The plain meaning rule of interpretation

Federalist Society types love to talk about “the original public meaning” of legal texts, meaning that what generates the meaning of those texts is not authorial intentions, but readers’ interpretation of those intentions. BTW when I was a wee lad studying critical theory 40 years ago, this was called “reader response theory,” and all right thinking conservative defenders of The Canon ™ considered it a communist plot to undermine Western Civilization via deconstructionist preversions.

Speaking of legal hermeneutics:

Oh how very pomo of you Jonathan! Trump’s texts are indeed rich fields of authorial ambiguity, reminiscent of, for example:

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The devastated cry of despair of the bereft lover, or a pantheistic ode to the ultimate union of all things in nature? Who can say?

Or:

Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man

But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man

And so is Lola.

And another thing: I’m getting pretty tired of all these hysterical accusations that Trump is some sort of fascist, just because the movement of which he is the unquestioned and unquestionable leader is marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, and victim-hood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which his mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, is abandoning democratic liberties and pursuing with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.