A toxic threat to America – Capitol Hill Blue

It is practically cliché at this point to observe that President Trump is jealous of the trappings of monarchy. He has draped the Oval Office in gold, gilded the statues and monuments that mark the landscape of Washington D.C., pledged to build an enormous triumphal arch in his name and destroyed a large part of the White House to build an opulent presidential ballroom of immense size.

As to the actual substance of his administration, Trump’s almost exclusive use of executive orders is tied up in his monarchical understanding of presidential power. The executive order, as he understands it, is less an interoffice memo with defined legal scope than it is a royal decree to be swiftly obeyed, without question or challenge.

That is one reason those orders cover vast territory, much of it beyond the president’s formal power or authority. His executive orders have sought to end diversity programs throughout the country, change school curriculums at the district level, commandeer state voting systems and rewrite the Constitution to limit the scope of citizenship. The ambition of these orders is a testament to Trump’s self-understanding as a man of limitless power. It is not for nothing that in February 2025, a little less than a month after many of these executive orders were issued, the official White House account on X shared an A.I.-generated image of Trump as monarch with the caption reading in part, “Long Live the King.”

In their book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount a meeting with Trump during which he proudly showed them a document, written by a golf caddy and businessman, that claimed he was a more powerful figure than a host of notorious dictators and warlords, including Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.

Trump relished the comparison.

With all of this noted, it is appropriate that King Trump, first of his name, would also seek to use the force of the state to punish those who question him, insult him or challenge his narrative of events — lèse-majesté, American-style.

Trump has filed lawsuits against a number of news organizations, including ABC, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. In each case he claims he’s been defamed, but nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that he demands fealty to his vision of reality and that if you will not accept it, he will try to impose it.

His most recent target is the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which he has threatened with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a recent report that criticized and condemned his deployment of the National Guard in American cities.

Trump claimed to send the Guard to cities such as Washington to address crime. But according to the center’s report, there is no statistically significant evidence that these deployments — which will cost more than $1.7 billion if they continue through the end of 2026 — have reduced crime across the country. The point of the deployments, the authors argue, was not to deal with crime but to intimidate and seize power from Democratic-led cities. The president’s lawyer called the report malicious and full of false statements.

Whether or not you agree with the report’s conclusions, an attack on the president’s policies is not an attack on the president’s person. Even if it were, the price of being a public official is that you are open to a wide range of critique. If that is unacceptable, you can always resign.

Donald Trump is not given to regret, but he does get rueful when he thinks about how modest his corruption was in the first term. When he was first elected as president in 2016, Trump was primarily a real estate magnate and television personality who licensed his brand for money. He held on to both his properties and his branding practices in his first term, which meant that business people and foreign governments could indirectly enrich his coffers by staying at Trump-branded hotels. Foreign governments also handed kickbacks to the president by granting trademarks to the Trump Organization. Though both practices clearly violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, the bribery went on with impunity during Trump’s first term; predictably, the Supreme Court refused to review the matter.

It’s now clear that, in the grand scheme of things, Trump’s first-term corruption was penny-ante, involving tens of millions of dollars rather than billions. It’s not that Trump was less greedy; he simply lacked the imagination and connections to realize how the presidency could really be milked on a grand scale. But his four years out of office allowed him to remake his business empire, moving into realms like social media (with Truth Social) and cryptocurrency (with World Liberty Financial, founded in September 2024 with the Trump family owning 75 percent). During these years, the Trump family also deepened its ties to the wealthy elites of Middle Eastern petro-states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These shifts allowed Trump to move from being a relatively small-scale con man to his current position as perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history.

In an interview last month for The New York Times, Trump lamented that he didn’t do business deals as president in his first term. He changed his position on this, he said, because “I found out that nobody cared. I’m allowed to. You know, George Washington, when he was president…had two desks. He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both. It’s OK to do that.” (Trump has been using this line about Washington for many years; it won’t shock anyone to find out that it is nonsense.)