Finally, America has a dictator. He is Donald J. Trump, 79. He is the 45th and 47th US president.
Nearly half of Americans elected Trump. They gave him control of both the Senate (53/45) and Congress (218/215). Majority (six of nine justices) of the Supreme Court are Trump loyalists. Anytime the executive gets control of the legislature and the courts, he becomes a dictator, instantly. He can do no wrong. And even when lying, he is always right.
With power and plenty of penetration, Cal. 45 is one of the best pistols. The AK-47 is probably the best assault weapon, for its bigger bullet and greater kinetic energy. As symbolism for Trump, 45-47 hits the target.
Now, Mr. 45-47 can prove lethal – to integrity in government, to an orderly world and to democracy as we know it.
Trump’s ethics, or lack of it, has no guardrails. He is rogue, rough, a reprobate. With unusual speed, he has proceeded to destroy the key infrastructure of the world’s best and richest democracy.
To do the job, Trump has commissioned the services of the world’s richest man – Elon Musk. Atrociously rich ($395 billion), Musk does not care who or what is hurt, how many lives are being disrupted, damaged or destroyed for good and how many long established institutions of governance will be abolished or reduced to rubble.
It’s child’s play and he has brought his four-year-old son, X Æ A-Xii, to observe perks and perfidy in the world’s most exclusive Disneyland, the White House.
The mechanism to bulldoze American democracy is a monster called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The mission: trim $2 trillion, 30 percent of Federal spending; fire more than 200,000 Federal employees and abolish entire government agencies.
Just how big is $2 trillion? It is twice the $1-trillion GDP of the Philippines, valued at purchasing power parity or what the US dollar can buy in local goods and services.
“DOGE is a democracy wrecking machine,” fumes New York Times (NYT) opinion writer Tressie McMillan Cottom. “It is targeting the government’s plumbing, the infrastructure that makes the state reliable and legitimate for millions of Americans. Elon Musk has captured the inner workings of the US government on President Trump’s behalf. His operatives reportedly infiltrated the General Services Administration, gained access to the nation’s system for issuing payments like tax refunds, locked workers out of computer systems at the Office of Personnel Management and strong-armed USAID into halting humanitarian work across the globe. They have vowed to slash essential research budgets and have put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in their sights.”
“Trump and Musk see government workers as losers for devoting themselves to public service rather than chasing dollars,” winces NYT columnist Maureen Dowd.
“The two are freezing programs, firing federal workers en masse, ripping apart the government and decimating agencies with no precision, transparency or decency.
“Trump and Elon are turning our values upside down. The president demands fealty, even if he is asking his followers and pawns to do something illicit or transgressive. Loyalty outweighs legality.”
Sneers Musk at such criticisms: “The fraudsters complain the loudest.”
Overseas, Trump has made it clear the US is no longer the world’s policeman.
Relates Ms. Cottom: “Trump started negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine – with Vladimir Putin, and initially without Ukraine – at the same time Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Europe that the United States is no longer the guarantor of European security. So Putin can take any part of Europe he wants (except maybe Greenland)?”
President Biden spent $63 billion for Ukraine in a war that eventually failed. Trump is demanding to get half of Ukraine’s rare minerals in exchange for further US support in what could be a never-ending war that began on Feb. 24, 2022. Estimates of the cost of rehabilitating Ukraine are a minimum of $486 billion, 3.24 times the $150-billion damage done by wild fires in Los Angeles.
Trump can reasonably ask: “Why would I give $150 billion to Ukrainians when Los Angelinos need $150 billion to rebuild their homes?”
So Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew to the Europe and told Ukraine President Zelensky to “wake up” and accept reality. “Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” Vance told a Feb. 14 security conference in Munich. “From now on, things will be different, and Europe needs to adjust to that.”
At the Feb. 12, 2025 meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Defense Secretary Hegseth said Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bring both Russia and Ukraine to the table. And the US Department of Defense will help achieve this goal. We will only end this devastating war – and establish a durable peace – by coupling allied strength with a realistic assessment of the battlefield.”
“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said bluntly. That means Ukraine will never recover territories grabbed by Russia in 2014 and in 2022 to 2025.
“Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering,” Hegseth said, adding: “The US does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not be covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine.”
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