What, if Anything, Can Be Done to Stop the Psychos Running Our Country?
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
On January 2, 2026, President Donald Trump rang in the new year by sending U.S. military forces into Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple were taken to New York City and held in a Brooklyn jail on as-yet unindicted charges of drug smuggling and trafficking. Subsequently Trump went on TV and posted on his social media site that the U.S. would run Venezuela for several months and demand 50 billion barrels of its oil. The money made from selling Venezuelan oil would be controlled, Trump said, by “me.”
On January 8, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross and two of his colleagues shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman and mother of three, right after she’d dropped one of her children off at school. Citing no actual evidence, Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, claimed Good was a “domestic terrorist” and an agent of a vast Left-wing conspiracy who had tried to run Ross over with her car, so he shot and killed her in self-defense.
During the first week of 2026, Trump also threatened the government of Denmark with an invasion by the U.S. military if Denmark doesn’t give the U.S. Greenland, a largely self-governing autonomous territory in the North Atlantic. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Trump said, using the thug-like language of which he is so fond. The five political parties in Greenland united to voice their opposition to U.S. conquest and annexation, and so did the Danes. Danish officials warned that an attack by one member country of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on another would shatter the alliance that has helped keep peace in Western Europe since 1949.
These actions, along with others Trump took in late 2025 – including the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for the grandiose “ballroom” he wants to build next to it – make clear that Trump has never wanted to be a powerful but constitutionally limited U.S. President. Instead, he wants to be America’s Führer, its absolute ruler. Trump is making it clear that once he decides he wants something, he will do anything in his power to get it, and so far the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have essentially done nothing to rein in his claims of absolute power despite the constitutional design of our government as having three co-equal branches that check each other’s power.
Those ICE agents, as well as ones from a dizzying array of other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security, including the Border Patrol and something called Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), were sent not only to Minneapolis but other American cities (all of them with local governments controlled by the Democratic Party) not to support local law enforcement but to act as an occupation force. Various mayors and governors have pleaded with Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others to withdraw ICE and Trump’s other forces on the ground that they are not making residents safer, but quite the opposite.
Trump’s response has been to “double down,” to use a phrase employed quite often about him. Instead of withdrawing the occupation forces from ICE and the other Homeland Security agencies, he’s sending more of them. His response to criticism of Renée Good’s murder has been to up the ante on the posthumous attacks on her character and reputation. And Vice-President Vance has declared that ICE agents have, not just the “qualified immunity” that has long bedeviled attempts to hold police officers accountable for attacking and killing civilians, but “absolute immunity.”
Think about that. The Vice-President of the United States is telling the citizens and residents of his country that they can be slaughtered at will by agents of the federal government, and nothing can be done either to protect them in advance or to bring their killers to justice after the fact. We are all living at the whim of poorly trained federal agents (Trump stipulated that newly hired ICE, Border Patrol and HSI agents get just 47 days of training, a number he reportedly seized on because he is now the 47th U.S. president) who literally have blanket authority to kill any one of us at any time they feel like it.
Trump also made his ideological project clear on January 7, when he issued an executive order unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international agencies, some independent and some affiliated with the United Nations. I won’t bother to repeat the list – you can read it at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-international-organizations-conventions-and-treaties-that-are-contrary-to-the-interests-of-the-united-states/ – but, predictably, among the hardest hit targets are any agencies dealing with the control of human-caused climate change (which Trump regards as a hoax) and any agencies dealing with protecting the rights of women or people of color.
It’s often argued that Trump doesn’t have an ideology, that he acts in a sort of willy-nilly fashion unconstrained by any vision of what he wants the world to be. There’s some truth to that, but Trump definitely has a series of prejudices that determine most of how he governs both at home and abroad. Among them are a pathological worship of “strength” and a consequent denigration of “weakness.” Trump is often accused of lacking “empathy,” but in fact he’s not only consciously worked to rid himself of any consideration for other people, he’s quite proud of that.
Trump also accepts as givens that white people are innately superior to people of color, men are superior to women, and rich people are superior to poor people. Trump believes that women exist mainly to gratify the sexual urges of men, especially rich and powerful men like himself, and to bear their children. That’s one reason why his current Defense Secretary (whose department Trump has unilaterally renamed the “War Department” even though Congress changed the name in 1947 and it would take another act of Congress to change it back) Pete Hegseth fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he was a Black man and the head of the Coast Guard because she was a woman.
