He does it every day, often several times a day. He’s walking out to his Marine helicopter, or he has reporters into the Oval Office while some president or prime minister is visiting, or he gives a speech like the one in Quantico a couple of weeks ago, and he says something or he does something that gets a headline because it’s outrageous and unprecedented and sometimes there are Constitutional consequences.

Today on Air Force One during his Asia trip, Trump once again “mused,” as the mainstream media calls it, about seeking a third term. He did the same thing last February, and in March, and after telling NBC News that “a lot of people” were asking him about it, he said he “was not joking.” It’s in the Constitution that he cannot serve a third term. He may think “his” Supreme Court will help him out, but mostly, he wants us to worry and get depressed that somehow, it might happen.

But it isn’t just his trolling or baiting the media. It’s everything else, and I mean everything. It seems not a day goes by that there isn’t another horror. Over the weekend, he had the USDA announce about the SNAP program on its website that “the well has run dry” and “there will be no benefits issued on November 1.”

That is not true. By law, the Department of Agriculture must maintain a reserve to pay SNAP benefits during times that there are unusual stresses on the system, and there is $6 billion sitting there in the treasury for just that purpose.

But the “law” doesn’t matter to Trump, and that is another part of his despair campaign. The Supreme Court unleashed the maniac with its decision in Trump v. United States, and he takes full advantage every time he can.

Let’s run down just what he’s done recently. He demolished a third of the White House without going through the mandated process, not just for federal buildings owned by the taxpayers, but for the White House itself. His Department of Defense shot yet another so-called “drug boat” out of the water without providing even a scrap of evidence that the boat was carrying drugs or headed for the United States. He has denied emergency federal funds to two counties in a blue state, Maryland, while providing the same sort of aid to red states, and he came right out and said that was why he was doing it. He is attempting to send National Guard troops from the state of Texas to two states where they have no business being, Illinois and Oregon. His deployment of masked federal “agents,” who refuse to show their identities, to arrest and deport undocumented migrants has inevitably rounded up U.S. citizens in their dragnets and denied them their rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

He threw a tantrum over a television ad aired in Canada that accurately used footage of Ronald Reagan criticizing tariffs, and he restarted an already insane trade war with our ally by imposing yet another tariff on them. He ordered the movement of an aircraft carrier group from halfway across the world to the waters off Venezuela, obviously in contemplation of an invasion of that country, just because he could do it.

Since taking office, he fired employees of the Department of Justice simply for doing their jobs when they prosecuted January 6 insurrectionists or worked on prosecutions run by Jack Smith. He has targeted his critics such as John Bolton and James Comey and ordered his attorney general to prosecute them. He has attacked law firms that have angered him by representing people whom he has declared his “enemies.” He has launched an assault on higher education by requiring colleges to change their hiring and admissions processes, and if they don’t do what he wants, he has cancelled their research funding.

There is nothing in the law that permits him to extort law firms or colleges or target critics with ginned-up prosecutions. In fact, all those things are a violation of the law, and he just does it.

And on and on and on it goes. I’m sure you could provide your own list of outrages. Here’s another one: his so-called “executive order” cancelling birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

Can he do it, any of it? The answer is, yes he can, and he has done all of it, and he is doing it not just to please his MAGA base, but to send his opponents into a downward spiral of despair.

I get the question from readers almost daily: What can we do? Well, I have a few answers that may not make you happy or satisfy you, but here they are.

The first thing is, don’t take the bait and fall into a depression that we are somehow losing our grip on this country. Bad shit is happening, but there have been 400 lawsuits filed in federal court to stop Trump from his attempts to throw out the law and the Constitution in his deployment of federal agents, the National Guard, his clearly illegal executive order cancelling birthright citizenship – I could go on. Federal judges have issued temporary restraining orders and criticized lawyers from Trump’s Department of Justice for incompetence and ignorance of judicial procedure and all manner of other failings.

