Much of Our Country Exists To Feed the Insatiable Ego and Delusions of a Senile, Hateful Bigoted Narcissist Violently Divorced from Reality. That's Not Good!
This is a pretty typical social media post for the most powerful man in the world.
Let that sink in.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the goal of the government was to serve the needs of the American people. I fondly recall the supremely democratic concept of checks and balances. That feels like a million years ago.
The national government no longer aspires to help the American people. It sees that as the job of states. Actually, it sees EVERYTHING as the job of states, with the notable exception of the military and protecting the border.
While other agencies' budgets were slashed or completely eliminated, funding for the military has increased by fifteen percent. Military parades for the president’s birthday aren’t cheap!
The government now exists to serve the deranged ego and bottomless self-regard of a hateful, ignorant, clearly senile bully violently divorced from anything resembling reality. That undersells the scope of the insanity: our nation seemingly exists primarily to serve the delusions of a madman.
Trump loves narratives that depict him as not just impressive but superhuman. He’s convinced his cult that he presided over the four greatest years in American history during his first term, despite having his America First agenda sabotaged by enemies within.
Deep State traitors like John Kelly and John Bolton saw their job as protecting sacred institutions from Trump’s arrogance and ignorance.
Trump vowed not to let that happen in his second term. The only criterion for a spot in Trump 2.0’s cabinet seems to be mindless sycophancy. The criterion is no longer whether a cabinet nominee would succeed where Mike Pence failed in 2021 and refuse to certify the presidential election of Trump’s opponent; it’s whether a Trump pick would throw a punch at a cop during the January 6th riot and keep punching until they ran out of strength.
The current and former president sees his modest electoral victory in the 2024 presidential election as an unprecedented electoral landslide that gave him a mandate to do anything he wants, no matter how illegal or outrageous.
Trump and his minions seem to feel that winning 49.8 percent of the vote gave the president a blank check to realize his wildest dreams. For Trump, the job of the legislative and judicial branches isn’t to act as an essential check on executive power but rather to execute his will.
The president doesn’t see the legislative and judicial branches as equal branches of the government: he sees them as underlings who must do what he says, when he says, if they don’t want to be harshly criticized, fired, arrested, and imprisoned.
Democratic norms mean nothing to Trump if they don’t feed the largest, most destructive ego in the history of the universe.
To Trump, EVERYBODY works for him. Trump sees himself as the voice of the American people. To go against him is to deny the will of the American people.
Trump has complete control over the Republican Party. Criticizing the mad king in even the meekest terms represents political suicide.
It goes beyond government. During Trump’s first term, he railed against Twitter and Facebook, which he saw as wings of the Democratic Party intent on censoring, banning, and shadow-banning his supporters.
In 2024, Trump saw a radically different tech realm. Under the leadership of Elon Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisors and a man who contributed about a quarter of a billion to his campaign, Twitter became an essential component of Trump’s campaign machinery. It consequently seemed redundant for Trump to launch his own social media site, Truth Social, since Twitter couldn’t be more aggressively pro-Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg similarly had a change of heart. He started wearing a gold chain, donated a million dollars for a front-row seat at his new best friend Donald Trump’s inauguration, and gushed about how badass he was for pumping his fist in defiance after a failed assassination.
Trump wasn’t exagerrating when he said that tech giants and business moguls were lining up to kiss his ass, bend the knee and do everything in their power to curry his favor and avoid his wrath.
Amazon and The Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, killed his formerly respected newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, paid a million dollars for a seat at Trump’s inauguration, and paid forty million dollars for a Melania Trump documentary.
When rumors began circulating that Amazon was going to show how much Trump’s tariffs would cost consumers, Press Secretary/Hitler Youth Karoline Leavitt derided it as “a hostile and political act.” In an unsurprising turn of events, Amazon hastily announced that it would not list tariff costs on its site.
In a non-coincidence, Bezos has lots of government contracts that Trump could cancel if he chose.
Trump tasked Elon Musk with destroying any government agency that displeased him or promoted the shameful lie that racism exists and our country is not a faultless paradise. Trump used his enormous power to force powerful universities to conform to his racist, misogynistic, transphobic worldview or lose funding. The same holds true of elementary and high schools.
The Ghosts Can’t Do It star fired anyone in the government he disagreed with, particularly if they participated in the unspeakable evil of DEI, which he declared immoral and illegal. He fired the entire board of the Kennedy Center and appointed himself chairman.
Trump sees his executive orders as royal decrees. If he thinks that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America, on account of our country being so much better than Mexico, then everyone has to refer to it by its bullshit new name or risk losing access to the president.
He alienated a legitimate press he never stops referring to as an enemy of the people and promoted right-wing conspiracy theorists who don’t just support him; they worship him.
Trump has a level of power NO ONE should have, let alone a deranged sociopath with the maturity of a temper tantrum-prone toddler and the ethics of his mentor, Roy Cohn.
That helps explain why Trump has been able to get away with imposing tariffs, which pretty much everyone else agrees is not just a bad idea but a potentially catastrophic mistake.
Trump looked on with delight as ostensibly independent institutions lined up to bend the knee and kiss the ring in order to avoid being on the receiving end of his bottomless rage.
In his arrogance, Trump assumed that China, Russia, and other superpowers would be just as eager to do his bidding as his flunkies in the Republican party or obedient and terrified tech, crypto, and business realms.
He was wrong. A lot of American life right now exists to feed Trump’s delusional conception of himself as our country’s morally perfect savior, but the rest of the world isn’t anywhere near as cowed by his awful power and eagerness to abuse it in the most awful possible way.
Internationally, Trump has overplayed his hand. It looks like the rest of the world will have to provide the check on his power that we’re too cowardly to do ourselves.
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Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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