Trump’s philosophy was capably explained by Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff – one of the few advisors who’s stayed with Trump through both his first term and his current one. In an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN on January 5, Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, couldn’t have said it any better. And late last year Pete Hegseth told Congress that he believed the U.S. military should practice “lethality, not legality” – a blunt promise to the rest of the world that the U.S. would commit war crimes anywhere it fought.
During his first term as President, Trump got tired of having people around him who tried to talk him out of his worst impulses, who kept telling him he couldn’t directly profiteer off the Presidency, he couldn’t deploy the U.S. military on the streets of American cities, he couldn’t snuggle up to dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin while denigrating the republican governments of the European Union. In his “wilderness years” from 2021 to 2025 he put together a new team whose members he could count on to give him the absolute “loyalty” – not to the U.S. Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump – he demands.
And while during Trump’s first term we were assured by some writers that the U.S. was not in danger of being turned into a fascist dictatorship because Trump was literally too lazy to put in the effort, that’s no longer a reality in his second. He has assembled a set of relatively young, energetic ideologues who are eagerly pitching in and giving his project of the fascist transformation of America the raw energy and influence it needs to succeed.
Donald Trump, George Orwell, and “Doublethink”
On July 18, 2016, while the prospect of Donald Trump as President was still a nightmare rather than an all too grim reality, The New Yorker published an interview with Tony Schwartz, the real author of Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all). In it Schwartz warned the U.S. and the world about Trump’s cavalier attitude to the whole idea of “truth.” “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”
The moment I read that quote I thought of George Orwell and his final work, the classic dystopian novel 1984. In 1984, the world is controlled by three great super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. All three are ruled by all-powerful dictatorships based on similar ideologies which use technology to maintain total surveillance of their entire populations 24/7. They also are perpetually at war with each other, in various combinations, because, as Orwell put it, “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”
One of the central tenets of the ruling ideology in 1984 is something called “the mutability of the past.” As Orwell writes, “Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For once it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”
We are now seeing the Trump administration apply this principle in real time in the case of Renée Good. Trump and his spokespeople are repeatedly telling the world that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to run ICE agents over with her SUV. The fact that widely circulating videos of the incident don’t show anything like that isn’t stopping them. Even the footage shot by Jonathan Ross right before he shot Good shows Good telling him, “I’m not mad at you,” and trying to ease her car out of his way before he draws his gun and fires the three shots that killed her. But, in classic Orwellian fashion, Trump, Vance, and other members of the administration keep repeating the lie that Good was out to kill ICE agents, and Trump’s dwindling number of fanatic followers believe it.
The key technique used by the Inner Party, the ruling elite of Oceania in 1984, is a mental exercise called doublethink, which Orwell described as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” Trump, from the start of his political career (and even before that as a businessperson), has been, as Orwell would have put it, a doubleplusgood doublethinker.
It’s why the people who note the contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric and accuse him of hypocrisy are missing the point completely. Trump not only believes in hypocrisy, he wallows in it. As Tony Schwartz told The New Yorker a decade ago, based on his personal experience with the man, Trump has the ability to believe whatever lies he needs to in order to maintain his self-image of being all-powerful. Just after he won back the presidency Trump started wearing a new version of the MAGA baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, “Trump Was Right About Everything.” It’s a claim of omniscience most religious believers (and one of Trump’s real-world exercises in doublethink is claiming to be a committed Christian while violating just about everything Jesus stood for) would reserve for God.
One of the quirks of the modern world has been that the rise in information technology – in particular the increasing use of digital rather than analog storage to hold our records of the past, and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) – has given modern-day dictators and autocrats much greater power to manipulate reality than Orwell could have imagined. In 1984 Orwell posited that the Ministry of Truth would maintain elaborate networks of minions to destroy surviving records of past events that contradicted the Party’s current version of the past. Today inconvenient records can be erased permanently with the mere push of a button on a control panel. Trump’s officials have already done this with economic statistics, disease progression, and the evidence of human-caused climate change.
