President Donald Trump ignoring a judge’s block on his media ban signals a significant step towards dictatorship amid a larger attack on U.S. law.
On Thursday, legal expert Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor emeritus at Harvard, warned of Trump’s larger attack on the law amid his insistence on banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House. Tribe spoke on CNN after the network’s correspondents were again turned away from the White House despite a judge issuing a temporary restraining order against the media ban.
“The president is playing cat and mouse with the American people,” Tribe said. “It really is an outrage. He says that he’s going to comply with judicial orders, but he defied them this morning.”
He continued, “And even though hours, many hours after the court ruled that access cannot be selectively denied to CNN and MS NOW and Politico, it was being denied.”
He then pointed to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House this morning, saying, “And in the morning, when President Xi arrived at the White House, none of you were able to cover it, just as you’re not able to in any meaningful way to cover the state dinner” with Xi.
“The president does not recognize that he is subject to the law,” Tribe said. “I was trying to think of parallels in history, but there really are none. George III didn’t have this kind of power,” Tribe lamented, referring to the English monarch Americans fought in the Revolutionary War.
“He tried to control coverage, but he was responsible to a parliament,” Tribe said about George III. “The Congress basically does, because of the MAGA element, does what the president wants.”
Tribe also compared Trump to King Louis XIV, the absolute monarch credited with declaring “I am the state.” Tribe said that Louis XIV “didn’t go that far either” in comparison to Trump’s words to the East Ballroom architect who raised concerns about building code.
“‘I am the law.’ He used the word ‘code,’ the code that controls him. He said, ‘I am the code,’” Tribe explained. “We can’t have this in this country. That’s dictatorship.”
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