\n<\/p>\n
Every day that wannabe dictator Donald J. Trump, a convicted felon and court adjudicated sexual predator, occupies the White House, America loses more of its democracy, standing with voters and leaders and history,<\/p>\n
Trump is a profane, immoral, criminal leader abetted by a cowardly cadre of cult-like hangers on in Congress and a shrinking mob of miscreants who have supported and voted for him in past elections but now admit they were \u201chad\u201d by a narcissistic psychopath.<\/p>\n
It is practically clich\u00e9 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\u00a0an enormous triumphal arch<\/a>\u00a0in his name and destroyed a large part of the White House to build an opulent presidential ballroom of immense size.<\/p>\n As to the actual substance of his administration, Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That is one reason those orders cover vast territory, much of it beyond the president\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u00a0shared an A.I.-generated image<\/a>\u00a0of Trump as monarch with the caption reading in part, \u201cLong Live the King.\u201d<\/p>\n In their book \u201cRegime Change<\/a>: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,\u201d my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount a meeting with Trump during which he proudly showed them\u00a0a document<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Trump relished the comparison.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 l\u00e8se-majest\u00e9, American-style.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0a recent report<\/a>\u00a0that criticized and condemned his deployment of the National Guard in American cities.<\/p>\n Trump claimed to send the Guard to cities such as Washington to address crime. But according to the center\u2019s report, there is no statistically significant evidence that these deployments \u2014 which will cost more than $1.7 billion if they continue through the end of 2026 \u2014 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\u2019s lawyer called the report malicious and full of false statements.<\/p>\n Whether or not you agree with the report\u2019s conclusions, an attack on the president\u2019s policies is not an attack on the president\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Trump, of course, will not resign or ever admit any of his many failings. He is a con man who relishes cheating people and using any means available to rob his victims of money and power.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0went on with impunity<\/a>\u00a0during Trump\u2019s first term; predictably, the Supreme Court\u00a0refused to review the matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s now clear that, in the grand scheme of things, Trump\u2019s first-term corruption was penny-ante, involving tens of millions of dollars rather than billions. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In an interview last month for\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, Trump\u00a0lamented<\/a>\u00a0that he didn\u2019t do business deals as president in his first term. He changed his position on this, he said, because \u201cI found out that nobody cared. I\u2019m allowed to. You know, George Washington, when he was president\u2026had two desks. He had a business desk and he had a president desk, and he did both. It\u2019s OK to do that.\u201d (Trump has been using this line about Washington for many years; it won\u2019t shock anyone to find out that\u00a0it is nonsense<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Polls show Trump is now distrusted even by Republicans, with disapproval ratings passing 50% and rising feelings of regret from those who voted for him. Even so, returns from Republican primaries Tuesday showed win by two of his endorsed candidates, a change from the 10 straight failings of his supported candidates in previous primary elections.<\/p>\n America\u2019s politics are controlled by rabid partisans on both sides of the aisle and too many party faithful lemmings still put lockstep support of their leaders ahead of what is better for elections. The Republican party is still controlled by the MAGA Maggots who ignore the threat he is to democracy and the true American way of life.<\/p>\n Trump lies when he claims \u201cMAGA\u201d stands for \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d It really stands for \u201cMalicious Assholes Grifting America\u201d and the main asshole is Donald J. Trump along with the GOP cowards in Congress who should be considered un-indicted co-conspirators.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every day that wannabe dictator Donald J. Trump, a convicted felon and court adjudicated sexual predator, occupies the White House, America loses more of its democracy, standing with voters and leaders and history, Trump is a profane, immoral, criminal leader abetted by a cowardly cadre of cult-like hangers on in Congress and a shrinking mob […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7049034,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106254,101215,97191,181661,111888,141258,211622,88,97133,106255,106257,211623,106258],"tags":[2708,278,21764,2096,14898,3527],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7049033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitol-hillbillies","category-donald-trump","category-fraud","category-fubar","category-lies","category-maga","category-malicious-assholes-grifting-america","category-news","category-opinion","category-republicans","category-treason","category-wannabe-dictator","category-white-house","tag-america","tag-blue","tag-capitol","tag-hill","tag-threat","tag-toxic"],"yoast_head":"\n