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Jeet Heer Profile picture
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Jan 30 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There's nothing to stop a president or would be president from encouraging followers to commit all sorts of federal crimes with the promise that they'll be pardoned.
Let's say you encourage your followers -- including elected officials and election officers -- to do all sorts of illegal shit to ensure you become president with the understanding that they'll be pardoned. What's to stop that?
The presidential power has been used in the past to help cover up crimes by a president's cronies and supporters (notably by the two Bushes) but Trump is really taking up to a new level.
The Senate had the power to remove Trump from office and also to bar him from running again. The failure to do so opens up this possibility.

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More from @HeerJeet

Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 31
1. Over the weekend, Trump hailed "those great Canadian truckers" protesting mandates. Joe Rogan, Jordan B Peterson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rob Schneider also love those Canadian truckers. What's going on?
2. As @CarlBeijer usefully points out, there's a history of the hard right trying to mobilize truckers, usually unsuccessfully: a 2013 anti-Obama protest (30 trucks) & a 2021 Australian one (2 trucks). carlbeijer.com/p/truckers-sit… ImageImage
3. As compared to those early fizzles, Canadian protest is relatively successful: generously maybe 1,000-1,500 trucks & 10-15,000 protestors. But that's piddling compared to other Canadian protests. 2019 climate protest had 1 million across country & 500,000 in Montreal.
Read 6 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 27
1. This is a good thread but saying there's no anti-Semitism & Holocaust denialism misses the point since it's very clear from the minutes that the swear words & nudity are pretextual for larger discomfort about a story about the Holocaust.
2. I would encourage reading the actual transcripts because it's very explicit board members think grade 8 students should read about "It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids" -- i.e. it's about the Holocaust.
3. The other area of objection is Maus shows how fraught Art Spiegelman's relationship is with father -- which is part of what makes the book great. It's about how suffering doesn't ennoble but causes trauma that ripples through generations.
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 23
1. When the Nation published my tribute to Terry Teachout this week they used this photo of The Vile Body, a salon Teachout formed in late 1980s, which revived all sorts of memories of the cult of Waugh & the failed attempt to create an American cultural aristocracy.
2. When we think of cultural Reaganism, what usually comes to mind is the populist pop stuff: Family Ties, Rambo, Red Dawn etc. But there was a niche high end counterpart in the Waugh Revival. Tellingly, when PBS aired Masterpiece Theatre they got William F. Buckley to introduce
3. The Wauvian moment in 1980s had many roots: popularity of the BBC adaptation of Masterpiece Theatre, longstanding anglophilia in elite circles bolstered now Thatcher/Reagan relationship, desire for alternative canon to fight cultural liberalism.
Read 9 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 14
1. "Reactionary centrism" is a bulls-eye description of a powerful political faction that is claims to be trying to save the Biden presidency but is actually working to capsize it: Manchin, Sinema, Friedman, David Brooks, many flying the "popularist" banner.
2. This Brooks tweet is a nice encapsulation of the project of reactionary centrism, which is to get Biden to throw overboard the progressive agenda & govern as a center right president.
3. There's a lot to be said about reactionary centrism, one of which is that these are sore winners. They've gotten everything they wanted: Biden as president, Machin as veto on agenda, national unity & norms rhetoric. If things are a mess, maybe look in the mirror?
Read 5 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 11
1. A lot of twitter jokesters had a field day a New Yorker critic named The French Dispatch as the best film of 2021 -- it seemed a mite self-congratulatory for The New Yorker to celebrate a film celebrating The New Yorker.
2. There have been movies about The New Yorker & its writers before -- Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Joe Gould's Secret -- but none have been as polarizing as The French Dispatch, in part because its not just about the magazine but the myth of the magazine.
3. The myth of New Yorker was actually discouraged by the two editors who dominated the magazine for its first 60+ years, Harold Ross & William, both in their way men of the shadows who wanted editing to be invisible. They resented myth-making of Thurber, Brendan Gill, etc.
Read 7 tweets
Jeet Heer Profile picture
Jan 5
1. Mailer pseudo-kerfuffle follows a pattern: there's a type of male writer who tends to be a star when alive & then goes into reputational decline soon after death: macho, two-fisted, sometimes substance abusing: Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Mailer, Harlan Ellison, Hitchens.
2. A commentator on my substack calls this literary school "penis-writing" and suggests it's fallen out of fashion. Hemingway has enjoyed a partial revival based on strength of his short stories, but it's hard to imagine Thompson, Mailer, Ellison or Hitchens doing same.
3. Hitchens is a particularly interesting case. The 10th anniversary of his death (Dec. 15, 2011) was last month and there is a flurry of attempts to reevaluate, shore up or restore, notably a @graydoncarter piece & @BenBurgis' new book.
Read 6 tweets

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