[whoknew1122]

I'm not sure how important that is to remember. The president is issuing the orders. The president is chief executive of the country.

The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.

Is it useful to look at the people who wrote or lobbied for the order? Perhaps if you want to want to understand the context of an order. But none of that context mitigates the president's responsibility for any order. At the end of the day, it is a single person exercising their sole authority to issue executive orders.

[great_wubwub]

[flagged]

[scarby2]

> the enablers and puppet masters are already planning and laying groundwork for when Cheeto Jesus drops dead. We've already lost the battle, let's not lose the war.

Their success in some way is tied to trump right now. Nobody else seems to captivate his base in the same way, and they've made most of this about a man and less about a movement. So it's entirely possible this dies when he does.

[alabastervlog]

The civil war between the competing factions behind the scenes when he kicks it should at least make for some good entertainment. So we have that to look forward to.

I expect it to make the film Death of Stalin look like a depiction of an amiable, staid, and sensible process purely in service of the public good, by comparison.

[GiorgioG]

Do you really believe that there were no enablers and puppet masters before this administration? Serious question, and this has nothing to do with claims that Biden was mentally unfit for the office.

[alickz]

Cutting one branch off the poisonous tree won't do much, even if it is the biggest, even if it's the trunk

Needs to be taken up at the root

[noitpmeder]

My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.

It's not like Trump is sitting on the toilet writing executive orders or tweets. These are initiatives championed by the elite conservative leadership, they just have a convenient "bad guy" that the rest of the country can focus their hatred on.

Don't think for a second that Vance wouldn't continue digging the same holes if Trump dropped dead.

[RajT88]

> My view (maybe shared by GP) is that while Trump deserves a lot of the blame, he's just a figure head over the rest of the republican party.

Exactly this.

Debated at length in the 2016 election cycle and onward since. The Republican establishment didn't (and doesn't) love Trump as a politician, but they love that he puts them in power, and they have been trying to figure out how to reproduce that kind of popularity in a candidate since (and largely failing). He's the best bet of the far-right folks behind the scenes to implement their policy, and he doesn't give a shit about all that stuff as long as he can enrich himself.

The one silver lining is the bit about not being able to reproduce his popularity - which I assume is why they've all been so aggressive in trying to remake the federal government. They've got until the midterms to grab all the power they can. It seems likely they will face a backlash and a lot of seats will swing, so their focus is on removing the teeth from congress, while state level actors try and push through enough new laws that they can prevent loss of seats in the midterms.

[doublerabbit]

> The president can't pawn off responsibility to some White House staffer or think tank. An executive order is the president's order.

He gets to press the enter key sure, however that doesn't stop his cabinet from passing the executive order over for him to execute.

[jampekka]

It doesn't reduce the responsibility but means that this is a wider agenda, not just something Trump comes up with, and so it doesn't end even if Trump is deposed.

[scruple]

It's very important and very transparent. Steve Bannon is out here telling the entire world what the playbook is for anyone willing to pay attention.