If Trump Sounds Like He Wants a Police State, That's Because He Does

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : " For a leader like Donald Trump, that legacy is a boon roughly equivalent to a golf deal with a sultanate.
55% : What's more, Trump's earnest vigilantism marked his first major foray into public discourse, when he took out full-page ads in all of New York City's major newspapers to demand that the state of New York bring back the death penalty to execute the innocent members of the Central Park Five.
50% : The act's wording is exceedingly vague, and high-court jurisprudence has consistently exploited its diffuse wording to grant sweeping and largely uncontested powers to the American president to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents federal troops from engaging in local law enforcement -- and to pretty much direct the actions of such troops according to executive whim.
43% : In addition, Trump has already stocked the highest reaches of federal law enforcement with likeminded connoisseurs of federal prosecutions as glorified vendettas or backsheesh opportunities.
40% : Here, too, formal precedent doesn't seem all that reassuring; after losing the 2020 election, Trump had bandied the idea of declaring martial law to "rerun" the balloting.
38% : Even without the specter of martial law, it's no great stretch to envision Trump using the border pretext to drastically step up surveillance powers, institute forced exile, and broaden economic coercion targeting the names on his far-flung enemies list.
37% : This early mobilization has prompted some to suggest that the Insurrection Act will supply a ready pretext for Trump to proclaim martial law, despite the fact that even the Insurrection Act doesn't sanction that level of executive-branch impunity.
27% : Trump is poised, on April 20, to announce the Department of Justice's findings on whether to invoke the Insurrection Act to address the alleged national emergency at the country's southern border.
25% : And like the Alien Enemies Act -- the other relic of Early Republic authoritarianism embraced by the Trump administration in its executive order authorizing the illegal immigration raids that swept up Abrego Garcia -- -the Insurrection Act is all but tailor made for maximum abuse from the executive branch.
21% : Such procedural wishcasting is always ill advised in anything related to Trump -- not only has he skirted convictions on two impeachments and a pair of federal prosecutions, but the selfsame press availability with Bukele underlined the administration's refusal to abide by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that Trump must facilitate the return of wrongfully detained immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.
18% : But given the Trump administration's penchant for disregarding legal strictures, and for divining "emergency" enemy threats at every pass, it's hard to see a Kent-led counterterrorism center lingering over such niceties -- particularly under the anything-goes enforcement mandate of the Insurrection Act.
9% : Bondi leads that inglorious roster; while she served as Florida's attorney general, she suspended a fraud inquiry into Trump University after Trump gave her a $25,000 campaign donation.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.