citizenship. And everyone whose comments I've seen, everyone -- whether they're no name posters on social media or professional opinionators whose job it is to provide some insight to what's going on -- misses the whole point monumentally ... again.
1. No, it is not a distraction. What Trump blurts out because his mind is constantly distracted does not make his posts a distraction. He is not saying these things to deliberately shift our attention to something else. He's merely impulsively reacting to what's in front of him at the moment. There is no forethought here.
2. He's tipping his hand. All these outrageous things he's been saying right from the start are acts of hand tipping. He's letting you know what direction he's heading. We should have learned by now that this is a man who has no internal life. Every thought that crosses his mind comes out of his mouth. And once he blurts it out, whatever he just said becomes a real thing in his mind.
3. Sure, she probably won't do it to Rosie O'Donnell, not yet at least. O'Donnell presumably has resources and would be able to push back hard in the courts. Some poor soul who doesn't have the resources won't be able to push back as hard, and they won't have the public sentiment in their favor. That poor soul will be the initial case that sets the precedence, which will either be enough to passivize people, or will give him the grounds to move to the bigger targets. Win win.
4. And this is the big one: "He's so dumb that he doesn't know he doesn't have the right" they say. All the learned pundits. They say crap like thris all the time because their minds still have not made the basic adjustment that it *doesn't matter* whether he has the right to do something. He's putting on a f*cking clinic on power for all those high-minded members of the polite society from elite east coast private colleges that are sitting on the first row: a leader's powers are defined not by laws, but by the tangible pushback they get. Abusers don't respect agreed upon boundaries unless there is a tangible force acting against them to secure those boundaries. If he decides tomorrow to revoke the citizenship of some dude nobody had heard of, and the entire federal state apparatus (plus the red states, obviously) start treating him as if he is no longer a citizen, what or who is going to stop him? Who will draw that physical boundary around his power to revoke someone's citizenship, a right he acquires through the absence of any real boundaries? Some lower court judge? Who cares about lower court judges when you have the majority in your back pocket in the supreme court.
Power, baby. That's how it works. Chuck Schumer may believe in the power of a strongly worded letter, but *that* is how power works in real life. Most Americans, especially the educated class, are so out of their depth here, it's not even funny or amusing anymore. Folks need to stop whistling past the graveyard thinking zombies are not real. Maybe they're not, but they're right here, and they're coming after all of us.