There is a movement, or several movements, to overturn practically everything Trump has done or attempted to do.

We have taken to the streets in No Kings protests, millions of us, in solidarity with each other and with the rule of law and the Constitution. This is no small matter. The protests are not spontaneous, but they have no central organizing organization, and they are not concentrated just in big cities, but in hundreds of smaller cities and towns across the nation in every single state in the Union, including protests in red states.

Many of us may indeed feel a sense of despair when we wake up every morning. How could we not? But we are not sitting back and taking this shit. Trump is said to be preparing the ground to “steal” the midterm elections. But he is already fucking that up by telling people not to vote by mail. Republicans are going to lose upcoming elections in Virginia and New Jersey. People are angry that their votes are being manipulated in states where gerrymandering is being forced by Republican legislatures and governors, and organizing is already happening to counter these chickenshit attempts to rig elections for the House in the midterms.

I think there is one important thing that can be done that has not occurred yet but should happen immediately. Our former Presidents of the United States should get together, all of them, and not only join the resistance, but lead it. Barack Obama has been giving speeches. Yesterday, in a speech in Boston, Joe Biden made the kind of strong statement that all the former presidents should be making on a weekly basis. Biden said, “Since its founding, America served as a beacon for the most powerful idea ever in government in the history of the world. The idea is stronger than any army. We’re more powerful than any dictator.”

We are indeed. Bill Clinton should be out there giving speeches. So should George W. Bush. All our former presidents lived and served the American people in the White House that Donald Trump is now desecrating not only with his presence, but by tearing it down in a naked and illegal attempt to rebuild it as a monument to himself.

Do these men whom we elected want to be the former presidents of a former democracy? By all reports, each of them hates Donald Trump, even Bush. They hate what he is doing to our country. They should get together and make clear their opposition to what Trump has done and is doing to tear down not only the White House, but our Constitutional order.

Let this be a clarion call to Presidents Biden and Obama and Clinton and Bush. We need you. You were elected by your fellow citizens to lead us while you were in office. We need your leadership now more than ever.

They should step up, and so should we. Despair is not an option. We need to fight with every cell in our bodies. I am proud of this country. I am proud to be a citizen. I want my children to have a country of which they can be proud to be citizens. I am distressed, but I am not in despair. I’m going to fight — we’re going to fight — until our last breath for this country and our democracy.

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The question has arisen among sane people again and again over the last ten years: Who are these people?

I think I know. They’re yabbos, best described by what they are not. They’re not men. They’re not women. They are human beings, but only in the barest sense that they are of flesh and blood. Some examples are necessary. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who during the same week it became known that there will not be money for SNAP food assistance for poor people, decided that she would use taxpayer money to buy two ultra-luxurious Gulfstream jets for her department that cost $172 million. She’s not a woman. She’s a yabbo.

Meet Paul Ingrassia. He’s not a man. When he nominated Ingrassia to run the Office of Special Counsel, Donald Trump described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” Ingrassia withdrew his name from the Senate confirmation process this week when it became known that he had texted on a Republican group chat, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time,” and that the Martin Luther King holiday should “be tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” Paul Ingrassia, who still has a job in the White House, is a yabbo.

Who says that kind of stuff? Who called Black people “monkeys” and “watermelon people” and praised those who believe in slavery as a group of Young Republicans recently did in yet another group text? Yabbos, that’s who.

How else do you describe the people behind what is going on in this country right now? Their Maximum Leader, the yabbo who goes by Donald Trump, tore down the East Wing of the White House last week. I mean, the ground where it stood is now a level patch of dirt and the dust and dregs of construction debris. He intends to build in its place a monstrosity which he already calls the “Donald J. Trump Ballroom.” The thing, which has a footprint larger than the entirety of the rest of the White House, will seat 1,000 people and is shown in an architect’s rendering as festooned in gold leaf and marble and crystal chandeliers. He broke multiple laws when he leveled the East Wing. He did not seek Congressional approval and funding, as other presidents have done when they did renovations to the White House. Instead, he is paying for his Towering Tomfoolery with donations from billionaires whose companies do business with the U.S. government and who seek favor with Trump. For this, and many, many other reasons, he is a yabbo.

