I’m at a horror convention this weekend, but President Trump has it beat all to hell.
With his attacks on the American electoral system, casting aspersions at every election he didn’t win, and making us doubt whether we’ll have a free and fair election, and now his launching a hot war in the middle East, he certainly looks like he wants to be the last President of the United States.
Sure, it might just be a quick jab at Iran that overwhelms them… but I doubt it. Those in power are not walking out the door, and they’ve launched counter-attacks at five other countries.
During the pandemic, I called Donald Trump a clear and present danger to the United States. I think that may have been too limited. His policies ignore science in favor of self-aggrandizement. His only interest in the future is how many buildings will bear his name, how many institutions will be marred by his footprint. This man who wants a new class of warship named for him, who thinks the “Department of Defense” sounds weak and wants to call it the “Department of War,” who campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize (ironic, isn’t it?) is a threat to the entire globe.
If, like me, you watched President Trump’s State of the Union address tonight, then you know the state of the union is divided, and the president is doing his best to divide it even more. Never have I seen a president so antagonistic to half the Congress during this—or any—address.
It’s obvious that he doesn’t think of himself as the president of the entire country, but only of those who support him. Everything he says boils down to the same few thoughts: American citizens who do not support him are his enemies; he is the greatest and smartest anything ever; and he knows how everyone should live their lives.
He has no sense of dignity: He stood on that rostrum awarding medals to actual heroes, while joking that he wants to give himself the Medal of Honor.
He has no sense of unity: He spoke only to the Republican members of Congress, repeatedly saying of the Democratic members sitting in that chamber “they.” The only “we” in his mind is “me and those who support me.”
He has no sense of the awesome power that he could be commanding if he respected the office he holds: He is a jumped-up street thug, thinking the only power at his command is “might makes right.”
He has no sense of what the United States of America truly is or should be. But he certainly does love the sound of his own voice.
Yesterday, we learned that the Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s use of IEEPA [the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977] to impose tariffs willy-nilly on other countries, in the case of Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. My first thought was: Is the Supreme Court recovering its spine? Is Chief Justice John Roberts finally hearing people saying that he’s ceded his power to be a Trump toady? Is this the beginning of a return to the rule of law?
I had high hopes that this was a sign that the members of the Court had decided to not merely be a vestigial organ of our government, to embrace the legacy that John Marshall, William Howard Taft, and generations of justices had fought so hard to maintain: that we do indeed have three co-equal branches of government. And that, despite the current Congressional leaders ceding their power to Donald Trump, our government might continue to function after the Trumpians’ departure.
I heard the decision and thought, “Yes! Finally. Some of the adults in the room are standing up and telling the president ‘I think Canada’s commercial was insulting’ is NOT an international economic emergency granting the president the power to impose an outlandish tariff in response.”
But then I listened to the president’s seething response from the Briefing Room, and remembered why he truly is such a danger: because he demands that the world do what he wants, right or wrong, for good or ill, because his only goal is his own self-aggrandizement and enrichment.
No sane person could look at the Court’s decision and say, “it clarifies the fact that I as president can impose whatever tariffs I want for whatever reason I want, I just have to check a different box on the form.” But he did. He (or more likely his lickspittles) found a passage in a dissent penned by one of the justices, and decided to focus their entire argument on that, rather than the clear majority opinion which said, “No. You may not do this.”
And he is dangerous. He spews bile, invective, and lies with every breath. He accused the Supreme Court of being beholden to “foreign influences,” with no proof and no evidence. He called the justices who ruled in favor of the law and against his illegal acts “embarrassments, fools, and lapdogs.”
When asked why he doesn’t simply work with Congress to come up with a legal tariff plan, he reminded us that he is nothing more than a petulant child, saying “Because I don’t have to. I have the right to do what I want.” And showing his own vaunting intellect, he said of the decision, “it’s like it was written by not-smart people.”
And perhaps worst of all, he said, repeatedly, that the ruling means “I can destroy a country, I can embargo their goods, I can do anything I want.” The only thing this ruling says is that “I can’t charge them money. But I can do anything I want to them.” No rational president has ever threatened to “destroy” another country out of hand, simply because he wants to. But for this president, it’s simply a negotiating tactic.
No call to arms here. Sadly, frighteningly, this is nothing new. While I applaud the Supreme Court for finally having to the courage to say “No, Mr. President, you are wrong, and the laws do not permit you to do this,” I doubt it will make much difference.
The US military removed Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela.