Soon the technology will exist, if it doesn’t already, to create or alter videos like the ones shot by bystanders of the killing of Renée Good in whatever shape and form the ruling elite demands. Right now the Trump administration has to keep repeating the Big Lie that Good was trying to kill Jonathan Ross in the face of video evidence to the contrary. In a few years, through AI they’ll have the power literally to remake the video evidence to show exactly what they want it to show. Trump and his supporters have already used AI to respond to last October’s “No Kings” protests against him by creating a video in which he plays a combat pilot literally dive-bombing the protesters with shit.
It’s revealing of Trump’s faith in doublethink and his determination to control reality that he has refused to allow the federal government to share its evidence in Good’s killing with Minnesota state and local authorities. His stated reason for doing so is that Minnesota’s state and local governments are “corrupt,” and he knows this because Minnesota voted against him in all three Presidential elections. Trump insists that he actually did carry Minnesota all three times, and state authorities “stole” the election from him. (In the real world no Republican Presidential candidate has carried Minnesota since 1972.) As with the overall result of the 2020 Presidential election, Trump is remaking history in his own desired image and acting on his delusions.
While there are plenty of things Trump promised in the 2024 campaign to do on “day one” of his return to the Presidency that he hasn’t, including lowering consumer prices and ending the war in Ukraine, the one big thing he did do was pardon all 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of his election loss. This not only created a cadre of people who had already committed political violence on Trump’s behalf, many of whom went on social media to proclaim their willingness to do so again, it was also a key step in Trump’s Orwellian campaign to rewrite the history of January 6 by casting the rioters as “freedom fighters” and the Capitol police who tried to stop them as agents of an oppressive “deep state.”
The “Unitary Executive” and Trump’s Claim of Absolute Power
One of the key weapons in Trump’s quest for absolute dictatorial power has been the theory of the “unitary executive.” First propounded by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the “unitary executive” theory holds that because the executive is the only branch of the federal government in which the framers of the Constitution vested ultimate authority in just one person, the President, therefore they meant the President to have absolute power. Trump reiterated this claim in a recent interview with the New York Times (a paper he’s suing for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him in 2024) in which he said he had the authority to commit the U.S. military to battle anywhere in the world at any time, and the only limits on this power were “my own morality, my own mind.”
America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, knew better. In 1848 Lincoln, then a first-term Congressmember from Illinois, strongly opposed the U.S.-Mexican War – a position so unpopular it killed his career in electoral politics for the next decade. On February 15, 1848 he wrote a letter to William H. Herndon, his law partner in Springfield, Illinois (https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D200458), criticizing then-President James K. Polk’s defense of the war. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” Lincoln wrote. “Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose.”
Lincoln went on, “The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where Kings have always stood.”
Trump has made no secret of his desire to be an absolute monarch, to place himself where kings have always stood. Early in his second term he posted to the official White House Web site a mock cover of Time magazine, with an image of himself wearing a crown and the slogan, “Long Live the King.” When he gave his 2025 State of the Union Address, instead of asking Congress for legislation, he boasted of the number of executive orders he had issued, essentially ruling by decree in classic dictatorial fashion. He told Congress that once they passed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” making the 2017 tax cuts permanent and decimating Medicare and Medicaid, he needed nothing else from them.
During his 2024 campaign he strongly suggested that it would be the last election the U.S. would ever have or need. He told his supporters at rallies, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.” He unilaterally abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) even though it had been established by Congress and therefore, at least in theory, only the Congress had the power to get rid of it. Trump also slapped his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. even though the name had been fixed by Congress in 1964 and could not legally be changed without Congressional authorization. And he renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War” despite Congress having adopted the “Defense” name in 1947.
One of the major tactics of Trump’s second term has been to declare so-called “national emergencies” and claim that these justify his assumption of absolute power. He did that with his tariff policy, beginning his second term by demanding power to fix tariffs of any size on any country in the world at any time. Trump also did that by ordering military action against Venezuela and threatening it against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Iran. Indeed, his Iran policy, threatening retaliation against the Iranian government for the crime of shooting unarmed protesters when Trump’s ICE agents are doing that themselves, is yet another example of Trumpian doublethink.
