The time has come to face the fact that Donald J. Trump can no longer be called a dictator wannabe, as I have been calling him for years. He\u2019s a full-fledged dictator now. We Americans are living in a dictatorship.<\/p>\n
As Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience a few nights ago, \u201cWe\u2019re beyond waiting and seeing now. \u2026 We are there. It is here.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019s right. Look at him.<\/p>\n
He is having his masked, anonymous, uncredentialed and unprincipled ICE agents (his Secret Police, his Stormtroopers, his Gestapo) arrive in unmarked cars and arrest people without warrants, and for no other reason than their skin isn\u2019t white enough. Then they send their prey off to prisons where they are locked away in squalid conditions and given poor access to decent food and medical care. They are often tortured, and they are denied access to lawyers. Only a dictator could do that and get away with it, and Trump does both.<\/p>\n
Trump also is turning the military inward on the American people, as when he put 800 Marines on the streets of Los Angeles \u201cto protect federal property.\u201d Marines are not trained for defense, only offense, and they would have had no idea what to do if problems broke out. (I know; I was in the Marines.) Again, only a dictator could do that and get away with it, and Trump does both.<\/p>\n
(Aside: I hope our servicepersons will remember they took an oath to honor the Constitution, not their commander-in-chief, and refuse to take up arms against their fellow Americans. They could be dishonorably discharged for doing that, but if that happens they should frame their certificates of discharge and hang them on their walls with pride. Maybe someone will start a project to put up billboards near military bases to remind our servicepersons of their oath.)<\/p>\n
Anyway, there is plenty more evidence \u2013 no, plenty more proof<\/em> — that Trump is a dictator now, no longer a wannabe. A few more examples follow:<\/p>\n The Supreme Court has granted Trump the right to commit any crime he wants to and not be punished, the only restriction being that his crime must be an official act. No one in America has ever had that power.<\/p>\n He has granted himself the right to establish, alter and cancel tariffs on goods from countries around the world, although the Constitution specifically reserves that power for Congress. Our spineless, GOP-controlled Congress sheepishly lets him.<\/p>\n He intimidates the news media into doing his will, such as the recent sale of CBS News\u2019 parent company, Paramount, to Skydance. The sale was approved only after the two parties agreed to several of Trump\u2019s demands. That is right out of the dictators\u2019 playbook<\/p>\n He fires top officials who speak the truth rather than repeat his lies, as he did Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics. She released a jobs report that showed numbers he did not like so he fired her, and a few days later he came up with phantom numbers \u2013 no evidence at all that they are accurate \u2013 that showed everything is all rosy. (Incidentally, McEntarfer had nothing to do with the numbers. She was just the messenger reporting unbiased data.)<\/p>\n Trump decries elite colleges and universities \u2013 Columbia, Brown, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, others \u2013 as places of extreme liberal ideology and antisemitism, and he forces them to do his will by withholding billions of dollars in research funds until they bow to him.<\/p>\n He terminates government contracts with large law firms he doesn\u2019t like and bars their lawyers from entering public buildings. Sometimes he even prevents federal employees from communicating with members of those firms, as he did to the Arnold & Porter firm because its attorney, former Atty. Gen. Merrick B. Garland, defended Jack Smith, the Justice Department lawyer who oversaw two criminal investigations into Trump during the Biden administration, one into Trump\u2019s handling of classified documents, the other as to whether his actions on Jan. 6th, 2021, were an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Both cases were dismissed.<\/p>\n He commands that the Smithsonian Institution display his version of history, and his version only, and has announced that his administration will review current and planned exhibitions in the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s 20 museums for \u201cdivisive or ideologically driven language.\u201d The museums would have 120 days to replace any content that Trump doesn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n He approves spending a billion dollars of our money so that he can have a gold-laced \u201cpalace in the sky\u201d airplane, after illegally receiving it as a gift from Quatar.<\/p>\n He willfully causes the deaths of millions of people \u2013 call it what it is: mass murder — because they do not live in America and are not white.<\/p>\n He approves spending $35 million or so to give himself a military parade as a birthday present, just like all the other dictators get.<\/p>\n
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