Thresholds and Precedents

Opens from Colorado to react to a doozy of a political event he sees as a new threshold and precedent, framing it through the explicit and implicit rules and special privileges a society grants for its own ordering.

In olden days leaders like kings and popes had total immunity, and the 18th-century US system made presidents honored citizens who are hard to prosecute so future parties cannot punish their enemies.

The failed states he has visited across Africa share a recurring pattern of new leaders arresting old ones, which are called banana republics, and that a former head of state cannot get an impartial trial.

Argues the US endowed the presidency with a social expectation to commit actual crimes, like Bush-era torture through enhanced interrogation and the Obama-era drone assassination of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process.

Presidents do thousands of technically illegal things involving deaths, asset seizures, and lying under oath but get away with it via executive privilege, a small self-regulating club with norms.

The country elected a person in Trump who does not respect precedent, will not turn over taxes or submit to subpoenas, asserts he is above the law, and cries political persecution.

Warns the Mar-a-Lago search is unprecedented and could cause catastrophic political damage, covering every institution that touches it in molten tar and being litigated for years.

Predicts if Republicans retake the House they will launch an inquisition into the searching institutions that delegitimizes them, and asks how you fairly try someone as polarizing as Trump with an impartial jury.

Recalls Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon, which cost Ford the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, because Ford realized no one can be impartial in the matters of a former president.

Asks the core question of why one person is endowed with this much power, calling it a prime example of hyper-centralization that lets an individual violate law, murder citizens, and torture while controlling their own investigators.

Once warped by the office a former president cannot be treated like a normal citizen, since they know nuclear secrets and intelligence methods, making jailing them a national-security liability.

Asks why one office needs to be this powerful and how to decentralize decision-making at the top, crediting the 18th-century founders for separation of powers, term limits, and peaceful transfers of power.

Sees no good outcome: a convicted Trump becomes a more powerful political prisoner then gets pardoned if Republicans win, while an uncharged Trump fuels civil unrest over being above the law.

Draws the lesson that this is a case study in why centralization is bad and why the crypto space works daily to disintermediate institutions and push power to the edges rather than elevate untouchable figures.

Says the Constitution has to change, and warns the precedent means every future president will be searched and arrested on a technicality, citing possible tit-for-tat Hunter and Joe Biden charges.

Argues you cannot run a nation-state under normal laws since intelligence agencies and the State Department kill and deceive for a living, so criminalizing that just lets parties arrest opponents.

The Trump case is only the beginning of a deeper escalating fallout, and Trump could lawfully run for president from a jail cell and potentially win, with massive political consequences.

Clarifies he is not a Trump supporter and loathes him as a pathological liar sued over 1600 times, a petulant man-child who leveraged an inherited dynasty as a carnival barker into power.

Trump tapped into unaddressed anger from a Jeb Bush versus Hillary Clinton choice, then squandered his chance to do something new and became a national embarrassment for four years.

America has survived worse, electing presidents sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan or responsible for the Trail of Tears like Andrew Johnson, then healing and sweeping them under the rug.

Trump's legacy is already tarnished and the party was ready to move on to DeSantis, but continuing to burn him down serves no public interest and makes him a viable 2024 candidate again.

Argues citizens' votes do not matter much and the only path to change is amending the Constitution through a constitutional convention that fundamentally reworks how voting and the federal government work.

The Constitution must finally address the fourth branch, the roughly 10-million-strong federal bureaucracy that is immune to consequences and more powerful than all three branches combined.

Proposes deconsolidating power with inclusive leadership like Switzerland's seven-person board where the president is no more powerful than the rest, versus the team-red-versus-blue theater serving the same masters.

Warns there is no natural de-escalation because media profits from radicalizing people, who are now buying guns, prepping, and talking secession in Texas.

Reminds that a small minority of malcontents started the American Revolution and that movements grow through counter-reactions, as seen with Mubarak in Egypt and the Soviet collapse.

He will push for a constitutional convention in Colorado and Wyoming, warning it will take years or decades and that one or two more economic calamities or pandemics could reach a boiling-over point.

He likes decentralization and governance conversations because good systems hold people accountable and keep them honest, while systems with malicious incentives turn honest people dishonest to survive.

Durable systems like Bitcoin's 21-million cap and Cardano's 45-billion monetary policy resist change because coordinating a hard fork across miners, developers, and exchanges is dramatically hard.

Compares constitutional stability to the difficulty of amending away free speech, asking how to make government inclusively accountable so people finally feel they are not being lied to.

Closes calling the search a crossing of the Rubicon and a new era, predicting years of retribution and pushing for a complete restructuring of a government he says has lost the right to lead.