We have never, in this country, had National Guard soldiers from one state deployed to the streets of a city in another state against the wishes of that state’s governor and the city’s mayor, as Donald Trump is attempting to do with soldiers from Texas and other red states to the cities of Portland and Chicago, both of which have Democrats for mayors. Who does this? A Republican yabbo.

Are all yabbos Republicans? That is a good question. Has the Democratic Party ever had a president in office who took $130 million from one of his political supporters allegedly to “pay the troops” during a government shut down? In fact, this has never happened before, a civilian “donating” money to the government and dictating how that money should be used.

Has the Democratic Party ever elected a president who took upon himself the power to use drones and jet aircraft to shoot boats out of the water on his own say-so that they were carrying drugs that would “kill 25,000 Americans?”

Has a Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives ever refused to seat a member who was duly elected by the constituents of her district simply because if that member is seated, she will vote in a way that is unfavorable to the yabbo into whose ass the Speaker of the House has his nose inserted?

That has never happened. So much has never happened. Has a president, Democratic or Republican, ever unilaterally shut down an entire department of the United States government without Congressional authorization in the way Donald Trump shut down USAID? Remember what they did about two or three days after Trump was inaugurated? They dispatched a couple of workers with crowbars and screwdrivers and chisels and removed the words, United States Agency for International Development, from its headquarters building. Then they used U.S. Marshalls to keep the people who work there from entering the building.

We’ve forgotten so many terrible things that have transpired, because new terrible things, like the East Wing teardown have come along to replace them. I remember thinking when I saw the footage of the workers chiseling the name of the headquarters of USAID from its building that this was a terrible omen. It predicted something frightening: a Donald Trump unleashed from law and order and norms.

And that is where he went, and it’s where he has been throughout the first nine months of his presidency. Every day, something new and terrible happens. He has had cabinet meetings that resemble nothing less than a meeting of the North Korean politburo. So-called “leaders” of government agencies, one after another, rise from their places around the cabinet table and heap praise on the Yabbo In Chief. He is the greatest president who ever lived. He is brilliant. He is a God on earth. On and on they go. I wondered how otherwise apparently sane human beings such as Marco Rubio said those things to a man for whom he showed such contempt only a few years ago, and then I realized that it’s not Marco Rubio sitting at that cabinet table. It’s a yabbo.

That display two weeks ago when some 800 generals and admirals were forced to fly from their commands in distant lands to Quantico, Virginia, and sit there to be lectured by a strutting fool whom they all knew had tattooed Nazi symbols on his own body…those generals and admirals were not observing and listening to a man, they were in the presence of a yabbo, and it was all over their faces that they knew this.

One of the salient aspects of what we might call yabbodom is disrespect for precedent and norms of the law. The human beings who wrote the Constitution foresaw a country that would be governed by the set of laws they wrote down as a blueprint for a nation. Integral to that document, and to the intentions of the Founders, was the idea that the laws and norms written into the Constitution would be respected by leaders of the Executive and the Congress and the Judiciary established by the Constitution.

The Founders hoped that this would be the way a nation keeps itself going. You write laws, and you honor them, and you hold elections called for by the laws, and you respect the offices to which you have been entrusted, and you hold onto all of it because it is what establishes and keeps your legitimacy. The key to all of it, to keeping the Democratic Republic that has been established, is honoring the laws and holding tight to what they compel the branches of the government to do.

This has not happened. The Republican Party has appointed and confirmed members of the Supreme Court who have decided that laws which have been written by the Congress, and decisions that have been passed by previous Supreme Courts, can be ignored or changed at will. This has created chaos. There is now chaos in the land regarding women’s reproductive health and the way decisions are made to keep women healthy. There is chaos in the land about the right to vote, the most precious right conveyed upon citizens by the Constitution. There is chaos in the law because we have a president who has taken it upon himself to decide who must follow the law, and who is permitted to break the law.

