The Disunited Kingdom of America

 

The Disunited Kingdom of America

Power, once taken and not immediately challenged, is seldom given back. Donald Trump has never been less popular. The vast majority of Americans believe he is damaging the economy, that his immigration policies are both cruel and miss his pledge to focus on “the worst of the worst,” and his pursuit of the hallmarks of a monarch are profoundly un-American. He has positioned his minions to take many of the arrows aimed at him. Stephen Miller and Russell Vought are calling the policy shots and using their 900+ page Project 2025 manifesto as their blueprint to reshape America. He has “busses in waiting” to roll over them if necessary.

Having completely made the Department of Justice, layered with his former private lawyers and purged of anyone who won’t follow orders, is now his personal instrument of retribution, a huge law firm that is dedicated to his mandate, he does not have to instruct his minion Attorney General Pamela Bondi to obstruct the Epstein inquiry, even under hard-fought but near unanimous disclosure law. He could release everything with one of his executive orders… but he remains silent. Bondi knows, wink-wink, that she will play games such that the information the public seeks is unlikely to be fully disclosed until there is a Democrat in the White House, assuming elections continue. Everyone in Trump’s cabinet understands what to do without a direct order. The above self-portrait makes his control most clear. He appointees may soon be blame victims.

We watch the machinations of FCC Chair Brendan Carr mirror the President’s de facto repeal of the First Amendment, threatening media giants (especially those seeking merger and acquisition approval) with license challenges and blocks to their corporate growth ambitions. He managed to pull several late-night hosts off the air or end their contracts; he loves suing news outlets for defamation, knowing that since they depend on his administration for corporate approvals, they have or will likely write him big settlement checks. But his Billionaire Battalion is slowing putting the squeeze on their recent media asset acquisitions (e.g., the mega-billionaire Ellison family’s acquisition of Paramount – which includes CBS News now under very conservative leadership) and strongly suggesting that to win government approval (read: Trump’s), in the current bidding war for WBD control, Warner Bros Discovery’s CNN better fall into some Trump-lover’s hands.

For those of us who watched the listing for a story on the December 21st CBS News’ 60 Minutes, we were expecting an exposé on Homeland Security’s cruel deportation practices. But CBS removed that segment at the last moment. As the December 22nd CNN tells it: “CBS News’ ‘60 Minutes’ is facing a credibility crisis after it abruptly shelved a segment featuring the accounts of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador. The correspondent who reported the story, Sharyn Alfonsi, said in an internal memo that ‘the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship.’ According to Alfonsi and two CBS sources who spoke with CNN on condition of anonymity, the story had been fully fact-checked and legally vetted by the time the network publicized it on Friday [12/29]. But [recently appointed] CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss weighed in with questions on Saturday [12/20] morning, the sources said, and Alfonsi said Weiss ‘spiked the story.’”

But as the President who is responsible for extra-judicial executions of Trump-labeled “narco-terrorists” in small boats carrying the relatively minor drugs (cocaine and marijuana vs the main culprit, fentanyl) in small boars, having just pardoned the narco-kingpin who enabled 400 tons of cocaine to be smuggled into the US – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez convicted and serving a very long sentence in a US federal penitentiary – it became clear that Trump really does not and did not care about illicit narcotics coming into the US.

Trump believes he should win the Nobel Peace Prize, even as most of the nations involved in the peace agreements he claims to have created either deny he was the party who made it happen or such agreements are unraveling fiercely (e.g., Gaza). Still, even if he has to force it, he wants that prize he could never win in an objective world. “President Donald Trump’s aides demanded that FIFA’s made-up ‘peace prize’ awarded to him be literally as big as the World Cup… The White House gave FIFA a list of demands regarding the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, which was invented by FIFA president Gianni Infantino, 55, to present to Trump at the World Cup draw for the 2026 games, according to a report from The Times of London.” The Daily Beast. December 20th.

Ladies and gentlemen, unfortunately we have a king. Writing for the December 21st, New York Times, Peter Baker points out: “In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.

“He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.

“Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls ‘score settling’ against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.”

Trump is struggling to rig the mid-terms so the Democrats will never take over either House of Congress… now or in the future. He may well dispense with elections altogether as “corrupt,” sending federal troops to seize ballots and voting machines if he cannot stop the voting entirely. With the criminal complicity of the conservative majority of Supreme Court, power has been wrongfully taken from Congress and even most federal courts and handed, without guardrails, to Donald Trump, whose family wealth has increase by multiples from Trump favored deals around the world. I wonder when we will see the Trump’s Washington Monument, the Trump’s Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. How about some more big, expensive Trumpy military parades?

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless a MAGA/Trump congressional constituency get the guts to confront what appears to be a physically and mentally unstable autocratic President, we may have to rely on a medical reality that simply ends Trump’s ability to function… on any meaningful basis… or?