The Abraham Lincoln carrier group is nearing Iran to support the protesters demanding regime change in that country.
I think it’s time we started considering domestic regime change. Donald Trump: you can save us all a lot of pain if you resign with dignity and grace.
And note, the founders considered this an acceptable possibility. Article 2, Clause 6, begins: “In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office…” Resignation is acceptable. Richard Nixon did so for the good of the country, as did Vice Presidents John Calhoun and Spiro Agnew.
Donald Trump’s tariffs are imposed due to “emergencies,” which thus grant him the power to do that which Congress is the Constitutionally empowered body to do. Or so he says. And he keeps relying on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act for the thin veil of legitimacy.
I am having a hard time finding any “emergency” in Emmanuel Macron’s decision to not pay Trump $1 billion to join his “Board of Peace,” but somehow Trump sees that decision as justification to impose a 200% tariff on French wines.
I only hope the Supreme Court wakes up to its job, that it is not subservient to the president, but a co-equal branch, and that the Court kicks Trump’s entire absurd tariffing policy to the curb.
Donald Trump is like a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership of them.
His latest is threatening staunch American allies with tariffs if they don’t support the forceful US annexation of Greenland. “We need Greenland for security,” he says. Does that sound familiar? It should. It’s what Vladimir Putin said just before ordering Russian troops to attack Ukraine. That’s the same Ukraine war, by the way, that Donald Trump said—during the 2024 election—that he would end within 24 hours if he won the election. We’re still waiting for that.
Long ago, I wondered if Donald Trump was a stooge working for Putin. Now I realize he’s simply doing his best to emulate Putin. Indeed, Putin gets all this Trumpian love for free.
Trump’s only morality is self-aggrandizement. Everything he does as president seems to have the same goal: to put more money in his pocket, or to put his name on things. In that respect, he’s not unlike a dog, pissing on things to claim ownership. The last major US territorial acquisition was the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. The US acquired Puerto Rico and Guam due to the Spanish–American War (in 1898; we also got the Philippines, which became an independent country in 1946). And the US purchased part of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917.
So what happens if the US manages to “acquire” Greenland? He becomes the first president since World War II to increase the geographic size of the United States. Indeed, he also gets to claim to be the president who acquired the largest parcel of territory for the US, and if you’ve listened to any of his speeches, you know “first” and “biggest” are among his holy words. (For comparison, Alaska is about 665,000 square miles, and the Louisiana Purchase [which the US got from France in 1803] involved about 828,000 square miles, while Greenland measures about 836,000 square miles.)
Any other president would measure success in terms of national peace and prosperity; the people’s health and wealth; happiness, amity, and community. But how does Trump measure success? With crowns on his head and dollars in his pocket.
He was talking about his “Board of Peace” this week. It’s key feature? Each member has to pay $1 billion, which he as chairman gets to control. The gold decorations dripping all over the White House are not impressive; they are there to tell him he controls vast sums of wealth. But he looks at the truly wealthy—Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Elon Musk—and he feels his inferiority complex, because his wealth is not on that level. So he keeps grifting, keeps taking what he can.
The first load of Venezuelan has recently been sold, and the proceeds of that sale wound up in a Qatari bank. Why Qatar? Why not the US? Or, for that matter, why not Venezuela? Because this way, Trump has control over that money, can disburse it as he will. It has suddenly become his money.
The Trump Kennedy Center. The Trump Ballroom. The Trump Battleship. The Trump Institute of Peace. The Trump Savings Account. The Trump Special Visa for Rich People. The Trump Southern Border Boulevard in Palm Beach. His face on the National Park pass. And on, and on…
The Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v United States (2022) seems to have set the standard for presidential immunity, that the President of the United States may not be sued for anything he does while serving as President (without any comment or direction as to what a President might do during his time in office that is not within the scope of his “official acts”). It seems most current interpretations of that ruling assume the President may not be the subject of any lawsuit, period.
At the same time, however, the United States is experiencing the presidency of a person who’s first response to almost any disagreement is to sue. I’m not sure there is an exact count of the number of lawsuits he has brought. For only the latest example, see President Trump’s threat to sue JPMorgan Chase.
As much as the President needs to do things that an ordinary citizen oughtn’t be able to do, it seems manifestly unfair that while Donald Trump as the President is immune from lawsuits, Donald Trump himself has the complete freedom to file lawsuits of his own.
