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Welcome to Donald Trump’s “What Are You Gonna Do About It?” Presidency

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How polarizing is Donald Trump? A hot item on Amazon and Tik Tok — it sold out on TikTok — is the Donald Trump toilet brush. Partial description on Amazon: “Put the world’s most renowned head of hair to great use. This COMMANDER IN CRAP Trump toilet bowl brush doesn’t merely comb over your dirty toilet, it can combat even the toughest stains and filth.”

It’s ironic that Trump’s circular mouth and hair (in the form of the yellow brush) would be on something that removes filth: Donald Trump has greatly contributed to the vulgarization of American politics. He has ignored and thereby altered norms, undermined or neutered institutions, KO’ed political civility and led to millions of people discarding their previous beliefs and principles without ever looking back faster than Netflix cancelling a good show.

And all of this is within the context of a presidency that is the “What are you gonnna do about it?” presidency. Or the “Waddyagonnadoaboudit” president as Tony Soporano would call it. And fittingly so: Some have likened the way the Trump presidency operates as to the mob.

Let health care soar? Waddyagonnadoaboutdit. Let America’s struggling families be without deseperately needed food programs? Waddyagonnadoabout it. Use the insurrection Act? I have the power so waddyagonasadoaboudit. Fire the arts commission that would have reviewed Trump’s upcoming big ballroom (which critics call the Epstein Ballroom)? Deny billions of aid to California to show who has the political power? Send National Guard and troops into American cities? Train American troops for civil unrest and threaten to send in the Airforce into American cities? All…waddyagonnadoaboutdit.

Many critics now say Trump aspires to be a dictator, or is already close to a full-fledged one.

Is that accurate? In an article titled “President for Life” in The Atlantic, J. Michael Luttig, a highly respected former Republican federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, says Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.

Here are some excerpts from the long must-read piece:

In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.

He wrties about January 6 and how Trump has tried to rewrite history and filled his government with sycophants and loyalsts, and then:

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

For anyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.

After going into the current situation with Trump’s inroads into weakening corporate, media and military checks on Presidential power he concludes”

Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.

On July 4, 1776, nearly 250 years ago, America freed itself forever from the oppression of tyrannical rule by monarchs. There was never to be a king in the United States of America. Never again were the liberties and freedoms of Americans to be subject to the whims of a monarch. From that day, Thomas Paine wrote, “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

The nation has survived great challenges and calamities, including the Civil War. Now it is being tested again. Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can long endure.

Read it in its entirety.