Trump the tyrant is on full display — but his acting out highlights how weak he is

Trump got his Comey indictment Thursday and issued a memo directing "domestic terrorism" investigations. And yet, both provided more evidence that Trump is losing.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump issued a new “domestic terrorism” memorandum targeting voices and views he dislikes under the guise of addressing political violence. That move came hours before news broke that his hand-picked and recently installed federal prosecutor in the D.C. suburbs of Virginia sought and obtained an indictment against James Comey, the former FBI director who Trump has declared to be one of his enemies.

What we are seeing now is extreme, but it is the result of Trump’s failure to win over people to his plans for the nation.

The broad-based unpopularity of Trump — and even greater unpopularity of many of the actions he and his administration are taking — is leading Trump, unsurprisingly, to lash out.

He is a petty tyrant, and we are seeing that at work. And though actions this week are those of an authoritarian, so were his and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s attacks on Jimmy Kimmel. And yet, Kimmel is back on the air, after it became undeniably clear that Americans weren’t going to live that way.

The same thing should — and, eventually, will — be true of the administration’s cruel, unnecessary, lawless, and often racist immigration enforcement policies, documented most recently by Stephanie Keith on Thursday in New York City, as a woman pleading for the return of her husband was mocked, then violently thrown against a wall and on the ground by one of those people who are carrying out Stephen Miller’s policies.

As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted of the video, “I think a single video like this does more to radicalize people against ICE than any loaded rhetoric any politician has ever used, and DHS should think very hard about the consequences of supporting this kind of behavior from its agents.“

And so, it is in this environment that we are getting — and are going to continue getting — the sort of over-the-top overreach like we saw on Thursday.

But, even in those moments — although they are undoubtedly bad — we get signs of how weak Trump actually is.

Erik Siebert resigned as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia on September 19, apparently refusing to do Trump’s bidding — as Trump all but admitted.

Trump had to publicly install, via Attorney General Pam Bondi, a sycophant, Lindsey Halligan, who he believed would be willing to put his enemies list in front of a grand jury. And yet, even when Halligan proceeded to take a three-count indictment against Comey to the grand jury within days of getting sworn in, the grand jury rejected the first count — one of two “false statement” counts she sought to bring.

But, the alarming fact is true: The former director of the FBI was indicted because the president considers him an enemy.

Even then, though, Comey was out front and fighting back. As he said on an only slightly awkward video posted on Thursday night, “I’m not afraid. … My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial — and keep the faith.“

This is not a person cowed by a man acting like a tyrant. This is a person who knows he is facing a weak man who is trying to appear strong.

That dual reality — Trump’s attempt to act like a tyrant to hide his weakness — was all the more clear in his continued effort to expand his un-American attack on the First Amendment to political opponents.

It is an appalling memorandum. In its opening paragraph, it tries to connect the murder of Charlie Kirk back in time to the 2020 protests against police violence — particularly, racist police violence — by calling them “anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots” that he asserted “have left many people dead and injured and inflicted over $2 billion in property damage nationwide.“

Not only connecting those, but combining and conflating them, Trump goes on to state that this “political violence” — one thing — is “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”

Trump then laid bare the unconstitutional, viewpoint-based aim of this effort:

That, however, is all with “Section 1. Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” It’s essentially a think-piece as presidential document. While most likely to come up as evidence of the unconstitutional aims of this effort, it alone does nothing. The other sections — the ones that actually authorize actions — are more carefully put together, slightly so.

First, understand that the United States — especially in the wake of 9/11 — has extensive (overextensive) federal criminal laws allowing federal prosecutors to go after people taking violent actions (or attempting, threatening, or even planning them).

What this memorandum does is try to aggressively use those authorities. However, within the memo and in light of Section 1, it could easily be read — or implemented — in extremely dangerous and unconstitutional ways to investigated and prosecute Trump’s political opponents. As with many such memos, though, provisions are vague enough that many of the problems would come from how provisions are implemented.

And while Trump will insist this shows his strength, I think it shows the limits of his powers.

This is how the action part starts:

Now, the key vague point here is the direction to investigate and “disrupt” those carrying out “intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” While there certainly is guidance on such language to be gained from federal criminal law, it also contains enough vagueness that the earlier language in Trump’s memo certainly could — at the least — lead to some federal investigators or law enforcement to go further than our Constitution properly allows.

From there, the biggest expansion of efforts appears to be this portion directing the investigation of funders and non-governmental organizations that “aid and abet” those “engaging in the criminal conduct” described above.

Within the investigation section, this, on my first review, appears to be the most constitutionally troubling on its face — particularly the second sentence:

Moving from there, the memo also encourages the type of investigation and information sharing — from the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service — that was seen earlier in the administration regarding immigration enforcement.

The most alarming aspect of all of these provisions is how they build on one another — potentially branching outward to anyone associated with people who later commit political violence or even actions that the Trump administration decides constitute “intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.“

That, on its face, is alarming. Absolutely.

But, coming as it does, on Thursday — while Kimmel’s back-on-the-air monologue has more than 21 million views on YouTube just shy of two days since it was posted — I think this memo mainly serves as evidence of a man who knows he’s losing ground quickly.

Trump the tyrant will lash out. And harm could and likely will come from it.

But, his overstepping fails. Because, as Kimmel said plainly, it is un-American.

Americans value our constitutional rights. We will push back. And we will win.