No Checks. No Balances. No Guardrails. |
“Guardrails do not fail all at once. They fail quietly, one by one, until nothing is left to stop the car.”
Something fundamental has shifted, and pretending otherwise is part of the problem.
This is not about being surprised by Donald Trump. Most of us crossed the threshold on his fitness for office years ago. That debate is settled. What feels different now, heavier and more dangerous, is not the behavior itself. Although he seems to be really losing his shit these past few weeks, the real danger and the real difference, IMHO, is the disappearance of institutional guardrails.
A functioning democracy depends on more than laws written on paper. It depends on guardrails that constrain power in real time. Courts. Congress. Norms. The press. Elections. When those guardrails hold, violations trigger consequence and correction. When they fail, the law does not vanish. It becomes performative. Invoked. Televised. Processed. Then ignored.
That is the moment we are living through.
When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a president enjoys broad immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” it did more than resolve a legal question. It rewired the system. For the first time, the nation’s highest court explicitly placed the presidency beyond ordinary criminal accountability while in office and, in practice, dulled accountability afterward. Once that boundary was removed, every other institution received the same signal: the guardrails at the top were now conditional.
What followed was not subtle.
Just this week, an American president seriously entertained and publicly floated the use of military force against a NATO ally to seize Greenland, then backed down only after markets recoiled. Read that again slowly. The plan to defend the Western alliance briefly involved invading a member of it. That sentence should still stop conversation. Instead, it passed through the system as content. Translated. Contextualized. Reframed as strategy. Then filed away and onto the next crazy.
The following day delivered a separate, clarifying data point. In sworn........