DJT just talked about arresting Newsom. When asked why by reporters he said because he was a bad governor.
We can bury our heads all we want, but this seems like a constitutional crisis to me. Said another way, hiw many signs do we have to ignore before we call it one?
What you're talking about is the rhetoric and politics surrounding the current times as opposed to the reality. Trump says a lot of things and he is a man of action, so that makes him a credible threat whenever he says he's going to do something. At the same time, it's pretty normal that whatever he does goes through a team of lawyers first.
This is convenient for Trump, because anything he says that people get riled up about ends up discrediting them as ridiculous, because the reality ends up being less surprising. In the US you can only be president so long as you remain within an operable window of reasonability, which Trump remains within despite his character.
Now, does that mean you just ignore the rhetoric and stop paying attention to let it normalize in your mind so that when something actually bad happens it can just feel like a minor iteration rather than a shocking leap? No. That said, the rhetoric is the rhetoric and the reality is the reality.
Trump also said to lock Hillary up, yet that never happened. Sure, you shouldn't have to be a constitutional lawyer or understand entirely how the country works to get a decent sense for what's really happening, but ideally high quality journalists help fill that role to contextualize important events, grounding viewers in reality. The problem is that people get so much of their news from entertainment comedy shows and emotional opinion shows now rather than actual boring (good boring) journalistic media. It becomes celebrity clickbait.
I agree with most of what you're saying. The only adjustment I'd make is the idea of a Trump's statements being a trial balloon. He says crazy things to see how people will react.
I agree that most of it is theater, for now. Some things have moved into reality, though. Ignoring judges orders. Sending US citizens to foreign jails. Going after media companies and extorting millions. Going after law firms and extorting millions. Before he did those things, they were just like all the other crazy things he said. Now, they're part of our reality.
He says crazy things to expand people's possibility space, increasing their tolerance for a less bad version of it that might have otherwise been harder for people to accept. This is in Art of the Deal.
Same thing with Gaza becoming some kind of glorious lavish supermall. Same thing with the Ukraine and Russia peace deals. This is just how he is.
It has extra upsides and downsides when used in politics at this level, to be fair.
We can bury our heads all we want, but this seems like a constitutional crisis to me. Said another way, hiw many signs do we have to ignore before we call it one?