This is why I believe that yabbos are now in charge. Donald Trump has decided that laws that were enforced by the previous president, Joe Biden, will not be enforced under his rule. He pardoned every one of the thousand-plus insurgents who were convicted of crimes for what they did on January 6, 2021, even the ones who beat and caused the death of police officers. Some of those who Trump freed have committed new crimes and have been charged and jailed and are headed back to prison.

He freed the man who was convicted and sentenced to a lifetime in prison for running the so-called “dark web” that provided a way to finance drug dealing and murder and other criminal activity.

He recently pardoned a crypto criminal who was convicted of running an enterprise that financed terrorism and the making and distribution of child porn. This man, the head of a company called Binance, used so-called “stable coins” produced by the Trump family crypto company called Liberty Financial to invest his own company’s holdings in bitcoin, yielding huge profits for Trump’s company.

This was a bribe. It is all the evidence we need that Donald Trump has decided that bribing him is legal, but possibly bribing someone else is illegal.

Trump has either frozen or cancelled some $28 billion that was scheduled to be spent on projects in states, cities, and counties run by Democrats. Among the projects is the new rail tunnel from Manhattan to New Jersey under the Hudson River. It has long been understood that so-called blue states run by and inhabited by Democrats contribute far more in tax dollars to the government than they receive in government benefits. Red states that produce less tax revenue are the beneficiaries of those blue state tax dollars. This was an odd but generally acceptable state of affairs until Donald Trump decided that the blue states will not be permitted to benefit from their own tax dollars, creating a vassal system of taxation without representation, yet another break with the democratic norms of the past.

Abandonment of laws and norms is not democracy. It mocks the Constitution and the principles upon which the country was founded. Men and women who are sane and who believe in the rule of law do not do this.

Who are these people, we have asked ourselves. They are not of the world we have known. They do not believe in the things citizens of a democracy believe in. We now live in a yabbocracy overseen by thieves for whom the rule of law that has held this country together for 249 years no longer exists. They are yabbos.

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On the longer time scale that we feel in nature, the violence of colonial capitalism seems almost fleeting. ‘Mother Nature will outlast all of this’, Barkandji man Woddy Harris told me, gesturing across his hometown of Wilcannia, two hours’ drive from Broken Hill, and which has a majority Barkandji population.

I wondered about this when, on a later visit, I attended a funeral at the Broken Hill cemetery. There, the Aboriginal wife of the white working-class man we mourned handed me a plastic rose. As instructed, I threw the rose into the grave, materially connecting me and the other mourners who did likewise, to his body.

That connection might almost last forever. The plastic rose will certainly take many hundreds of years longer than his body to decompose. It will probably outlast Creedon Street and all the gravestones in the cemetery. It will likely still be there under the ground when BHP is a lost memory. It may outlast even the stock exchanges that BHP and other mining enterprise have helped to succeed. Success seems an understatement, in fact: finance’s influence has sometimes exceeded the power wielded by governments and politicians, including American Presidents and UK Prime Ministers.

Some things are eternal, or near-enough, but that doesn’t necessarily make them nourish. In the moment, at the funeral, the plastic rose nourished something. Global petrochemicals, turned into plastic, were articulated in a moment of everyday life that Michel de Certeau would certainly have called ‘agency’. In this way of thinking, we would take heart from the ways the product of capitalist environmental contamination was translated into new meaning at the graveside, a logic that mirrored the world-class restaurant that produced touristic beauty on the old slag heap. The problem with this perspective is that it does nothing to end the production of plastic, nor the infection of soils, oceans and food with microplastics that poison us all. We might have to admit that the plastic rose, so simple and beautiful a gesture, also performs something akin to pollution.

