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Public alarm over the chances of democracy surviving in America has reached a new high-water mark in the wake of the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States, where the court expanded presidential powers for all current and future U.S. presidents. Among other things, the court may have granted U.S. presidents the powers to overtly plot violent coups and to assassinate U.S. citizens, officials and politicians. Seeking to dismiss those concerns, the court’s conservative majority wrote that dissenting justices were engaged in “fearmongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals.”
The alarm has been amplified by a sudden growing awareness of Project 2025, a far-right plan authored by former Trump administration officials to weaken government agencies and further expand chief executive powers. Liberals warn that these developments and others have together rendered any prospective second Trump term far more high-risk to American democracy than Trump’s first term.
Watch the above video as Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling is only one component of a larger and more terrifying reality, and warns that if Donald Trump wins in November, he can and will bring the American republic to its final end.
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The following is an excerpt of the above video:
[Project 2025] also seeks to create a unitary executive branch where the president of the United States reigns supreme. Now, that would help explain why the right-wing majority of our U.S. Supreme Court found the gall to grant broad, sweeping immunity to Donald Trump, allowing him to be free from prosecution for any criminal activity that he reportedly made in furtherance of the executive office. SCOTUS’ immunity ruling even bars prosecutors from presenting evidence of the president’s motives or his rationale behind his activity.
That means while in office, the president could deal pardons for payments, order the killing of citizens he doesn’t like, and so much more, so long as he proffers that it aligns with his constitutional duties, he’d arguably be untouchable. The immunity granted is near-absolute.
Just to think, to give a president the powers of unchecked monarchs that our forefathers fled. That demonstrates how far we have fallen from democracy, yet we can fall further, and we will if Trump is reelected. Not only will he ensure that Project 2025 is implemented, he’ll use the executive branch to do so.
Interested in opposing perspectives? Have a look at how our other contributors view this issue from across the political spectrum:
Dr. Rashad Richey: Democracy is on the ballot this November.
Ben Weingarten: Clarence Thomas has it right on presidential immunity case.
Jordan Reid: Donald Trump isn’t joking when he says he wants people killed.
