Presidential historian alarmed by Trump's boast of 'awesome' secret powers at his disposal
Appearing on MSNBC just 24 hours after Donald Trump was declared the next president of the United States, presidential historian Michael Beschloss ticked off the many ways that Trump could abuse his powers with the approval of a compliant Supreme Court.
Speaking with "Way Too Early" host Jonathan Lemire, the noted historian pointed to a comment the president-elect made that he said should alarm everyone.
"Abroad I think people will wonder about the stability of our society and there's likely to be a lot of protests at home," he told the host. "The question is how much will people take if, let's say he uses as he has discussed in the past, the Insurrection Act? The Insurrection Act is used, for instance, to send federal army soldiers into a city that he deems full of unrest and up rising and that state says he or she can't handle it."
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"There's a prospect that if a president comes in and pushes presidential power to the maximum, you know, we could see if not a breaking point, at least a crisis of a kind that we've never seen before," he darkly added. "Remember, Jonathan, you've written about it. When he was president, he used to talk about the presidential power that he had that was almost sacred. He said some of my powers are so awesome, that I don't even talk about those."
"And now he has, as you noted, a Supreme Court that's more or less a president can do anything he or she --," Lemire replied only to be interrupted by the historian who stated, "We've never seen that in all of American history."
"That's right there are examples across this world where democracies backslide," Lemire added.
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