These intersections of agency and structure, of meaning and matter are particularly noticeable at funerals, and in cemeteries, where small things accrue abundant significance and where each life, mourned, celebrated and remembered, also somehow represents us all. In the cemetery, the structures of big capital articulate not only with the everyday life that was the focus of de Certeau’s politics, but in everyday death. In everyday death, individual agency might pollute in the same moment that it nourishes. And the sheer inclusivity of death, universal as it is, embraces and celebrates working class activism on the same street as the Aboriginal families that the very same town pushed to the margins if not to die, at least to live materially close to the dead.

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I’ve been trying to make a point for a VERY long time that the soulless monsters on the right do not see themselves as monsters. They see themselves as heroes. No matter how cruel or sadistic or illegal their actions, they look in the mirror and never see a villain, only a hero, or, at worst, a victim.

I would very much like to disabuse them of that notion, and this article is for them.

Hey, buddy. Yeah, you in the body armor with the assault rifle, taser gun, pepper spray, smoke grenades, zip ties, and a love of Donald Trump and the white race.

You think you’re the good guy, don’t you?

Maybe you’re a warrior for Christ. Maybe you’re a soldier for the white race. Maybe you’re a patriot who hates baby-killing commies. A lot of you have conflated all of these into a Grand Unified Theory of Americanism where your pronouns are “U, S, and A” and Jesus personally signed the Declaration of Independence to defeat the Soviet Union.

Whatever story you tell yourself about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, I guarantee you think you’re the brave hero of this tale.

You are, after all, fighting the forces of darkness. Your enemy, the radical left, is filled with socialists and commies and Marxists.1 They’re Antifa and BLM and femininazis who murder babies after they’re born. They’re pedophiles and child traffickers and maybe even cannibals. They’re definitely controlled by The Jews “The Globalists.”

You are fighting against the armies of Satan himself.

How could you NOT be the glorious hero of this story? You are fighting the ultimate evil!

And since you are fighting evil in its purest form, you are unshackled by moral limits, right? It would be insane to worry about morality in a time like this! Or the rule of law. Or even basic human decency. You are fighting a war for the very future of America/humanity/God’s kingdom on Earth.

You can’t be concerned with rules of engagement or annoying questions like “Is this legal?” or “Is this right or wrong?” You are on a mission! You MUST win at all costs! And, honestly, the people you’re fighting aren’t even really people anyway. That means you can lie, cheat, and steal from them. You can assault them at will. Violence is your ally. Rape and murder are tools to defeat the ultimate evil. They’re not crimes or sins! You’re the hero of the story!

At least, that’s what you keep telling yourself.

But when you get up in the morning and get ready for another day of violence, you cover your face and you hide your badge so no one can see your name. And you attack reporters and anyone with a camera.

Because deep down, you know you’re not the hero. You’re not even the villain. You’re just a cancer poisoning everything around you, and you’re afraid.

Oh, I know, I know. You cover your face to protect your identity because Antifa might come for you. You’re “protecting” yourself and your family from “leftist terrorism.”

Motherfucker, please.

You’re not a brave resistance fighter struggling against an oppressive government, afraid the jackbooted G-men will kick down your door. You are the fucking government.

You’re not hiding from a terrorist ring hunting you down. You’re hiding from the future. You’re afraid of what will happen to you after the regime falls. This is why you hide your faces. This is why you cover your badges. This is why you illegally change license plates after your little raids:

You’re afraid of facing the consequences of your actions because you know that this ride won’t last forever. That Donald Trump will not be president for much longer and without him, the 1000-Year Reich will fall.

You’re afraid of what happens next, and I am here to tell you: You should be.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

The Ogre says "Be VERY afraid."

