To the GOP's Führer, America tips its tin-foil hat

"We are a country full of people smilingly capitulating to a tyrant. Here in [my] city is a mayor who just went ahead and said it: 'I’m collaborating.' A word more well chosen than he knew.... Exactly that. It is fashionable now. Bravery, less so." —Anand Giridharadas, journalist, former NYT columnist

The shock endures, haunting with sound and fury — signifying the upending of everything I once believed was inherent in the American character at large. Perhaps most fundamental to it was a predisposition to the nation's only homegrown philosophy, pragmatism. Alas, a cavalier willingness to cut one's throat lies some considerable distance from our traditional, admirable traits.

Saturday, the Bleak House posted this mugshot of its criminal inhabitant, below which is his proclamation canceling all Americans' 18th-century emancipation from servitude to a monarchical despot: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."

An open declaration of lawlessness; in Trump's psychotic mind, his divinely granted right to do whatever he pleases — to hell with those two other constitutionally established branches of government. Of this he made no secret, explaining to American voters in 2024, "God saved me [from a nicked ear] for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before."

Here, greater's definition is, as noted, the country's devotion to serving his every whim, or, at minimum, bowing to them in silence. This collective genuflection is an uncompromisable act, for none among the unblessed possesses the heretical right to dispute and oppose God, whose instrument on earth just happens to be one Donald J. Trump.

Sayeth a rumor likely apocryphal, the featured mugshot's tagline was taken from Napoleon's mouth by the lawless one himself. And sayeth Charlie Sykes, "Unlikely in the extreme that he even knows that a guy named Tolstoy wrote a book about Russia’s war with the French emperor. There is literally no chance he’s read it. So all of the commentaries pointing out that things did not end well for Napoleon are beside the point."

Notwithstanding what strikes me as the quote's non sequitur, Sykes' point about Trump's A-to-Z ignorance is well taken by my own interpretation. When admixed with boundless narcissism and the heftiest possible dose of sociopathy, profound ignorance comes with the sister pathology of believing in one's inerrancy. If Trump really believes that God — or for that matter, if he even believes in God — has anointed him to do "greater" things for America, that's what is beside the ultimate point.

That being, this autocrat's unshakable belief in his infallibility coupled with untouchability is what ultimately will shake him into the grim reality of his grievous mistake. History abounds in the decline and fall of hubristically dictatorial reigns, from ancient Rome's to modern-era Europe's. I need not cite a string of such eventual losers to compare with Trump; let it suffice that in the category of smarts, America's Caesar is comparable to merely Nero and Mussolini.

Trump had the good fortune to be as universally ignorant as his 2024 voters, save for his idiot savant-acquired knowledge in the art of demagoguery. When we again consult history we find that Fate has treated Trump's singular fortune rather unkindly, often ungently. "Pride goeth before the fall," that sort of thing. This, perhaps not so much ignorantly but stupidly he overlooks or dismisses. Never glancing behind, Trump will see not what's gaining on him.

And for him, it won't be pretty. Americans now asleep and themselves dismissive of the evil they've wrought will be subjected to its repetitive fallout. The population's 53 or thereabouts percentage presently content with the nation's lawless goofweed of an ego will, in increments readily imperceptible, turn on him — and we others won't much care if it in agonizing time it someday comes with a kaboom, just as long as it comes.

This chronological sketch is more than a personal hope or delusion derived from thinking that's wishful. Not to be tiresome, but as tomorrow's guide I look at historical precedent and what I see is the irrefutability of Trump's fate. Were he less Neroesque and Mussolini-like in diseased intelligence I'd give pause. He isn't, and so I don't.

Further, with the passing of his ruinous phenomena MAGA will re-reduce to its historical status. In surveying political polls since their professional origin you'll see that roughly 20% of Americans have always camped on the lunatic fringe full of conspiracy theories, strongman-love or just plain imbecility. Facts in hand, I once wrote an article, published elsewhere, on this unfaltering historical verity.

Nonetheless my shock endures. Infinitely more unsettling is that its sound and fury shall never dissipate. Though rejecting American exceptionalism I did believe in the laudable uniqueness of America's character, especially that of a pragmatic bent. But with Trump's popular re-ascendence my belief went down like a shot dog. No whimpering involved, though; could be, I should have known better.

Yes we will crawl out from under the scofflaw's maggot-infested rock — the upside. Yet it's just as likely that the world's once-envied character of these United States will, someday, again reveal a contradictory wound oozing tin foil — because we, by and large, are no different from the world's others, all those capable of bowing to despotism.