Newspaper Reader recalls the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 & …
Nov 07, 2024
Reader braces yourself !
Headline: The end of an American world
Sub-headline: Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term on Wednesday, November 6, and the success of the Republican Party, of which he has taken total control, represent a major turning point for the United States.
Published yesterday at 11:15 am (Paris), updated yesterday at 2:50 pm
This time, they made an informed decision. In 2016, when they first entrusted him with the White House, American voters didn’t know what a Donald Trump presidency would be like and were taking a leap into the unknown. In 2024, the situation is different: Not only do Republican voters know their candidate inside out, right down to his least glorious behavior, he’s even more radical than he was eight years ago. Trump’s electorate knows where this president is going to take them, and wants more.
It’s a reality that needs to be examined with eyes wide open. The path on which Trump, strengthened for his second term by his party’s success in the Senate, will take his country diverges fundamentally from the one charted by the United States since the end of the Second World War. It marks the end of an American era, that of an open superpower committed to the world, eager to set itself up as a democratic model. It’s the famous “shining city on a hill,” extolled by President Ronald Reagan. The model had been challenged over the past two decades. Now, Trump’s return is putting a nail in its coffin.
Editor: To call this hyperbolic, and even tinctured in political hysteria, is the describe it with a telling accuracy! American History puts it in perspective : given the fact that in 1968 Richard Nixon was elected to office, the victory of 1972, followed by Watergate, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush The Elder, Bill Clinton, Bush The Younger , Barack Obama , Donald Trump, Joe Biden: These candidates, and then Presidents, represent the very mundane politics, and politicians who have held the American Presidency! Yet Le Monde wants to sound the alarm on Trump, who defeated New Democratic simpleton Kamala Harris, it defies the historical facts aided by that hyperbole and political hysteria.
Editor: I will offer a selection of Le Monde’s ‘arguments’:
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Trump views the world solely through the prism of American national interests. It’s a world of power struggles and trade wars, which scorns multilateralism. A world where transactional diplomacy replaces value-based alliances. A world, ultimately, where the US president reserves his harshest words for his allies but spares the autocrats, who are seen as partners rather than adversaries.
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If, as he threatened during the campaign, Trump ceases military aid to Ukraine and negotiates peace with Vladimir Putin in favor of the invader, the consequences of such an outcome will go far beyond the fate of Ukraine alone. They will affect the continent’s security as a whole.
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This threat is existential for the European Union, and its leaders need to be aware of it and prepared to confront it, without waiting for Trump to take office – they are long overdue.
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Editor: Le Monde ends it’s *Bill of Attainder’:
Trump’s victory at the end of a campaign of unprecedented populist, misogynist and racist virulence also bodes ill for women, immigrants and democracy in general. The 47th American president inherits a system he began to put in place when he was the 45th, one in which the sacrosanct checks and balances, those safeguards supposed to preserve American democratic institutions, are already weakened, and in which the Supreme Court has gone over to his side. He succeeded in downplaying the assault on the Capitol by rioters he encouraged on January 6, 2021. The image of a head of the world’s leading power who calls his opponents “enemies from within,” deems some of them worthy of the firing squad, vilifies dissident media and threatens to send the army to hunt down illegal immigrants in Democratic cities can only encourage illiberal leaders the world over, including in Europe.
Trump’s voters chose him in full consciousness, as did the business and tech leaders who rallied behind him, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, the iconoclastic CEO turned eminence grise. The rest of the world will suffer.
Newspaper Reader.
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Acts of attainder or of pains and penalties were passed by some of the American colonial legislatures until the Constitution forbade them. In applying these prohibitions, the Supreme Court of the United States has expanded the historical conception of attainder. It invoked these clauses in 1867 in Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland to strike down loyalty oaths passed after the American Civil War to disqualify Confederate sympathizers from practicing certain professions. Similarly, in United States v. Lovett (1946), the court invalidated as a bill of attainder a section of an appropriation bill forbidding the payment of salaries to named government officials who had been accused of being subversive. Later decisions, however, have declined to treat requirements of loyalty oaths as bills of attainder, though they have invalidated such requirements on other grounds.
Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977) held that the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act was not a bill of attainder even though the law referred to President Richard Nixon by name. This law directed the administrator of the General Services Administration to seize tape recordings, papers, and other materials then in Nixon’s possession. The law did not impose a punishment and did not evidence a congressional intent to punish. In light of the fact that Nixon was the only president to resign under threat of impeachment by the House of Representatives, the court held that the “appellant constituted a legitimate class of one.”
Attainder | Definition, History & Effects | Britannica
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