It would begin because the present approach of leaning on China to pressure North Korea will likely fail. Trump will grow angry at public snickering at the emptiness of his threats.
.. At some point, U.S. intelligence will see a North Korean missile prepared for a test launch — and it may then be very tempting for a deeply frustrated rogue president to show his muscle. Foreign
.. the country might respond by firing artillery at Seoul, a metropolitan area of 25 million people.
.. a new Korean war could cause one million casualties and $1 trillion in damage.
.. “I do not believe there is any plausible military action that does not bring with it a possibility of a catastrophic conflict.”
.. China’s relations with North Korea aren’t nearly as close as Americans think.
.. In the 1990s, North Korea continued with its nuclear program even as a famine claimed the lives of perhaps 10 percent of the population
.. Instead, she urges greater measures to undermine the regime’s legitimacy at home by smuggling in information about it and the world (as some activists are already doing).
.. pushing for a deal in which North Korea would verifiably freeze its nuclear and missile programs without actually giving up its nukes, in exchange for sanctions relief.
My country had its own Trump. Here’s how we beat him.
Having first secured control of public broadcasting and other media outlets, Meciar was extremely effective in keeping his core group of supporters energized, but not much else. For other voters his frequent outbursts became increasingly off-putting. Even apathetic segments of the electorate were alarmed when, under Meciar’s watch, the secret service cameunder suspicion for kidnapping and nonfatally electrocuting the son of the Slovak president, Michal Kovac, who was Meciar’s political nemesis. The key witness in the case was later killed in a car bombing. These crimes were later amnestied by Meciar during his brief stint as acting president in 1998.
.. Second, Meciar’s demise was precipitated by the emergence of an effective opposition that coalesced around the questions that mattered the most: rule of law and Slovakia’s place among European democracies. Like Trump, Meciar first rose to power by sidelining rivals in his own party and staging a flurry of media stunts that left his opponents paralyzed and divided.
.. if Trumpism is to be defeated, it will require politicians on the center-right and the center-left to get organized around questions that matter — most importantly, the defense of the liberal democratic character of the U.S. government.
.. In defending himself, he tried to sell his voters a grotesque idea of an international conspiracy directed against Slovakia. His domestic critics, too, were smeared as paid agents of anti-Slovak forces abroad. That message resonated with Meciar’s core supporters, but more and more Slovaks saw that their country’s growing isolation was purely of their own government’s making.
.. Corruption, which reached gigantic proportions under Meciar, has never gone away. Meciar took pride in his crony privatization, which created what he called a “Slovak capital-owning class,” loyal to him. Today, politically connected businesses are enriched through overpriced procurement tenders or tax fraud.
.. Meciar’s infamous amnesties for what were widely believed to be acts of political violence have left a traumatic legacy too, creating an ominous sense of impunity for those in power. His years also entrenched a generation of communist-era judges, many of them in cahoots with the political class. According to a recent survey, only a third of Slovaks trust the court system.
.. nurturing the institutions of liberal democracy requires much more work than simply keeping aspiring authoritarians at bay. It requires ensuring that liberal democratic governments are seen as legitimate and effective at delivering key public goods, including justice and security.
Democrats: Last Republican President not Cheating in 1988
The idea that Americans might have known Trump was guilty of all manner of sins and character flaws and chose to roll the dice on him anyway — because they liked him better than four years of the Democratic alternative — simply cannot compute for the crowd crying “illegitimate.”
.. Were the WikiLeaks revelations significantly more “unfair” than the revelations of the Access Hollywood tape? Or the revelation of George W. Bush’s DUI in 1976 just four days before the election of 2000? Or independent counsel Lawrence Walsh indicting former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger four days before the presidential election, an indictment that was tossed out a month later for being beyond the statute of limitations? There is always some unexpected outside force in an election that the loser can claim was the decisive factor.
.. “In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines.”
In other words, the last presidential election where a Republican won and the Democrat didn’t contend that the winner cheated was 1988. In my adult life, there have been only two possible outcomes to a presidential election: A Democratic win or a Republican win that Democrats believe is illegitimate.
.. Plenty of the same Democrats complaining the loudest now — John Lewis, Al Sharpton, Michael Moore — treated Bush like crap.
I simply don’t believe that Democrats are upset because Trump is uniquely bad as a person or a president. History tells me that they’re upset because a Republican won.
A Coup Against the Supreme Court
People don’t usually remember it this way, but on Dec. 13, 2000, Vice President Al Gore gave one of the most important speeches in American history. Mr. Gore had contested the initial results of the Florida vote count and prevailed in the Florida state courts, but the Supreme Court had voted, 5-to-4, the day before to end the recount and effectively hand the presidency to George W. Bush.
“Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken,” Mr. Gore said. “Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.” The frenzied battle over a few hundred votes had spawned intense anger across the country — but it had been resolved “as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy.”
Mr. Gore’s concession that night still stands as the most powerful reaffirmation in modern times of the Supreme Court’s unique and fragile role in the American system of government
.. Millions of people were furious at the justices’ decision in Bush v. Gore — many believed it was the result not of legal reasoning but of rank partisanship — and yet virtually everyone followed Mr. Gore’s selfless lead, accepted the court as the final arbiter of the dispute, and moved on. There were no riots in the streets, no attempted coups, no “Second Amendment solutions.” There was, instead, a peaceful transfer of power: the hallmark of a civil society operating under the rule of law.
.. Even Senator John McCain, who once joined with Democrats in an effort to depoliticize the judicial nomination process, recently told a radio show, “I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up.”
.. Step back for a moment and consider the radical absurdity of this position. Senate Republicans first justified their refusal to hold hearings or a vote on Mr. Obama’s nominee before the presidential election because “the people’s voice” needed to be heard. That was always a transparent lie. Now, apparently believing their candidate, Donald Trump, will lose, they are acting as though the Supreme Court is the property of the Republican Party.
.. it takes open aim at the court’s legitimacy as the sole unelected branch of government. Because the court “has no influence over either the sword or the purse,” as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, its legitimacy and authority depend entirely on the shared public acceptance of its verdicts.
.. the court has had a majority of Republican-appointed justices for nearly half a century
.. Republicans want to maintain that majority, even if that means tossing out all political norms