“Bless America,” Centralia, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“When even the dictators of today appeal to reason, they mean that they possess the most tanks. They were rational enough to build them; others should be rational enough to yield to them.”

– Max Horkheimer, The End of Reason

Trump has been gifted more power than he has taken. But now that he has accumulated so much authority through the weakness and political negligence of his opponents, he is in a position to seize and consolidate an unprecedented amount of power by himself, leaving the country almost defenseless against his vindictive whims and authoritarian aspirations.

We’re entering a time when the internal checks on unbridled executive power have either been unplugged or ignored with no meaningful resistance from the other branches of government. If there was one thing the founding fathers (if only there’d been founding mothers or sisters) feared more than slave rebellions, it was a king-like executive, whose control over the levers of government, including its military and police powers, was absolute.

The federalist structure of the US government set forth in the Constitution was largely designed by James Madison to prevent this outcome, much to the distress of figures like Alexander Hamilton, who argued that the constitutional checks on executive power would slow almost to a crawl sometimes the ability of the government to enact radical changes. (Madison’s friend and fellow Virginian George Mason refused to sign the Constitution because he felt it still conveyed too much power to the executive branch!)

But this system, once venerated as a bedrock value by conservatives, is in the process of being demolished from the inside-out by one Executive Order after another with even the “originalist,” Federalist Society-vetted members of the federal judiciary helping to press the detonator switch.

John Adams: “I fear that in every elected office, members will obtain an influence by noise not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning.”

The best Gong Show Presidency Money Can Buy: According to documents obtained by Wired, corporate leaders and business tycoons are paying as much as $5,000,000 for meetings with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Earlier this month, Mar-a-Lago hosted a “Candlelight Dinner.” The cost to reserve a seat started at $1,000,000.

After the Chinese crypto mogul Justin Sun bought $75 million worth of the $Trump memecoin, the pending SEC civil fraud case against him was put on hold.

The entire country is being hacked by its own government. In the latest intrusion, the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reports that DOGE sought access to a sensitive database kept by the federal child-support office, which........

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