The only way the US can fix our reputation will be to try and imprison our current leadership after they are eventually removed from power. And in particular, the Trump family needs to have all of its assets seized.
I don't know why this is voted down, because it's absolutely true. The only way for the US to regain the lost trust is to finally clean house, hold its corrupt leadership accountable. Throw them in prison, seize their illegitimately gotten assets, reform that broken political system, and educate your people so this doesn't happen again.
Not necessarily with similar judicial executions. Fair trials and fair and exemplary punitive measures would be enough for me.
I lost respect when Obama let Bush Jr administration off the hook. It essentially set the tone that it is ok to behave like that, that there would be no consequences.
I am very eager to understand the down votes. Corporeal punishment too harsh to allow in exceptional cases or too mild for the warcrimes and other crimes in question ?
We need a Nuremberg trial for the genocide in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the illegal attacks on 7 countries in the Middle East.
We need to prosecute both the Biden and Trump administration, the Israeli leadership, and the leadership of most European countries. Never again is never again.
What Israel and the USA is doing in the ME is uniquely evil. There are likely hundreds of thousands dead in Gaza. Children intentionally killed by snipers, famine as a tool of war, the displacement of millions of people.
It was very obvious that Trump is a highly corrupt and incompetent person at the second term election. His voters do not disappear when he is in prison, neither would the US reputation suddenly be way better. Who will these people elect next, why should anyone trust the US anymore?
Imprisonment would be a good starting point though. Together with education, regulation and reforming the political system. But this takes decades.
Following the precedents of imprisoning and persecuting the previous regime on "corruption" charges established by the likes of much of Latin America, Pakistan, the Phillipines, and other similar countries will definitely mark the USA as a second-rate tin-pot dictatorship.
Maybe the predecessor regime is corrupt. Maybe not. But the first thing the new regime always does is to arrange the show trials to establish their own bona fides.
The absolute lack of consequences Trump faced after his first go-around all but guaranteed the crime spree we're now seeing, and will probably go down in history as the primary blunder of Biden's DOJ.
Open bribery and corruption (both the direct pay-for-play and the indirect via insider information), openly violating the law and ignoring the courts, betrayal of public trust, mishandling of confidential information, war crimes, take your pick of the many different choices.
And the asset seizure would be for the proceeds of all the open bribery, at the very least.
Sadly, these are all fairly "safe" things for a US president to do. Either because there's no law against it and if there is he can just pardon himself and his partners in crime. I know a presidential self-pardon is controversial but realistically Trump will be dead before that legal question is settled.
There should be a law against it. It's blatant corruption. The fact that lawmakers and supreme judges have the power to make their own corruption legal, doesn't make it any less corrupt. The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
> The Nazis made their crimes legal, and they were tried anyway.
They were tried after being beaten militarily, who will lead the rebellion against Trump and the American military backing him? The military doesn't dislike what he does and those are the main ones that could oppose him.
It's peculiar to me that after Nixon, Americans just don't hold their presidents accountable for their illegal actions anymore. It seems like they've just given up; they no longer behave as if the president was the head of the executive branch. They behave as if he was a king with absolute power.
This is such a long-standing problem that people no longer even notice the crimes happening right in front of their eyes. It's just become normal.
The president of the US does not have the power to start a war without getting it approved by the UN security council. You're arguing internal implementation details, but the legality is not determined by your courts.
The US constitution specifically calls out treaties signed by the US (such as the UN Charta) as supreme law of the land. Article VI, the "Supremacy Clause".
Thus, US law, too, defers to international law.
Please at least read the legal framework you're so confidently misdescribing.
A law defines the nature of collective action in response to certain violations. Words on paper themselves are impotent. If there is no potential for enforcement, i.e. there is no counterfactual state of collective action, there is no law.
That sure is an attitude that explains why US soft power (and with that, Empire) has been crumbling at an unprecedented rate.
You might not care about the rules, but the rest of the world takes notice. This is how you break a world order carefully designed to further your own interests.
