Trump was a very specific kind of disaster: a chaos agent, who lacked the wit, patience and executive function to recruit the powerful institutions of the US military-industrial complex to fight his corner.

1/

The kind of guy who demands the impossible and then fires and publicly humiliates any allies who fail to deliver - or dare to contradict him - is not the kind of guy who can build new, enduring, evil institutions.

2/
The best he can hope for is to get some trumpalike goblins into positions of power (where they will replicate his chaos, but without the broad impunity of the presidential office, resulting in a series of resignations and prosecutions), back by executive orders.

3/
The last months of the Trump admin were an orgy of executive branch rulemakings that dismantled public safety, health, labor, anticorruption and (especially) environmental protections.

4/
Trump is a debt kingpin. His MO is running across a river on the backs of alligators, hoping to move so fast that none of them takes a leg: borrow, refinance, restructure, borrow, blow town, borrow, restructure, bribe, blow town.

5/
He's an improviser, a bullshitter, a pantser and not a planner. That's why so many of his worst ideas got turned into regulations at the very end of his term, and that's why they are vulnerable to being swiftly undone by the obscure, rarely used Congressional Review Act.

6/
The CRA allows Congress to void administrative-branch regulations and to prohibit any substantively similar regulation from EVER being enacted. It's powerful, but it's almost impossible to invoke, as Jan Ellen Spiegel writes in @CC_Yale.

https://t.co/QpW3BFchtI

7/
Indeed, the CRA is so baroque that only an absolute dunderhead of a president need fear having their administration's signature achievements being undone by it.

Cometh the hour, cometh the dunderhead.

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It would be delicious irony to see the CRA used to undo Trump's planet-destroying environmental regulations. Obama, overconfident of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, waited too late to pass many of his regulations, leading to Trump invoking CRA against his end-of-term rules.

9/
Unlike Trump, Obama spread out his regulatory agenda over his whole term, only exposing a fraction of his rules to his successor. Still, the CRA has only been successfully invoked 17 times, and 16 of those were Trump undoing an Obama reg.

10/
1,350 of Trump's regulations are vulnerable to being permanently overturned. In combination with the barrage of firings of high-level Trump swamp-gators and henhouse foxes, using the CRA on these would go a long way to erasing Trump's policy legacy.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Mashing the Bernie meme; Know Nothings, conspiratorialism and Pastel Q; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/cKWPSzuYHE

#Pluralistic

1/


Mashing the Bernie meme: What if every video game, except Bernie with mittens?

https://t.co/Zcs71oUras

2/

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Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.