Recently there has been an ever increasing drumbeat from the media for a narrative portraying that Donald Trump would be a dangerous dictator if he returned to the White House in 2025, despite not becoming one during his first term. Further undermining the media's "Trump as dictator" narrative was an NBC News article on Monday that presents plans by liberals both in and out of government to curtail "dictator" Trump's power by using the law to thwart him, and hyped a Collusion Hoax peddler as the standard-bearer for that effort.
The FIVE writers NBC crammbed into the article, Peter Nicholas, Katherine Doyle, Megan Lebowitz and Courtney Kube, plow forward trying to convince readers that a dangerous dictator can be constrained by mere law in "Fears grow that Trump will use the military in ‘dictatorial ways’ if he returns to the White House":
Trump has raised fresh questions about his intentions if he regains power by putting forward a legal theory that a president would be free to do nearly anything with impunity — including assassinate political rivals — so long as Congress can’t muster the votes to impeach him and throw him out of office.
Now, bracing for Trump’s potential return, a loose-knit network of public interest groups and lawmakers is quietly devising plans to try to foil any efforts to expand presidential power, which could include pressuring the military to cater to his political needs.
Those taking part in the effort told NBC News they are studying Trump’s past actions and 2024 policy positions so that they will be ready if he wins in November. That involves preparing to take legal action and send letters to Trump appointees spelling out consequences they’d face if they undermine constitutional norms.
So the NBC News writers want us to believe that a dictatorial president willing to assassinate political rivals would also be constrained by law? Are these NBC writers so clueless as to not understand that real dictators don't follow the law at all? Did the Communist China constitution limiting presidents to two terms stop that country's dictator Xi Jinping from serving a third (and probably lifetime) term?
Imagine a Soviet official going into the Kremlin to inform Joseph Stalin he is breaking the law. It never happened because any such official would know that he would be in the basement of Lubyanka prison before the day was over facing certain execution if he were so naive as to think the law could put a limit on Stalin's power.
Thus their own lack of knowledge about real dictators made their premise of a supposedly dictatorial Trump being limited in power by the law a joke. Then again, they did holdup a big promoter of the Trump-Russia Collusion Hoax, Mary McCord as a standard-bearer for their new movement:
“We’re already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to,” said Mary McCord, executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.
Part of the aim is to identify like-minded organizations and create a coalition to challenge Trump from day one, those taking part in the discussions said. Some participants are combing through policy papers being crafted for a future conservative administration. They’re also watching the interviews that Trump allies are giving to the press for clues to how a Trump sequel would look.
It is interesting that NBC News cited McCord as being somehow a devotee of the law to constrain Trump, since she was a notorious abuser of the law as revealed in April 2021 by investigative reporter Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller:
Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who approved efforts to snoop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, has been appointed to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The same court excoriated government officials in late 2019 for providing misleading information in four applications to surveil Page, who served as a Trump campaign national security adviser.
The surveillance court appointed McCord, who served as assistant attorney general for national security through May 2017, to be an amicus curiae on April 15.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relies on eight amicus curiae to provide advice and expertise on matters related to foreign intelligence collection.
McCord, who currently works at Georgetown University, helped oversee Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia. She also took part in the process of reviewing an application the FBI submitted for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Page, a former Naval officer who joined the Trump team in March 2016.
McCord is named 25 times in a Justice Department inspector general (IG) report that details a series of missteps by government officials during the Crossfire Hurricane probe.
So if NBC News was so concerned about abuse of power perhaps they should not have cited McCord, who abused the law to promote the discredited Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, as some sort of savior who will use the law to save us from "dictator" Trump.
NBC's excite meant for the secret cabal looking to curtail Trump shared some parallels with a 2021 Time magazine piece that gushed for the "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election." At the time, writer Molly Ball praised what mant would likely dub the "deep state" for saving the country from Trump.
