The Tangerine Terror
Don the Destroyer grabs the government by the . . . you guessed it. Who will pry him off?
By Michael Pates, Editor
Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.
— Robert G. Ingersoll, American politician (praising the late Abraham Lincoln), 1895
Almost all Americans recognize the importance of the rule of law. Large majorities continue to express strong personal rule of law values.
— World Justice Project, 2024
Whatever. Donald Trump — the golden groin-grabber; the grippy grifter; the mango man-child; the Velveeta Voldemort; the rusty rogue; pick your apricot appellation (alliteration or assonance essential)1 — now owns the federal government. But Elon Musk (let’s call him the vanilla vampire?) holds the mortgage and — now in control of the Treasury Department’s payment system — virtually absolute power. Great.
As Sen. Rafael Warnock aptly described it, we’re in the midst of “an administrative January 6.” Any Trump opponents — protesters, civil society advocates, prosecutors, judges, generals — can, with an incel’s mouse click, be harassed, impoverished, erased.
In a word, neutralized. Mob, flagpole, stun-gun, bear spray, gallows, eye-gouger no longer necessary.
Such tools still have their place, though. Trump has also stripped Secret Service protection from a growing subset of formerly powerful opponents (some, former allies) who might conceivably rally resistance against him, making them easy pickins for, say, all those so-called “Proud Boys” he pardoned, should they somehow remain inclined toward such violence.
In fact violence, destruction, and death — physical, philosophical, moral — are Trump’s ongoing legacy. Truth and principle had always been assaulted, but merely for marketing tacky buildings, mindless TV shows, and various and sundry other grifts. Hell, his very face is a fraud, sporting a shade of orange unknown to nature.
But when he was given power, the rule of law soon got caught in the gripper, wriggling free thanks only to his first impeachment (though no conviction) for attempting to corrupt the Ukrainian president into sabotaging his potential (and eventual) political opponent, Joe Biden. Then too many Americans were killed by his intentional Covid incompetence. Then came the cops and rioters alike whose deaths he spurred on January 6 — an even closer call for the rule of law until his hunted vice president did his duty.
Then he finally left, and proceeded to skirt conviction in another, last-ditch impeachment, as well as manifold state and federal civil suits, criminal charges, and fraud convictions by running for and becoming president again. And now, starting with Musk’s extra-legal evisceration of USAID and the impending dismantling of other agencies, he’s taking it all to blitzscale — simply because he can.
Because, eggs.
So, filtering all this through the above-noted observation about character and power, Trump’s abuses call to mind Maya Angelou’s oft-truncated counsel, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them [here’s the forgotten part] the first time.” In the Trump sequel, even more people will die; the world will be less stable; the nation, less secure; and the rule of law — which, according to the World Justice Project, almost all Americans strongly value — will be, what? Diminished? Gone?
We should have believed him the first time. But then, that begs the question: Who believed what, whom, and why, such that it led to Trump’s return to power? No doubt the social science literature will would have abounded with insights and analysis on this question.
Yet sometimes the anecdotal can be just as revealing. In my case, I recall a conservative family member who would become a Trump supporter lamenting, several years before Trump’s ascendance in 2016, that he “didn’t know who to believe” about the news of the day and settled on “screw ‘em all,” sure that no politician was worth a damn. Knowing he watched Fox News and listened to right-wing radio, I replied with a reasoned, anemic recommendation of the sources I trust, from liberal to conservative.
What I should have said was, “Both things can’t be true, so someone’s lying to you. You have to figure out who’s lying about what and why.”
The simple fact is, no one like Trump ever would have gotten a whiff of the Republican Party presidential nomination, never mind the White House, before social media weaponized “news” into opposing forces of perception. That doesn’t mean a clementine-colored carnival barker like Trump would have gotten no traction among the electorate, but his lies would not have been misshapen into plausible “truths” and become politically competitive. Instead, he eventually would have been laughed off debate stages and out of primary races and rendered a chortlesome memory.
But now, people actually believe this shit, and in sufficient (indeed growing) numbers to foist it on the rest of us in the form of a fast-fading democracy. The question now is, what do the rest of us do about it?
The first step is to recognize that belief drives human action, irrespective of any objective truth underlying the belief. What people believe is, to them, true. The only thing that can overpower it is another belief with larger, more practical implications.
So, trying to convince Trump supporters of the falsity of their beliefs is a fool’s errand and a waste of now-precious energy, especially when their trusted media sources continue to pump them otherwise. Instead, the larger practical implications of those beliefs — for example, believing Musk’s lie that USAID was a criminal enterprise — are beginning to percolate among some elected representatives, such as those from farm states that used to sell a large percentage of their crops to USAID to help feed desperate people overseas. “Criminal enterprise” and ‘plummeting honest profits’ will be increasingly tough to reconcile on the homestead balance sheet.
Meanwhile, as that process plays out, the rest of us, in marshaling an actual resistance, first have to recognize the true end game of these lies. It’s not to increase government efficiency, however cruelly and ham-handedly; nor to align related agencies to the president’s foreign policy priorities. Of course not.
It’s autocracy, plain and simple. Trump is firing large swaths of federal workers to remove their hands from the levers of the federal bureaucracy, thereby pre-empting institutional resistance to his lawlessness. And he is making similar moves, usually in the form of threats, explicit or implied, across other nodes of potential pushback, including mainstream media, the private sector, and even the military. With everyone protecting their own bacon, hoping for the best as they wait to see what happens, embracing the false belief that appeasement might save them, none will risk joining forces with the others to prevent what they fear.
But we know what will happen, or something like it:
Protests will emerge and grow in size. Fired federal workers will be among them.
Trump will deploy infiltrators to commit violence so as the render the protests themselves ‘violent,’ requiring the use of troops to quell said violence, and imprison the ‘violent protesters.’
He’ll accuse the fired (and now ‘violent’) federal workers of treason to justify firing the rest of the federal workforce en masse as infested with traitors, and invoke the Insurrection Act to finally impose martial law.
Then he’ll backfill the bureaucracy with a skeleton crew of loyalists.
Autocracy achieved. And, to both acquire and keep that power, the Treasury payment system that Musk and his merry maidens hacked into early on will also come in very handy. And we shouldn’t be surprised to see Trump opponents disappear or be mysteriously poisoned or otherwise dramatically sidelined, Putin-style.
So then, with the end game in clear sight, now what?
At the end of the day, it will have to come down to the American people. If it’s true that good always defeats evil — that it’s just a question of how much destruction good permits evil to get away with before good rallies to defeat it — then enough of the American people will eventually rise up and sweep Trump out once and for all. That is, the larger, more practical implications of his evil deeds will outweigh the false truths that too many have used to rationalize them. For, as Abraham Lincoln famously observed, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
In the meantime, those of us already alerted must marshal our time, talents, and resources — intellectual, moral, and material — to mitigate the damage so there’s something left to build on — and maybe even to prevent the worst. In so doing, we must risk our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, as did generations before us.
But will we? As Ben Franklin might put it, that’s the big if.
To my fellow Golden Rule adherents: My use of this nomenclature reflects the flip side of the rule — treating Trump how he, as evidenced by his unrelenting behavior, clearly wants to be treated.