There’s this fun little nugget of history I learned recently. Something they didn’t teach in history class and doesn’t get mentioned much when we talk about what happened to the Nazis after World War II. Oh, we all know about the Nuremberg Trials, where a bunch of the worst of the worst were tried and executed. And I’m all about a new round of Nuremberg Trials. Big, showy tribunals for the leaders who directed the campaign of terrorism against the American people. The thieves who stole billions of OUR money. The traitors who worked with our enemies to weaken our nation.

But France and other countries went further than that, and this is what you’re really afraid of, even though you almost certainly are not aware of the history:

Immediately following Liberation France was swept by a wave of executions, public humiliations, assaults and detentions of suspected collaborators, known as the épuration sauvage (wild purge) or épurations extrajudiciaires (extrajudicial purges).

When the regime falls, and it will, there is going to be chaos. You will be cut loose immediately. ICE will be disbanded. Your badge, your title, your legal protection, all gone. And a lot of very angry people, all the people you abused and tortured and maimed and kidnapped and raped and the relatives of the people you killed? They’re going to come looking for you.

And if they don’t, the FBI will once it’s restored to working order. And if not the FBI, state Attorneys General will. Because no matter what fairy tales you tell yourself today, you know what you're doing is immoral and illegal and we will be coming for you.

If you’re lucky, someone with a badge will show up with handcuffs, and you’ll spend the next 15-25 years in a prison cell. If not, it will be a mob with guns and a rope looking for collaborators because that’s what you are: A collaborator.

You are willfully working for a corrupt fascist regime enacting an illegal white nationalist agenda. Shhhhhh…no one cares about your justifications. No one cares if you were “just following orders.” You could have refused. You could have upheld the law. The REAL law, not the white nationalist version Stephen Miller told you to enact.

But you didn’t. You covered your face and then smashed your way through immigrant communities, zip-tieing naked children in the middle of the night and kidnapping people exercising their First Amendment rights.

So, yeah, we’re going to come for you, one way or the other. That is why you cover your face.

Chances are, when the regime falls, you’re going to rush out and join the first white nationalist militia you can find, assuming you don’t already belong to one. An awful lot of you MAGA types have made it clear you do not believe in democracy and that you, and only you, have the divine right to rule America.

Cool.

Just to be clear, when you take up arms against the United States THIS time, it’s not going to be another January 6th. You’re not going to be rehabilitated and celebrated. You’re going to be put down like a rabid animal. Thus, to all traitors and collaborators, because again, and I cannot stress this enough, that is what you are: A collaborator. You will be forever branded as someone who betrayed their oath to serve the people of the United States and uphold the law.

You chose to indulge your deepest, darkest impulses. You chose violence and hate and rage. You chose fascism over democracy. You chose evil, no matter how hard you lied to yourself about being the hero.

There will be a price to pay, and that is why you hide. But you cannot hide forever. The regime is not smart enough to wipe all of the records, and we will find out who all of you are. Maybe you’ll have enough time to flee the country before we catch up to you. I hear Russia is always looking for able-bodied recruits. That’ll probably work out just fine for you.

Has to be better than the mob justice waiting at the end of a rope for siding with the fucking Nazis, right? Guess we’ll find out soon enough. Clock’s ticking. See you soon…“hero.”

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Donald Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House to make way for a gigantic gilded ballroom. He initially promised that there would only be small changes to the building, and nothing would be destroyed. Now, it’s being entirely demolished.

According to the president, he met with “two geniuses” — men he didn’t name — who told him he didn’t need permits or permission to make whatever changes he liked to the White House. “I said, ‘how long would it take? They said, ‘Sir, you can start tonight. You have zero zoning conditions. You have no approvals.’‘” Trump said. “I said, ‘you gotta be kidding.’ He said, ‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.’”