Trump has recently been dropping hints that he may cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections altogether because of yet another bullshit “emergency.” Never mind that the U.S. held Presidential elections in both 1864 and 1944 despite being faced with genuine emergencies – the Civil War and World War II, respectively – that directly threatened the survival of the nation. Trump will do whatever it takes to stay in power after his current term ends despite the stipulation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Either he will openly defy the Constitution and run again anyway, declare an “emergency” that requires him to suspend the election and remain in power, or do what Latin Americans call imposición: find a pliant stooge to run in his place and so keep Trump in power through a puppet President. Indeed, I suspect at least part of J. D. Vance’s motivation for giving that chilling speech in which he said that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” was to show Trump his diehard loyalty so he can be elected President as Trump’s surrogate in 2028 instead of Trump throwing him under the bus in favor of someone else, including (as I predicted in 2024) one of his adult children.
The Dwindling Options of Stopping Trump
And the most chilling thing about Trump’s power grab is that his opponents have so few options available to stop him. Democratic politicians and the sort-of Left-leaning hosts of media outlets like MS NOW keep pointing to opinion polls that say what Trump is doing is monumentally unpopular with the American people. They forlornly look to the 2026 midterm elections as a way of putting at least one house of Congress back in Democratic hands and thereby revivifying Congress’s constitutional role as a check on Presidential power. Their hopes for that election remind me of the equally futile hopes of Russian democrats in 1917 that a national election scheduled for 1918 would vote the Bolsheviks out of power. That election never happened because Vladimir Lenin ordered it canceled.
Trump’s behavior during both his first and second terms has made it clear that he doesn’t regard Congress as having any legitimate power to stop him or even slow him down. Either he will refuse to let officials in his administration testify before Congressional committees even when they’re subpoenaed to do so, or when they do show up he will encourage them not only to defy the committees, but to do so in a highly combative fashion that questions the very idea that Congress has a right to question whatever the administration is doing.
Trump is also working industriously to block the media from any adverse reporting on him. When he isn’t aggressively filing multi-billion dollar lawsuits against outlets like the New York Times and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) to intimidate them, he’s getting his billionaire supporters to buy them out. Already we’ve seen the father-and-son team of Larry and David Ellison buy the parent company of CBS, cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, and install a Right-wing minder at CBS’s once vaunted news department to kill all stories Trump doesn’t want to see aired, including a 60 Minutes report on the high-tech dungeon in El Salvador to which Trump has been sending people he declares as “terrorists” without any due process whatsoever. More recently he’s supported the Ellisons’ hostile takeover bid for CNN’s parent company and has reportedly given them a hit list of CNN anchors he wants them to fire when they take control.
The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis January 8 and the similar slaying of Keith Porter by ICE agents in Los Angeles eight days earlier (which hasn’t been as widely reported because Good was a white woman and Porter a Black man) are among the salvos in Trump’s attempt to silence protesters against him. In the short term they’re not working – people in Minneapolis swelled the streets in defiance of ICE and literally risked their lives to do so. Trump will likely respond to these protests by upping the ante and ordering either ICE or the U.S. military itself to shoot into unarmed protesters and kill them en masse, and that will quite likely spell the end of major street protests against Trump the way the Chinese military similarly stopped protests against their regime after its 1989 mass murder of protesters in Tiananmen Square.
To quote Orwell again, “All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or they grew too soft. Either they became stupid or arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again they were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have created a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.”
Trump’s critics frequently point to the example of Nazi Germany as an authoritarian state that proclaimed its destiny to rule for 1,000 years but only made it to 12. But the Nazis didn’t fall because of any internal weakness; they fell because they aroused the enmity of so many other countries they ended up losing the world war Adolf Hitler had started to conquer the world. To defeat Nazism, the U.S. (a representative republic) and Great Britain (a constitutional monarchy) had to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, a dictatorship in its own way as brutal as Hitler’s that probably killed more people than the Nazis did.
Looking over the world, Trump probably realizes that the only countries that could conceivably defeat the U.S. militarily are China and Russia in coalition. That’s one reason why he’s sucked up so heavily to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and dialed back big-time on his confrontational attitude towards Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Trump’s obsequiousness to Putin has baffled a lot of people, but I’ve long suspected it’s really because he admires Putin and sees him as a role model. Just as Putin successfully crushed Russia’s short-lived experiment with republican governance and re-created the Czarist and Soviet dictatorships, so Trump wants to destroy America’s longer-lived republican experiment and install himself as dictator for life.
