I don't think they see a problem with this. My grandfather used to say we needed to get a couple leaders from GE or whatever company was huge and successful then, and let them have free reign for a year.

You end up driving up the share price in the short term and destroying the company in the long term but by then you’re gone as CEO with your golden parachute. Not unlike presidents who will be gone in 4 years time (if second term) and let someone else deal with the consequences of their actions.

There are definitely people who think that a president who just violates the law in order to achieve these outcomes is a fine thing. Those people are lost. Nothing I can say to those people will stop them from eventually putting a bullet in my brain.

The goal should be messaging to everybody else. Especially those who might like the outcomes of Trump's crimes but would prefer not to have a president that just smashes through the law to get there. A way to help achieve this is to repeat, over and over and over, that Trump's actions are violating shitloads of laws.

I, for one, am glad I'm not living through the legacy of Jack Welch's government management.

Companies can declare bankruptcy and fold their hand: governments, notsomuch.

It's good that your grandfather isn't alive to see the catastrophe that is GE.

Jack Welch is the reason corporate America is a shit show, and GE is a joke.

Trump is breaking the law, but Congress has no interest in holding him accountable - and they're the only institution Congress specifies for having the authority to hold the president accountable.

So...Trump is breaking the law and getting away with it. What else is new?

> Trump is breaking the law,

Yes

He has immunity

This is different from immunity. What’s supposed to happen is the action is stopped, as though the EOs never happened. It’s not illegal to issue illegal EOs, they just can’t be followed. The only real point sanctions come is when a judge says “stop” and the people involved don’t. This is violating a court order, which is contempt of court. But Trump wouldn’t be violating it, Musk would.

Yeah, but contempt of court still is enforced by the executive (the court can order enforcement, but it’s the DOJ [US Marshal’s Service] that does arrests and the DOJ [Bureau of Prisons] that holds those arrested.)

BUT... even if the executive is under legal theory constitutionally unitary, it isn’t actually unitary, it consists of individual people who act based on their own perception of legitimacy, and when the President abandons the principle of government of law and not arbitrary individual will in dealing with the courts, well, that also threatens the theoretical infrastructure that binds the people carrying guns in various executive departments to his authority, and we can very quickly end up in one of those highly unpredictable periods of history that produces lots of really neat stories to read about afterwards but is somewhat less pleasant to live through.

Absolutely, I didn’t want to give the impression any of this is good. I just wanted to correct the common misconception that issuing invalid EOs is, itself, a crime.

Pardon?