Added January 30, 2026: And now he is suing the Internal Revenue Service. From the linked article: “The lawsuit, filed Thursday at a federal courthouse in Miami, says Trump is suing in his personal capacity, not as president.” So he can differentiate Trump-the-person from Trump-the-president. Hmm….
Is this all far-fetched, doom-and-gloom, dystopian theorizing? Probably. I hope certainly. Nevertheless, it is a topic of conversation which keeps cropping up, so…
I know how Donald Trump is going to attempt to stay in office beyond the end of his term. It’s Section 3 of the 20th Amendment. Section 3 talks about who shall become President or act as President (two different things) if there is no President elect or if the President elect is not qualified to serve as President. The final clause of that Section reads “the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.” In other words, if the election is somehow prevented from occurring—and despite Article II, Section 1, and Amendment 20, Section 1—I think Donald Trump’s sycophants are relying on this phrase to enable the Congress to “select” him to “act” as President “until a President or Vice President shall have qualified” (by being elected).
This revelation came while I was researching the essay I thought I was going to write, noting that, regardless of what Trump and the Trumpians try to do to the election of 2028, a lack of an incoming President does not enable the current President to remain in office.
I was going to quote Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which says the President “shall hold his office during the Term of four Years”—thus limiting the time the President serves to four years, whether a successor has been elected or not.
I was going to go on to the 12th Amendment, which says “…no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” Thus preventing the President from becoming Vice President, only to succeed to the Presidency with the removal of the new President.
Then comes the first Section of the 20th Amendment: “The terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Repeating and emphasizing the Article II quote above: the President’s term ends, regardless of whether or not there is a successor waiting.
And, of course, the first Section of the 22nd Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
But then I stumbled upon Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, as I said above. That’s the “well, there may be a way around the Constitution” that the most ardent Trumpians have been hinting at. It’s fairly simple, if we assume they can somehow prevent the next Presidential election. And one doesn’t have to be too creative to figure out ways to do that: declare a state of emergency, ban gatherings “for public safety” during the first week in November, so that an election cannot be held (that’s why they keep pushing to get rid of mail-in ballots and early voting; so that there will be no ballots to count). Or, perhaps easier, would be to look at the fifth paragraph of Article II, Section 1: “The Congress may determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” Such an emergency declaration could simply prevent the Electors from gathering to cast their votes in December. No electoral votes, therefore nothing to count on January 6, and no President elect. Blocking that, rather than the general election, would mean that there would still be a new Congress elected who would then be charged with selecting that person who shall act as President.
Therefore, Congress needs to adopt a new law, by a veto-proof margin, saying “No person who is ineligible to be elected President may act as President.”
As angry as I am with many of President Trump’s statements and actions—some of which are immoral and unworthy of the presidency, and some of which are demonstrably criminal—my ire today is reserved for Congress and the Supreme Court. Part of the genius of our Constitution is that it organized a government that is not dictated solely by one person or one body, but rather has three co-equal branches, each of which has certain powers over the other two, and other responsibilities to the other two. As we learned in elementary school: the Legislative branch (Congress) makes the laws, the Executive branch (the President and his departments) enforces the laws, and the Judicial branch (the Supreme Court) interprets the laws (tells us what they mean, and if they are in keeping with the Constitution).
The President appoints the members of the Supreme Court, but the Senate has to agree. The President spends the money, but only according to the budget that Congress creates. Congress writes the laws that the President can veto or accept, but the Supreme Court can say “no, that law is not Constitutional.” Congress can remove the President and the members of the Supreme Court for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
According to Article I of the Constitution, Section 8, the powers of Congress include the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises; to regulate commerce with foreign nations; to declare war; “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions”; and a slew of others.
Article II, Section 2, lists the powers of the President, including serving as the Commander in Chief of the Army, Navy, and Militia, “when called into the actual Service of the United States”; making treaties, appointing ambassadors, Supreme Court judges, “and all other Officers of the United States,” all “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate”; and other things.
Article III vests “the judicial Power of the United States” in the Supreme Court and other inferior courts. Section 3, interestingly reads “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
This system of checks and balances among the three co-equal sections of the United States government worked pretty well for a long time. The relative power of the executive and legislative branches waxed and waned over the decades, but all three branches maintained their shared powers through the strength of their leaders over the years. Congressional leaders have worked with and against presidents, the Supreme Court has allowed and denied laws over the years, but always, the holders of those offices upheld the power of their position, the importance of their branch, and kept the tripod standing.
