Who said there are no second acts on the American public stage?. The good fortune of Donald Trump’s narrow escape from an assassin is a powerful recent exception to that rule, along with his GOP nomination this week after his 2020 election loss. Now Republicans are pressing their luck, bringing back Berkeley law professor John Yoo who is attempting to hitch his wagon to the second act of Donald Trump

Yoo first came to prominence on the national stage two decades ago, in 2002, when he authored a series of infamous memos providing legal justifications for the Bush administration’s post-9/11 use of torture. Recently, Yoo has again broken out of the pack of the right-wing chattering class and returned to the limelight as a regular commentator on Fox News.

Because of his ardent defense of former President Trump and advocacy of revenge and reprisal as legitimate tools in a second Trump Administration, as Rolling Stone Magazine notes, “Trump and his allies are increasingly smitten with John Yoo’s work and his views on punishing their enemies and expanding presidential power.”

They may well be drawn to Yoo’s contention that prosecutors who investigated and charged the former president “have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs exactly the same way for exactly the same kind of things until they stop.” Yoo’s May 29 essay in the National Review laid out that case in detail.

According to Rolling Stone, one of Trump’s advisors labeled that essay “The Vengeance Memo,” a playful, if chilling reference, to Yoo’s Torture Memos.

Along with the authors of Project 2025, Yoo is laying the groundwork for an assault on constitutional governance and making the case for his appointment as Attorney General or to the United States Supreme Court should Trump win in November.

On July 8, Yoo used a startling point of reference to expand on his vision of what a second Trump Administration should do. “If we’re not going to become a banana republic,” Yoo said, “Unfortunately, we’re........

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