The title of this post is that now-famous quote from University of Missouri faculty member Melissa Click. It’s her threat to a reporter who was covering a protest on the campus.
I thought of it when reading this story about how the FDIC muscled a payday lender and tried to make it look as if the bank took the initiative.
Here’s a quote from the article:
Emails show that FDIC administration officials struggled to figure out how to explain to banks why their institutions should be terminating their relationships with businesses that have not committed any fraud or other illegal activities.
Back in 2016, Fortune quoted Obama supporter Larry Summers:
The landscape Summers painted in his op-ed is full of broken trade deals, wars, heightened nuclear bomb threats, and a more dictatorial U.S. government.
Larry got the broken trade deals thing right. But a “more dictatorial U.S. government?” That’s hard to measure because there are so many dimensions. But I think Obama gave Trump a run for his money. Don’t expect to see Larry ever admit that though. Remember what he told Elizabeth Warren about insiders.
READER COMMENTS
BC
Oct 19 2018 at 7:30pm
I now see a benefit of cryptocurrencies.
Michael Sandifer
Oct 20 2018 at 6:11am
Oh, come on. Trump’s openly autocratic, openly obstructs justice, openly attacks the very concepts of checks and balances, free press, legitimate opposition, etc. Wow.
David Henderson
Oct 20 2018 at 8:39am
I’m not sure how much he openly obstructs justice, except in the sense that they all do–by enforcing oppressive regulations, engaging in foreign wars, and forcibly taking our money.
I do agree with you that he attacks the idea of checks and balances, the idea of the free press, and the idea of legitimate opposition. But my discussion is about actions not words and bluster. Trump blusters a lot and doesn’t seem to have the focus, fortunately, to go much beyond bluster, except, unfortunately, on trade and immigration.
Michael Sandifer
Oct 20 2018 at 1:04pm
I usually agree with you David, but here you’re way off. You don’t think Trump incriminated himself when he told Lester Holt that he fired Comey over the “Russia thing”?
Look at the first couple of minutes of the Holt interview clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wvuw_Zmubg
How about when he told the Russians in the White House something similar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mKxeo67fn4
Are we so far gone as a country that we can’t see a President incriminate himself in front of our eyes?
David Henderson
Oct 20 2018 at 2:07pm
Michael,
Thanks for the links. I’ll check them later. I think you’re getting away from the original discussion, though, which is whether Trump is more dictatorial than Obama. Check out zeke5123 above.
Bedarz Iliachi
Oct 22 2018 at 2:15am
The Director of FBI serves at the President’s pleasure and may be removed at any time for any reason and no reason whatsoever.
A
Oct 20 2018 at 6:57pm
I think it’s less useful to distinguish between actions and “words and bluster” for a state actor. After all, much of Operation Chokepoint’s effects resulted from implications, rather than explicit use of regulatory powers. The White House doesn’t need to formally support Saudi Arabia to effect their behavior in Yemen.
zeke5123
Oct 20 2018 at 10:53am
The question isn’t whether Trump is bad; the question is whether Trump is uniquely bad.
Obama’s administration routinely spied on investigative journalists, tried to ban certain outlets from covering the WH, and prosecuted at an unprecedented rate journalists and whistleblowers. Trump might talk about the media being the enemy of the people, but Obama’s administration was (i) at least equally bad on media freedom and (ii) this is worse in the context that media was friendly towards Obama.
As for checks and balances, “I have a phone and a pen.” Or alternatively, the pressure put on SCOTUS re Obamacare. These are the famous examples. We can discuss in detail some of the regulatory abuse by the Obama administration. Obama discussed the concept of legislative obstruction, which was also an attack on checks and balances.
None of this is to excuse Trump’s shortcomings — clearly there are things he does wrong. But the key to understand is that these shortcomings are not unique to Trump, and thus focusing on Trump misses the point.
A
Oct 20 2018 at 7:05pm
You don’t need a “Great Men Of History” framework to identify Trump as being particularly dangerous. Looking at global trends, Trump is probably a symptom, rather than a prime mover. However, he is active at a time when Steve King explicitly promotes the theory that Jews are trying to replace the white race with non-whites to zero condemnation from other Republicans. It feels like we are at a tipping point where racial biases receive a kind of political endowment effect, which then secure permanent structural biases like court packing, racial gerrymandering, racial voter deregistration, etc…
Philo
Oct 21 2018 at 11:04am
“Steve King explicitly promotes the theory that Jews are trying to replace the white race with non-whites . . . .” Apparently you are impressed by Steve King’s promotion, but can you name anyone else who is? (I confess I had never heard of Steve King.) Kooky conspiracy theorists have always been abundant, and society has always muddled on in spite of them; denouncing them would be mostly a waste of one’s time.
A
Oct 21 2018 at 4:21pm
He is a fifteen year congressman who sits on the subcommittee for immigration and border security.
TMC
Oct 21 2018 at 11:01am
The pleasant surprise with Trump has been a less dictatorial U.S. government.
There’s a long way to go, but the reversal of direction has been nice, instead of Obama’s accelerating it.
Comments are closed.