That also explains the reason why in December 2025 Trump’s administration issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf) that essentially adopted Russia’s talking points on the Ukraine war, including pledging to oppose any further expansion of NATO. “It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, present unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and re-establish strategic stability with Russia,” the document read.
Instead the document bristled with contempt for Western Europe. It read, “The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
Trump’s general attitude towards the world was summed up in a series of tweets both from him directly and others in his administration justifying the intervention in Venezuela by saying, “This Is Our Hemisphere!” It’s been argued that Trump, who ran as a principled opponent of America’s expansive role in the world and still proclaims himself the “Peace President” while starting or threatening military action in places as diverse as Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada (doublethink strikes again!), believes in the 19th century imperialist vision that divides the world into “spheres of influence.”
Trump sees the world as divided into three broad spheres: the Western Hemisphere, under the suzerainty and control of the United States; the former Soviet Union (and the Czarist Empire before that) and eastern Europe, under Russian control; and an Asia dominated by China. The NSS pays lip service to America’s interest in China and preserving the quasi-independent status of Taiwan, but it’s hard to believe that an administration so wishy-washy on the Russian attempt to conquer and subjugate Ukraine would come down hard on China for doing a similar thing to Taiwan.
Western Europe doesn’t fit snugly into this “spheres of influence” pattern. (In 1984, most of western Europe is part of Eurasia, the super-state formed by the Soviet Union, while Britain is part of Oceania, which had evolved from the United States.) It’s a lot of things Trump hates: confederated, cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant of immigrants (especially immigrants of color), and willing to use the power of government to control what its leaders view as “hate speech” (the real meaning of the passage in the NSS that criticizes Europe for “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” – Right-speak for keeping far-Right trolls off the Internet).
Trump has made it clear to western European countries that the only way they can redeem themselves in his eyes is if they elect far-Right anti-immigrant nationalist parties whose politics mirror Trump’s own. Among these are the Reform Party in Britain, the National Rally in France, and the effectively neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany. In both his Presidential campaigns Trump threatened western Europe that the U.S. might not come to their defense in case of a Russian attack, despite our obligation to do so under Article V of the NATO treaty, if Europe’s countries didn’t start spending more money on defense.
Ironically, a number of them are starting to do exactly that – not because they’re meeting Trump’s demands but because the increasing unreliability of America as a security guarantor has led European political leaders of all ideological stripes to realize that they need to protect themselves instead of counting on the U.S. to do it for them. Meanwhile, Trump has asked Congress to increase America’s already bloated military budget by 50 percent – yet another indication that he wants to rule not only the U.S. but much of the rest of the world with the sheer force of U.S. military might.
At the end of William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2, the dying King Henry IV tells his son and successor, Prince Hal, to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” Henry IV had taken power in a coup d’état (as dramatized by Shakespeare in a previous play, Richard II), and his whole reign had been beset by attempted revolutions and civil wars instigated by supporters of Richard’s designated heir. Accordingly, on his deathbed he tells Hal to unite the country by mobilizing it behind a foreign enemy – and everyone in the court knew who the likely enemy would be: France, which Britain had already tried to conquer decades earlier.
Trump is clearly using threats of military action abroad at least in part to unite the U.S. behind him in the face of growing opposition to his policies. While his conduct in office both times has shown he’s never wanted to be President of the entire United States of America – it’s obvious he regards the regions of the country that voted against him as enemy territory he needs to subdue with military or quasi-military force – he wants to forestall domestic opposition by, among other things, keeping America engaged in one military conflict after another. Military action also has the desirable (to Trump) consequence that he can define all domestic political opposition as “treason.”
At this point there seem few, if any, ways to forestall or reverse Trump’s and his minions’ devastating transformation of the U.S. from an imperfect but still vital democratic republic into an authoritarian, or even a totalitarian, dictatorship. One of the major ironies is that this is happening in the year of the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from kings in general and George III in particular. Just as Richard Nixon planned to use the Bicentennial in 1976 to set aside the 22nd Amendment and run for a third term – which didn’t happen only because the Watergate scandal evaporated Nixon’s political capital – Trump plans to use the 250th anniversary to anoint himself and his movement with absolute power to run the U.S. for however long this nation lasts.
