A year into this alt-presidency,
we're looking into how Trump has warped American democracy
and what's stopped him from totally disfiguring it for life.
Trump's presidency is turning one. Or, if we're counting in human progress years,
negative 50.
For me it's been a "five stages of grief" type process.
First, there was denial. That one lasted a long time.
then there was anger, then bargaining, depression,
And finally: Canada.
In this past year we've learned a lot about American democracy:
specifically how strong and yet simultaneously rickety it is.
It's like that one chair in your office that refuses to collapse but no one bothers to fix it.
Because democracy has been subjected to a president who seems to not care for it all that much.
It's an archaic system. You look at the rules of the Senate, even the rules of the House
but the rules of the Senate
and some of the things you have to go through, it's really a bad thing for the country
in my opinion.
They're archaic rules.
We need something modern. Like one family with great taste
who gets to keep calling the shots for centuries and centuries.
How come no one's thought of something like that?
Yes, even with his brown-nosing henchmen greasing both chambers of Congress,
Trump is upset that democracy requires planning and discussion and agreement.
Even though Republicans passed a tax bill that will strip 13 million Americans of health insurance
without a single Democrat's vote, it's somehow not enough.
Trump still wants a magic wand!
I'm just saying, Voldemort had a wand.
The thing is, Trump, by many accounts, not only didn't think he would win the presidency,
he never wanted to be president.
He wanted to be a dictator.
Unaccountable and serving no one but himself – like he was as a crap businessman.
Just listen to Trump's well-known affection for authoritarian leaders
who can push their agendas through however they want.
Like President Rodrigo Duterte.
The president struck a friendly tone while appearing with Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte,
who is accused of ordering extrajudicial killings
as part of a war on drugs.
It's an honor to be here and, Rodrigo,
thank you very much for the way you've treated all of us.
Or how he practically pardons the head of Russia, whose opponents keep winding up dead:
He's a leader of his country.
Putin's a killer.
There's a lot of killers. We got a lot of killers.
What, you think our country's so innocent?
Sounds like a fair point. Let the killing resume!
And before they were enemies, Trump even praised Kim Jong Un.
What do you make of the North Korean leader?
He's dealing with obviously very tough people,
in particular the generals and others.
And at a very young age he was able to assume power.
A lot of people I'm sure tried to take that power away.
Obviously he's a pretty smart cookie.
Smart cookie?!
Trump just called the man who starves his own people and murders his uncle
the same thing I call my niece when she wins her spelling bee.
Now, I know what you're thinking, just because he praises those leaders
doesn't mean he wants to be like them.
So what if he's got an Ivan The Terrible Blankie and a Pol Pot lunchbox.
He's a collector.
Sure, American presidents have supported awful regimes before,
but this level of affection for criminal leaders is alarming.
It means Trump doesn't just like them, he kind of envies them.
Because they have complete power and he has the U.S. constitution,
a document he apparently thinks is boring since according to the new Fire and Fury book,
his eyes rolled back in his head during a briefing about it.
And it's thanks to the Constitution's checks and balances
that we've been able to pump the breaks on some of 2017's 55 executive orders:
The Constitution's checks and balances have largely stopped Trump from breaking the law.
You know what? We have this amazing system in this country
of checks and balances. And it works.
There is a judiciary checks and balances and separation of powers
and he is not the emperor.
Yes. He is not the emperor yet.
For now he's just a guy dressed up in the emperor's new clothes.
My my, those ... pants look dashing on you sir!
Say what you will about America's Founding Fathers...
Slave owners, womanizers, probably smelled horrible ...
They wrote the Constitution to avoid power grabs.
Articles I-III lay out the roles of the three branches of government:
the judicial, legislative and executive branches,
all which have their own powers and constitutional checks on one other.
These checks and balances are our institutional barriers against despots.
And in 2017 they stopped sanctuary cities from losing federal funding,
blocked the president's ban on transgender people from serving in the military,
and struck down parts, but not all, of the travel ban.
So Trump is not Putin or Kim Jong-un or Duterte or Erdogan
or Hitler or Voldemort, and that's good!
But it doesn't mean that he isn't on his way.
Despite his probable dementia,
Trump and his kill-the-American-Dream team have managed to do a lot of damage.
One thing I've realized studying despots is
they don't have to be effective to be destructive.
And Trump is not effective but he is destructive.
And very often the autocrats and despots you study around the world are bumbling idiots.
Trump, despite himself, has gotten away with a lot of things that seem glaringly undemocratic
but aren't explicitly unconstitutional.
Stuff that sounds a lot like the despotic leaders he praises.
His immigration policies are clearly made to target religious and ethnic minorities,
giving them a certain, "je Nazi quoi."
He and the Crypt Keeper Jeff Sessions have further militarized ICE,
whose arrests of immigrants--many of whom have live in this country for decades--
have gone up by 43 percent.
He's openly nepotistic, placing his family in the most privileged positions of power,
not unlike Saddam Hussein did for his sons.
He hasn't divested from his family business, rather he uses his kids to keep them going
much like Egypt's 30-year dictator Hosni Mubarak.
He constantly distracts us with ridiculous stunts, which is something
Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to do also. Fun!
He's been involved in money laundering and other shady financial loopholes through his real estate empire
not unlike the offshore accounts of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
His cabinet has vested interest in businesses over which they're supposed to exercise regulations,
smacking of corporate kleptocracy like Vladimir Putin and other Russian oligarchs.
Even Republican Senator Jeff Flake gave an entire speech
about the similarities between this administration and dictators past and present.
"The enemy of the people" was how the President of the United States
called the free press in 2017.
It is a testament to the condition of our democracy
that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin
to describe his enemies.
Yeah. The fact that Trump has been able to get away with all that should be a warning to all of us
that we've been neglecting that rickety office chair called democracy for far too long.
We've let it out in the rain, dogs have been chewing on its legs,
it's got decades of embedded farts just fused with the fabric
and now it's just one Filet O-Fish away from finally collapsing!
The painful fact that even operating within the law
can be enormously destructive of our democracy.
It's norm-shattering. It's the kind of behavior you see
in developing democracies,
not the strongest democracy on earth.
Trump *has* shattered norms,
ignored the ways things are usually done.
And so have we.
Cause now that we're paying attention, we might want to consider making those norms laws when this is all over.
If it's ever over.
Cause from here on out, we can't assume anyone will treat the Oval Office with any more respect
than a drunk Coachella girl at a Navajo burial ceremony.
What band is this?
Democracy is being put to the test.
And if you think this is as bad as it gets,
then you clearly have only ever lived in one of the strongest democracies on Earth.
It gets worse. A lot worse.
Remember how Trump thinks the democratic process is archaic?
I wonder what else he managed to slip into that same interview?
They're archaic rules, and ...
Maybe at some point we're going to have to take those rules on.
Because for the good of the nation, things are going to have to be different.
Idiots can be effective.
Welcome to year 2 everybody.
Once again, thank you so much for watching Newsbroke.
I'm Francesca Fiorentini, follow me on Twitter.
And share this video if you're as concerned as we are
about repairing our rickety democracy.
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and we want to keep our star ratings hiiiiigh.
You guys are awesome. See you next time
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