The Fall of the Rebel Angles by Pietr Breughel the Elder, 1592, Royal Museum of the Arts, Brussels.

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

– James Madison, Federalist Paper #47

Let’s try to reprise this week in the dismantling of the Republic: Trump proclaimed Super Bowl Sunday, Gulf of America Day, and announced his plans to “buy Gaza.” From whom it isn’t clear.

On Monday, Trump said he was ordering a 25% tariff/tax on all imports of steel and aluminum and warned Hamas that if all hostages in Gaza weren’t released by noon this Saturday, “all hell” would break loose. Then he banned paper straws.

On Tuesday, JD Vance and Elon Musk fumed that federal judges had no business intruding on their unconstitutional raids on the federal government and that Trump should ignore any injunctions imposed on them. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order rolling back enforcement of a law that makes it illegal for US companies to bribe foreign officials, arguing that the restriction puts American firms at a disadvantage, and told the Justice Department to drop corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. To be fair, Trump also abolished the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, making it easier for overseas corporations and governments to bribe US officials. (He also shut down the Justice Department’s task force responsible for tracking down Russian oligarchs evading US sanctions.)

On Wednesday, Trump demanded that the Education Department be closed “immediately!” The problem: the Department was opened by an act of Congress, which isn’t as insurmountable a problem as it once might have been given that Congress barely asserts its existence anymore. Later that day in the Oval Office, Trump was allegedly told by X Æ A-Xii, one of Elon Musk’s 12 (known) kids, to “Shut up” and “You’re not the president!” Perhaps as compensation for being dissed by a four-year-old (who also wiped streams of snot on the Resolute Desk), Trump proclaimed himself the head of the Kennedy Center, whose annual awards he’d boycotted during his prior term, and called Putin to let him know he could take as much of Ukraine as he could carry back to Moscow, as long as he left the rare earth minerals behind for Trump.

A Data for Progress poll conducted on February 2 asked, “Billionaires have…”

Too much influence over government: 73%
The right amount of influence over government: 13%
Too little influence over government: 5%

Of course, the whole point of having billionaires, and their slash-and-burn hackers, run the government is that they don’t give a damn what the people think and, in fact, will almost always serve their own interests first by doing the exact opposite…

The only thing these three did to increase their already unimaginable wealth by unimaginable amounts was to help get Trump elected. And Trump returned the favor by giving them free range to gut the federal government’s regulatory system from the inside out, eliminating programs that curbed the growth of their wealth and protecting those features that fuel it.

Oxfam: The wealthiest 1% of people now own almost 45% of all wealth, while 44% of humanity live below the World Bank’s poverty line of $6.85 per day.

It’s a strange kind of economic populism, which bolts out of the gate with massive layoffs. But what would you expect from a guy whose only successful business venture (aside from two elections) was a TV gig where he hammed it up firing people?

As we bear first-hand witness to the evisceration of “democracy” in our own country by the billionaire class, it’s perhaps helpful to consult what the Greeks now think about the failure of what’s considered–rightly or wrongly–the first democracy, the one that briefly bloomed in fifth century BC Athens before being crushed and supplanted by a dictatorship of oligarchs and eventual imperial occupation, first by the Macedonians, then the Romans. Here’s the view of contemporary Greek political philosopher Takis Fotopoulos:

The final failure of Athenian democracy was not due, as it is usually asserted by its critics, to the innate contradictions of democracy itself but, on the contrary, to the fact that the Athenian democracy never matured to become an inclusive democracy. This cannot be adequately explained by simply referring to the immature “objective” conditions, the low development of productive forces and so on—important as may be—because the same objective conditions prevailed at that time in many other places all over the Mediterranean, let alone the rest of Greece, but democracy flourished only in........

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