Have you heard some perfectly good words used over and over until you think ‘enough already’? Maybe I’m just a grumpy old geezer, but after hearing “incredible/incredibly” every hour from sunrise until beddy-byes, I get incredibly irritated.
Norms: I don’t remember hearing ‘norms’ very often before June 2015 when Donald Trump descended the fake gold escalator in Trump Tower and declared he planned to run for president. We thought it was the usual Trump flim-flam to get attention. Then he won the nomination. Surely the majority of American voters wouldn’t buy his mumbo-jumbo. And they didn’t. He lost the popular vote by 2.9 million.
But because the founding fathers messed up and mandated an electoral college in the Constitution, we had to put up with Trump disregarding the norms for a long four years. And here we go again. Leaving aside such nonsense as ‘Gulf of America’, ‘ Department of War’, Canada as the 51st state, and purchasing Greenland – just a few examples.
Corruption at the highest level
Even before being elected, Trump refused to release his tax returns. Every president since Richard Nixon has had his tax returns made public in one form or another. Steve Rosenthal of the Tax Policy Center said Trump “crashed all the norms”. The New York Times managed to obtain several decades of Trump’s returns and published them. They showed the self-proclaimed billionaire paid little to no taxes and, in some years, this wheeler-dealer lost money.
The minute Trump became president on 20 January 2017, he violated the “emoluments clause” of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 9). In brief, it states that no federal officer can accept gifts or emoluments from a foreign source – in effect an anti-corruption rule. Every president before Trump has either divested himself of his businesses, like Jimmy Carter, or put his holdings in a blind trust. Not Trump. He kept the Trump Organisation intact, claiming his sons would now be in charge. All righty. And that luxury plane from Qatar? A presidential jet which will go to a future Trump Library, not him personally. A jet in the library. The billions in crypto? Oh, that’s the family’s, not his. According to Bloomberg, Trump has doubled his wealth since taking office for a second term. His blatant corruption boggles my weak brain.
The loss of constitutional protections
Guardrails: Trump, like all bullies, will keep pushing and pushing until he is challenged. He violates the norms because the ‘guardrails’ have been disregarded by those who should apply them.
The first and foremost guardrail is the Constitution. Its fundamental principle is separation of powers. In theory the US has three co-equal branches of government – the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary. If one branch overstepped the norms, the other two branches would say, to quote the Beatles: “oh, you can’t do that”. That’s BTE (Before Trump Era). Republicans now control both houses of Congress, have stuck the guardrails in a storeroom, and become a rubber stamp for whatever Trump tells them.
Trump said his favourite word is ‘tariffs’. The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, except in emergencies. Trump said America is getting screwed by trade deficits and on 2 April, announced a ‘Liberation Day’. Not a peep from the GOP. Billions have been poured into the Treasury, which Trump believes is really sticking it to those horrible nations like Canada, Mexico, China, and the UK. No amount of explaining seems to convince him that those billions are a tax on Americans. The Republicans in Congress, like the three monkeys, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
The power of the Republican majority
Normally the annual budget is passed in 12 appropriation bills. Not in 2025. Trump wanted “one big, beautiful bill”, with no need to negotiate with the Democrats. The Republican majority did not say, ‘as you well know, Mr President, we don’t do budgets that way’. No, it was, ‘whatever you want, oh Dear Leader’. And here we are in a government shutdown because Congress did not apply the guardrails nor follow the norms.
The fourth amendment to the Constitution protects everyone from unreasonable search and seizure. Repeat: protects everyone, not just people with blonde hair and blue eyes. ‘Everyone’ includes undocumented migrants and asylum seekers. Forget it. No guardrails. We now witness masked men in combat gear grabbing people off the streets, in courthouses, schools, and places of worship, and throwing them into detention facilities. No warrants.
They may get deported before a judge can decide their cases. And if a judge decides they should not be deported before their day in court? Stuff the judge, deport ’em anyway. Trump’s Department of Justice (or injustice) will delay and appeal until it finally reaches the third co-equal branch of the supreme court, which may delay making a decision while several hundred rot in an El Salvador prison or find themselves in Eswatini. Even the supreme court has stopped applying legal guardrails.
The cult of Trump
Gaslighting: Everybody seems to be gaslighting everybody these days. In the not-so-distant past, I only heard the word in reference to the 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she’s going crazy. The gaslighter-in-chief has bamboozled around half of all Republicans, approximately 15% of all adults, into thinking only he can make America great again (MAGA).
He follows Adolf Hitler’s ‘big lie’, as laid out in Mein Kampf (1925). If you spout BS long enough, and loud enough, some people will believe you. Trump claimed the 2020 election was rigged, even before results came in, and he said it over and over and over. This culminated in the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. More than 1200 ‘true believers’ were charged with federal crimes and 460 convicted.
The fanatic MAGA cult consider Trump the GOAT (greatest of all time). Believe it or not, house bill 792 directs the National Park Service to make arrangements to carve Trump’s image on Mt Rushmore, alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, despite some presidential historians ranking Trump as the worst president in US history. Almost all put him in the bottom five. Just imagining Trump on Mt Rushmore makes me nauseous.
The future of the United States?
Unfortunately, it might get a lot worse. President John Adams famously said the Republic is, “a government of laws, not of men”. America, it seems, is now a government of Trump. The US already has soldiers in the streets of cities due to Trump’s big lie about rising violent crime that the “radical left” Democrats can’t handle.
My nightmare scenario: Trump, in a fit of extreme paranoia, declares martial law and the military are deployed throughout the country. The Constitution and all laws are suspended. The US becomes an occupied land. Trump, not one for nuance, announced outright that he would not be a dictator, then added, “except for day one”. Well, it seems Trump would be a dictator quite a bit longer than one day.
While campaigning in 2015, Trump said: “I know words. I have the best words.”
In addition to ‘MAGA’, ‘rigged’ and ‘radical left Democrats’, his best words include ‘loser’, ‘hoax’, ‘fake news’, ‘witch-hunt’, ‘retribution’ and my favourite, “covfefe”. Americans may have to get used to Trump’s new best words: ‘President-for-Life’.
