and he’s carried that forward through the entire week, including this midnight firing" of the inspectors general.

Trump and his supporters dismiss all such charges, of course.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday whether Trump had violated the law in firing the inspectors general without giving Congress 30 days’ notice and a specific reason for his actions, as mandated by a 2022 law.

“Technically, yeah. But he has the authority to do it,” the South Carolina senator responded.

Graham, like the vast majority of Republicans, argued that Trump was clear about his intentions during the election campaign and now has a mandate to do all the things that are eliciting howls of protest from Democrats.

The most fervent Trump backers, far from seeing themselves as acting outside democratic norms, contend they are correcting what they see as the excesses and “weaponization” of the Biden era.

Kash Patel, the president’s nominee to lead the FBI, told Steve Bannon during a 2023 podcast that a future Trump administration would “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens.”

Patel alleged falsely that these unnamed but shadowy figures had “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Patel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for Thursday.

For now, it’s a bleak picture for Democrats and other liberal critics of Trump.

He is forging ahead, and his opponents have no way to pull the brakes.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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