Conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way and because he cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with a liberal democratic society. IOW Unfit to be president much less CEO of his businesses.Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology. In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
Rather, look at it this way, if you dare look up the statistics and facts, when Biden was president:The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months. Previous presidents have moved the dial of executive power, as a polarized, deadlocked Congress has surrendered more and more authority, but even John Yoo — who once argued that a US president has the right to crush the testicles of a child if he so wishes — now acknowledges that Trump has “elevated it to another level.”
Trump just declares non-existent ones real on Twitter — and presto! — they are real. He knows he doesn’t even have to bother to justify them. He rightly assumes that Americans have less resistance to bald-faced autocratic lies in 2025 than Russians did in 1999.
Trump’s mouthpieces justify it this way: “President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”
1. subsidies for green energy that Biden initiated ending under Trump
2. 2.7 % inflation - lower than it is now
3. a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades
4. unemployment flat and job creation positive
If any of it amounts to a national emergency (which it doesn't), the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: a sad rubber-stamp Congress allowing the mad king to do whatever he desires. This one-man rule has allowed:
resist and he’ll ruin you
he’ll destroy your law firm’s business;
he’ll stop that corporate merger you want (thereby getting rid of Colber);
he’ll put a tariff on your company, indirectly, a company that relies on cheaper foreign made materials;
he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you;
he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully;
he’ll sue you if you print something true about him (or raid your house as in the case of Bolten);
and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you.
He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them. Just this week, Trump unilaterally imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazil because he disagrees with the country’s judiciary’s indictment of his buddy Bolsonaro, and an extra 25 percent tariff on India (for a total of 50 percent), because India continues to buy Russian oil. “We are in a situation now where he is completely upset by India, and the 25 years of effort to build a relationship seems to be going down in 25 hours,” said Mukesh Aghi, president of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum. Trump was in a bad mood, it seems, upset, because he never expected the sudden realization that Putin had been manipulating him. So f*** India - a solid trading partner!
It was precisely against this kind of power Americans once staged a revolution. Now they want the king back — as long as he’s their king; their Red Caesar. The essence of arbitrary, absolute power, based on nothing but one man’s thrill at bullying those weaker than himself, and having them prostrate before him, is a key element of this administration.Let’s be perfectly clear: Trump has less than zero constitutional or legal authority to do any of this. Tariffs are constitutionally the Senate’s prerogative, and are applied for reasons to do with trade and industry. For a president unilaterally to use them as a club to coerce other countries on unrelated policies — on a whim unrelated to any Congressional mandate — is an impeachable offense. And yet what were only a few years ago obviously impeachable offenses are now simply known as the Trump administration.
He has also used the full weight of the Justice Department to target his personal enemies, impugn honest judges, harass dissenters, and now to accuse a previous president of treason. At the same time, he has pardoned violent rioters, insurrectionists, and corrupt pols on the take for the sole reasons that they’re on his side. He did so with his usual judicial care and moderation: “**** it. Release ‘em all"
His appointment — and the Senate’s confirmation — is an open, aggressive declaration that the rule of law is now the rule of Trump.
I realize that the above is too complicated for Trumpsters like Gondal, who has the attention span and zero intelligence of a fly. But even some Republicans are starting to see the light - especially many of the 263,000 and fed government workers recently unemployed who voted for him. The numbers may be inaccurate - according to Gump, but replacing those federal workers who worked hard to report them is now the status quo.
...and this is just the beginning!Trump is fast dismantling neutral institutions, reality-based research, legal neutrality, and economic predictability, all in order to disorient, and in that disorientation, paralyze resistance. The relentless thoroughness of the campaign to end liberalized democratic life and replace it with a strongman cult, has been staggering!
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