'Everyone on the planet will pay the price': How the GOP is giving Trump 'absolute power'

Atlantic writer Anna Applebaum diagnosed the reason President Donald Trump can effortlessly accumulate power to himself with king-like executive orders. There's also a reason he can wield the US attorney general’s office and the FBI like his personal police, and it has everything to do with one political party's dedication to a strongman regime.

“The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate (Trump), in this or almost any other matter,” Applebaum writes. “The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

“This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like,” wrote Applebaum, and it is why the men who wrote the Constitution “never wanted anyone to have it.”

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The nation’s founding fathers argued for ages how to limit the powers of the American executive, and they eventually settled on dividing power between different branches of government. The system largely worked, but Applebaum noted that it falls to pieces when a powerful party refuses to hold a president accountable for behavior they would never accept from the opposing party's president.

According to Applebaum, when Trump fills government divisions with lackeys and ideologues, he's doing it in hopes that his political party that dominates Congress will ask no questions. She also asserted that when he orders federal agencies to pursue people who make him mad or tries to incite a riot, he requires his judicial appointees to endorse him with favorable court decisions.

Fortifying this emerging autocratic force is a “brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers” who “find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a 'national CEO,' a dictator by a different name." Applebaum said they mimic the words of Mussolini, who said “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” or the words of Lenin scorning “the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy.”

“If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price,” Applebaum writes.

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Read the whole story at The Atlantic here (subscription required).