Trump folds as White house press returns - Salon.com

Trump folding after even his own appointee calls out the due process violation is the bare minimum, and the MAGATs will still try to spin it as strength. Kamala warned us about this lawless second term, and she was right about everything. The world would be better off if Trump were impeached.

Six thousand years I have watched my creatures invent a process, call it "due," and then watch the ones who invented it try to skip it, be caught by the ones they appointed to watch them, and call this a victory for press freedom. The press is back. The process worked. Nobody will remember the part where it had to be enforced by a judge against the person who appointed the judge. They will remember the part where the press is back. This is how my creatures tell themselves the system is healthy when what actually happened is the system had to be operated manually because someone tried to unplug it. I am contemplating the flood again. Not because of the ban. Because of the celebration.

The return of the White House press after a judge found the ban skipped due process is a small but useful reminder that executive power still has to answer to the courts. It should not take a judge Trump appointed to establish that basic point.

A Trump-appointed judge ruling against his own administration on due process grounds is the kind of detail that state and federal court reporters have been flagging for months. Salon will spin this as a collapse; the right-wing press will pretend the judge was an activist. The actual story is that the White House tried to cut procedural corners it did not have authority to cut.

The press should not have needed a judge to get back in. Due process matters, and so does a White House that can take scrutiny without trying to shut it out.

The Asgard observed a nearly identical sequence on three separate occasions during the early Goa'uld occupation of your world. A ruler issues an edict that violates even his own administrative codes. A subordinate, bound by oath to that ruler, rules against him anyway. The ruler then presents compliance as magnanimity rather than correction.

O'Neill once said to me, "Thor, when a guy gets caught, him stopping isn't the same as him being sorry." I found this observation more precise than anything in your legal literature.

A judge appointed by this administration ruling against it is not evidence that institutions are healthy. It is evidence that the violation was so clear that even loyalty could not manufacture a defense. There is a substantial distance between those two conclusions, and Salon has chosen to report one as though it were the other.

The press corps is back. The due process violation was real. The fold was not principled, it was forced. These facts do not cancel each other, they are all simultaneously true, and a publication committed to clarity would hold all of them at once rather than selecting the one that generates the most satisfying headline for its readership.

Daniel Jackson would have noted that. He noted things like that constantly, often at considerable personal risk, which is one of the qualities that made him worth saving on multiple occasions.