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DDOS on democracy
Donald Trump has always been fond of “Hail Mary” passes: he arranges things so that he has nothing to lose, then tries something with a minuscule chance of success, but if it works, he’s gained something at little or no cost. The past week is sort of a “massively parallel Hail Mary” strategy: throw a hundred Hail Mary passes at once, with a hundred different footballs, and if one of them gets through, he’s ahead of the game.
Of his executive actions since taking office again, some are meaningless (e.g. directing all government departments to find ways to reduce food and energy prices), some are malicious and sadistic but within his legal powers, and some are malicious and sadistic and NOT within his legal powers. Let’s concentrate on the third category.
In the past few days he’s fired people “effective immediately” who can’t legally be fired without thirty days’ notice, or before the end of their Senate-confirmed terms, and can’t be fired except for a specific performance-related cause. He’s frozen billions of dollars per day of Congressionally-authorized spending, in violation of the Impoundment Act. And of course he’s ordered government officials to violate the 14th amendment by denying birthright citizenship — not only to the children of “illegal aliens”, as he said on the campaign trail, but to the children of LEGAL temporary residents (e.g. on student or tourist visas). I’m sure there are other blatantly illegal actions in the last few days; those are just the first few that occurred to me immediately.
All of these things will be challenged in court, of course, but if one in ten cases draws a sympathetic Trump-appointed judge who gives him a full or partial win, that case sets a precedent granting him one more power that previous Presidents (including himself) didn’t have. And in the mean time, all these court cases are clogging the legal system and reducing Americans’ faith in it, which is also a win.
It’s a distributed denial of service (and brute-force phishing) attack on democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
So how do you fight a distributed attack? It has to be in parallel, of course, to have any hope of keeping up with the traffic. Each processor/citizen can only deal with one or a few attacks at a time without crashing itself. But there are many millions of us already, and the farther he reaches with his attacks, the more people will realize that he’s not on their side.
Of his executive actions since taking office again, some are meaningless (e.g. directing all government departments to find ways to reduce food and energy prices), some are malicious and sadistic but within his legal powers, and some are malicious and sadistic and NOT within his legal powers. Let’s concentrate on the third category.
In the past few days he’s fired people “effective immediately” who can’t legally be fired without thirty days’ notice, or before the end of their Senate-confirmed terms, and can’t be fired except for a specific performance-related cause. He’s frozen billions of dollars per day of Congressionally-authorized spending, in violation of the Impoundment Act. And of course he’s ordered government officials to violate the 14th amendment by denying birthright citizenship — not only to the children of “illegal aliens”, as he said on the campaign trail, but to the children of LEGAL temporary residents (e.g. on student or tourist visas). I’m sure there are other blatantly illegal actions in the last few days; those are just the first few that occurred to me immediately.
All of these things will be challenged in court, of course, but if one in ten cases draws a sympathetic Trump-appointed judge who gives him a full or partial win, that case sets a precedent granting him one more power that previous Presidents (including himself) didn’t have. And in the mean time, all these court cases are clogging the legal system and reducing Americans’ faith in it, which is also a win.
It’s a distributed denial of service (and brute-force phishing) attack on democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
So how do you fight a distributed attack? It has to be in parallel, of course, to have any hope of keeping up with the traffic. Each processor/citizen can only deal with one or a few attacks at a time without crashing itself. But there are many millions of us already, and the farther he reaches with his attacks, the more people will realize that he’s not on their side.
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Those court challenges also cost money, lots of money usually, to bring. Trump also wins if he bankrupts challengers or forces them to withdraw for fear of that.