Lately, the tripod has collapsed, because two of those legs have been allowed to weaken before the onslaught of the third. Obviously, this collapse has been going on for longer than just the last decade, but no one looking at Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Tip O’Neill ever thought either one of them was subservient to the other. Since that time, however, we’ve been stuck with a series of ideologues who realized that the way to enforce their partisan will long beyond their service would be to enable a collapse of the system of checks and balances. Thus, Mitch McConnell’s lies and machinations have unbalanced the Supreme Court: in early 2016, he told us the Senate could not appoint a new Supreme Court justice during an election year, and kept Antonin Scalia’s seat vacant for 11 months, until Donald Trump’s election. Four years later, McConnell told us to ignore his four-year-old words, and that the Senate had to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died a month and a half before the election of 2020. That’s the same Mitch McConnell who, on January 6, 2021, called Donald Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the attack on the Capitol, but then voted to acquit Trump of those charges at his second impeachment. McConnell is no longer the leader of the Senate, but his successor, John Thune, has not shown himself to be any more of a leader. His every utterance proclaims his subservience to the office of the President.
Chief Justice John Roberts has used his ideological majority of the Court to grant the president nearly complete immunity for anything he may do during his term of office, since the president in question supports his views. He also can’t imagine any of our recent or potential presidents hailing from the Democratic party ever running so far beyond the pale as Donald Trump has, so he’s not worried about karma coming back.
And now we have the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who has completely subsumed his authority to Donald Trump’s will. He has decided the House shouldn’t actually be conducting any business, because the president is happier to have the government shut down, so he can rampage however he wants.
The Supreme Court, unfortunately, is beyond our power to correct in the near term. The way the Justices are chosen requires waiting for those currently in office to leave in order to replace them. And let’s face it, there doesn’t appear to be anyone even on the horizon with the strength of John Marshall or the moral fiber of David Davis.
The make-up Congress, however, is—at least, theoretically (but see my several previous pieces on Gerrymandering)—something we can affect. I say it is time to elect Senators and Representatives who will stand up, not necessarily for me and my views, but for the strength of the Congress. Congress needs to restore itself to its role as a co-equal branch of the government.
Far too often, among the Republicans and Trumpians in the Congress, we see people who are far more interested in doing what Trump wants so that he won’t attack them. Can they possibly be proud of their service? Or are they merely keeping their seats warm? Liz Cheney stood up for right over party, and was punished for it by losing her seat. But as much as I disagree with many of her views, she earned my respect. The problem was, she was one voice in a vast sea of the voiceless, and thus, easy to target. The other members of Congress need to find their voices, to stand up, not to keep knuckling under.
I may not have agreed with their policies or their actions, but did anyone ever doubt the Congressional allegiance, the strength, the patriotism, of prior Senate Majority Leaders such as Robert Byrd, Mike Mansfield, Everett Dirksen, Lyndon Baines Johnson, or Henry Cabot Lodge? Similarly, will the House of Representatives ever feel the need to remember the service of Mike Johnson as it does Tip O’Neill, Carl Albert, Sam Rayburn, or Nicholas Longworth?
Donald Trump has gone off the rails. He cares nothing for the Constitution, law, or tradition, and is interested only in lining his own pockets and glorifying his own name. But if the rest of the government was functioning as it should, the damage Trump could inflict would be minimized. But with the Supreme Court saying only “Yes, sir,” while Congress’s leaders say “We’ll do whatever Trump wants,” our government, our nation, is in danger.
And yes, I know I’ve not mentioned the Democratic leaders. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, too, are falling down on their jobs. They’re doing what they can in their minorities, but it sure feels like they could be doing, could be saying, more. And their younger colleagues, the flaming liberal branch of the party who don’t recognize that good government is negotiation, compromise, and not getting everything? They, too, are not doing us any favors.
Term limits are not, and never have been, the answer. But whether you vote Republican or Democratic, I urge you—in the strongest terms possible—to vote for someone who wants to serve in Congress, not someone who wants only to kowtow to or attack the president.
Isn’t it ironic that the “crime” Donald Trump is alleging against his enemies—Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff—is the same crime of which he was convicted? That is, lying on loan applications to get better rates from banks. How many times as a defendant did Trump say “no one got hurt, the banks got their money back, so there was no crime”? But now that it’s his enemies, suddenly it’s a horrid crime. Although, remember that Trump was tried (and convicted) of multiple instances of that non-crime, while these three are accused of one instance each.
Ian Randal Strock 