By Chris Powell
Last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies in Connecticut and around the country, protesting what were said to be President Trump’s excesses, were as hyperbolic as the president himself, and, insofar as most of the protesters were Democrats and liberals, largely hypocritical.
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Yes, the president is laughably vain and has ridiculous megalomaniacal tendencies, exemplified by the military parade he ordered in Washington, purportedly to salute the Army on its 250th birthday, coincidentally also the president’s 79th birthday. Associating with the military is much more fun for Trump now than it was years ago, when he escaped military service with a claim of bone spurs.
But Trump, a Republican, isn’t the first president to enjoy ruling by executive order. His two immediate predecessors, both Democrats, issued many such orders — indeed, some of Trump’s just undo them — and many of his orders have been stalled by court injunctions that themselves exceed law or precedent.
It would be great if Democrats and liberals are starting to see some virtue in limited government. But if presidential powers have become too large and tempting, the Democrats themselves legislated or consented to them when they were available to Democratic presidents.
It would have been nice if the people protesting Trump’s supposed lawlessness last weekend had also protested when President Joe Biden refused to enforce immigration law, followed his predecessor Barack Obama in refusing to enforce federal marijuana law in states that don’t want it enforced, and forgave student loans without legal authority. But Democrats liked that lawlessness. Similarly, most people at the “No Kings” rallies refused to acknowledge any difference between legal and illegal immigration, since breaking immigration law is fine with them and enforcing it an outrage.
The Democrats’ hypocrisy hints that their hysteria about Trump arises less from his recklessness and overreach than from his attempt to take away the government patronage, employment, subsidies, and grants the Democrats and the political left have come to consider their birthright. Government in the United States has grown vastly in recent decades, financed by a spectacular increase in the national debt, an increase that has rocketed inflation and is prompting the world to withdraw from financing American overconsumption.
Americans are living far beyond their means, and Trump and the Republican majority in Congress have just produced a federal budget that will keep increasing debt and devalue the dollar. But the policy objective originally articulated by Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was sound: to shrink the government sector, much of which is mere overhead, and grow the private sector, which produces wealth.
No one seriously aspiring to be a king would aim to shrink the government he controlled, and the people protesting last weekend don’t want to shrink the government either. They like it big. They’re not against kings as much as they just want a different one.
JOURNALISM QUICKLY FORGETS: Last year’s most important investigative journalism in Connecticut was done by the Connecticut Mirror’s Jessika Harkay, who wrote about a recent graduate of Hartford Public High School who was illiterate, an example of the social promotion that is destroying public education.
Last week the Mirror happily noted that Harkay had won a national journalism award for her report and was leaving for a job with an internet site covering education nationally.
But the Mirror and all other news organizations in Connecticut had forgotten Harkay’s prize-winning story. For while the illiterate graduate is suing Hartford’s school system, no one in journalism has followed up.
When the scandal broke, Hartford’s school superintendent and the state education commissioner promised investigations to fix responsibility and address the problem, but they have produced nothing. Rather than fix responsibility, Hartford’s superintendent will retire in a few weeks. Months ago the education commissioner told Republican state senators that she might have something to report about the case … next year.
Governor Lamont seems to have said nothing about the case, nor to have been asked.
Questions abound here. Harkay’s award is a reminder that no one in journalism is asking them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 
I would ask the girl what her Grade 8 mastery test score was, as in: “What did Hartford know and when did they know it and how many others were there just like her?”
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