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Reading Donald Trump’s endless and nauseating prime time address to Congress last Tuesday night, I was struck by how completely and weirdly willing he is to alienate broad swaths of the US populace.

“I Will Increase Your Grocery Bills and Slash Your Retirement Income!”

What normal US president would get up in front of the nation and advocate an insane policy – including 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 20% on Chinese important – that is certain to increase prices across the board for a US population that is already agitated over inflation and that voted for him over Kamala Harris at least in part because they thought he would act to curb it?

And then there’s the economic recession or perhaps even depression his tariffs could set off.

Check your 401Ks, middle-class America! And learn where the best and closest food pantries can be found.

What normal US president would do this and also launch absurd attacks on Social Security, which a great majority of Americans want protected and properly funded, while applauding a demented multi-billionaire sociopath and fellow malignant fascist/narcissist (the Sieg-Heiling oligarch Elon Musk) he has illegally empowered to attack anything and everyone remotely decent in the federal government?

Yes, he attacked Social Security. That’s what Donald “I See Dead People” Trump’s ridiculous Big Lie claiming that millions of deceased Americans are receiving Social Security checks is all about – this while his government-whacking Nazi Musk calls the Social Security system “a Ponzi scheme.”

Dead voters elected Joe Biden in 2020 and dead people are getting Social Security. Notice a pattern here?

As Robert Reich recently noted on Facebook: “Trump keeps lying about Social Security as an excuse to gut the program. Despite promising not to touch it, he’s planning to shutter SSA offices and fire 7,000 employees who help distribute benefits. All to pave the way for privatization and more billionaire tax cuts.”

All of this and more – the funding and staff cuts and the sociopath Musk’s role in the government – polls badly for Trump and his party.

A Coup Attempt Predicted

But of course Donald Trump has never been a normal US president. I can’t stand Timothy Snyder politically, academically[1], or personally, but he had Trump understood pretty damn well in early 2017 when he told Salon‘’s Chauncy de Vega that Trump45 would likely try to stage a coup:

De Vega: “you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?”

Snyder: “I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some........

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