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There is actually a body charged with overseeing changes to the nation’s capital city and preserving its history; Trump has ignored them. The ballroom he’s building is massive, and historic preservationists warm it will overwhelm the primary building and compromise the aesthetic of the White House grounds. It’s not exactly a shock that the man who owns Mar-a-Lago and whose favored aesthetic is “throw more gold on it” is not overseeing the classiest renovation. But this really does look like it’s going to be a monstrosity. Here’s a mockup — you can see the ballroom on the right, over the former East Wing, which used to be roughly the same size as the West Wing:

The ballroom dwarfs the primary White House residence. It feels quite visually unbalanced. It’s ugly. It’s tacky. It’s also reportedly going to be connected to the primary White House building by a glass bridge (ugh); it’s hard to imagine how one builds a glass bridge into the White House without making some significant changes to that structure, too. And it’s all about being built because an egomaniacal president wants to leave a huge mark that is all about him — even if the mark is a giant eyesore.

Adding a larger ballroom to the White House isn’t itself a bad idea, and it seems like the space really is needed. But it’s a question of process (and, to be honest, taste). The White House isn’t Trump’s personal abode; it’s a place he’s living for four years, that he is a custodian of. Changes to it should never be made unilaterally, and should have the input of people who understand and respect the building’s history and integrity. Past presidents have renovated where needed, and they generally didn’t face much in the way of backlash, because at least in the modern era the renovations have been modest, necessary, and completed after undergoing a thorough approvals process. They didn’t just jam through what they wanted.

I was struck by Trump’s comment that he was told, “‘Sir, this is the White House. You’re the president of the United States. You can do anything you want.’” It harkens back to another famous Trump observation: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”

This kind of entitlement is what has characterized Trump’s entire adult life. It’s what is characterizing his presidency.

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It should also not be lost on us that Donald Trump is demolishing the East Wing, where First Ladies and their staffs worked. This is an administration characterized by virulent misogyny, and a president elected on the by white-hot male resentment. This is a presidency of the manosphere. Of course they’re destroying the area of the White House grounds largely associated with women.

Last week, Trump also posted an AI video of himself dropping excrement on American cities. The point was to mock the No Kings protesters who took to the streets. The visual, though, was him literally dropping shit on America. This presidency is shocking in a million ways, but this video really was a new low: The juvenile humor of it, the very fact of an American president declaring that millions of his fellow citizens deserved to be shat on because they disagree with him. Past presidents have almost to a one understood themselves to be president for all Americans. Not Trump. In his view, only Americans who are loyal to him are truly American at all.

Most American presidents, even ones I think were terrible, understood themselves as custodians — of a historic home, sure, but more importantly of an office, a people, a national creed, and a founding document that set out bold and crucial principles that would become a model of freedom and democratic rule. America is not perfect, but part of what has made America admirable is that our citizens and leaders alike have been committed to a set of ideals. We haven’t always lived up to those ideals — far from it — but the best parts of our history have been the times in which groups excluded from America’s promise demanded the country honor its commitments.

What we’re seeing now is a man who does not believe himself beholden to anything — not tradition, not morality, not the rule of law, not the US Constitution. And what is to me even scarier is that a significant minority of the nation lines up behind him, and also apparently has no fealty at all to America as a place and an idea and a collective that is ours only temporarily, that we have a collective obligation to preserve, improve, and pass on. This same group has deemed half the nation not really American by virtue of our liberal or even moderate politics, and they cheer the president on when he says that their fellow citizens are enemies. They claim removing confederate statues that are only a few decades old is an unacceptable erasure of history, but shrug as the president bulldozes part of the White House. It’s not about principles. It’s about dominance. These are not people who love American democracy and our history. They are people who simply want their guy in charge, so that he might humiliate, denigrate, and destroy the Americans they collectively dislike.

It is not normal to applaud a president for saying he shits on America. It’s not normal to allow private donors to funnel money to a presidential vanity project that involves destroying a large part of the single most iconic symbol of the United States.

“You can do anything you want.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” Trump is the most un-American president in modern American history. He’s destroying not just a physical manifestation of that history, but the social glue that has held this enormous, diverse, complicated country together. He’s not just taking a bulldozer to the East Wing; he’s taking it to all of us.

xx Jill

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