It's been the established president since the Korean War when the US began ignoring the constitutional provision that gave congress the power to declare war. Additional examples are the Vietnam War, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq I & II, the Libyan regime change, and the current Iran conflict, and there are plenty more. The written law still states that the president does not have this power, but the actual unwritten law has been that he can. And that is the only law that matters.
Yes, the US and not just the presidency. If it was just the presidency then he would have been impeached by congress for usurping their constitutional authority.
he was impeached (more than once cause he's a special kind of guy) and will be impeached again in 2029 :)
again, you are saying something is legal that is both clearly illegal and unconstitutional. you can say "it is illegal but we have no way to enforce since our congress and senate do not work for the people but are simple extension of a given political party in power" but you can't say that it is legal
The war is certainly illegal. Our systems are just so atrophied at this point that we treat congressional approval as a formality. This is a choice we make over and over again that we need to stop making.
US constitution says that starting a war must be authorized by Congress, president has no authority to do it on his own.
The problem is: over time the US grew so powerful, that the definition of "war" became blurry. "No, we are not at war, our soldiers are just dropping bombs on Iran for fun and profit".
EDIT: Another problem, of course, is that current member of Congress have no balls to stand up to Trump and reclaim their constitutional powers.
Congress made its mistake a long time ago. Power is very difficult to reclaim once it has been relinquished. And it didn't even take a Caesar crossing the Rubicon in our case.
Well, his administration has ignored the constitutional rights of this country multiple times at best, and at worst outright violated them resulting in killing American citizens with zero justice or recourse. There's a million different alternative reasons people could come up with, but we can just go with the classic 'treason' and line them up accordingly.
There’s probably a huge case for corruption. And of course he can be declared national threat and foreign agent. I mean, just look what Putin does within his constitutional limits. When there’s choice between the bad (block Trump and allies) and the worse (his ideas stay alive even if he is no longer in business), you have to choose something and then reflect not on what you just did, but how did you get there in the first place. Legal matters are secondary, as long as majority is convinced that justice is served.
There is absolutely evidence he is a foreign agent. He is likely too stupid to realize it, tho. Israel and Russia both have paper trails on him going back decades. People around trump and his businesses have deep ties to russia and that isnt private. His own sons have bragged about being close to russia. Oh, plus the eastern european wife.
This isnt a conspiracy. Epstein was an israeli agent and him and trump were bffs for years. Trumps family is also heavily in debt to Russia and theyve been very open about it.
You seem to be a weird trump supporter who is mildly trolling by saying false stuff like the iran war isnt illegal when it very clearly is. Your comments are either very ignorant or youre trolling. The only folks still defending trump are p silly folks. The evidence is overwhelming at this point.
You can't be an agent without realizing it and you don't get to call me silly when you list having a foreign wife as evidence that someone is a foreign agent.
If you hold the belief that the Trump administration (and Trump himself personally) have not commited a rather long list of crimes openly, you are either willfully ignorant or complicit. I do not care if this statement irritates you in any way. After a certain point, we are firmly in the realm of personal responsibility.
Who cares? Just stop enforcing laws on little guys completely, if you can't even think of what to put any of the US admin members on trial for. It's nuts that there are long complicated trials and TV series and movies about like a single person murdering one other person, yet people ask what we could even try nutjobs that murder and kill by thousands and/or support mass crimes all around the world for. Let alone all the financial crimes that are being perpetarated for sure, with all the crypto scams and insider trading on the insane volatility they themselves create and know in advance about.
On what principle would the Trump family's assets be seized? Just to pre-empt the idea that he corruptly became rich in office, that is actually fairly usual for US presidents to become suspiciously wealthy after their time in office [0, 1]. That's never been a reason to start talking about asset seizure.
Although given the current lunatic escapade it does seem like a good moment to remove him from office. There must be someone somewhere in the administration that thinks another forever war is a bad idea, even if they aren't worried about WWIII. I've never seen a presidency implode so quickly - this has to be the most illegal, unconstitutional, unmandated, immoral and ill-advised war of choice the US has launched in decades.
I don't know about the rest, but Clinton when he left the presidency was actually in (legal) debt. He raised to the actual 100+ million way after his presidency, so Newsweek is presenting it wrong.
