The Rogue President of a Rogue State
Feb. 28th, 2026 06:57 pmBack in November of 2016, when I was on LiveJournal instead of Dreamwidth, I reacted to the election results, if I recall correctly, by quoting Kelvin Throop’s emendation of Euripides, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make President,” and expressing the hope that the country would not be destroyed along with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has pledged ten billion dollars of the public’s money to a “Board of Peace” of which he is to be president for life, without, so far as I am aware, obtaining a Congressional appropriation; he has unlawfully imposed taxes (tariffs) not authorized by Congress; and he has now gone to war with Iran without a declaration of war or other authorization from Congress. You don’t have to be fond of Iran’s Islamofascist regime to disapprove of this.
If Congress were responsible, and if its Republicans were not terrified of offending Trump and his MAGAts, the House of Representatives would be busy impeaching him now, by a bipartisan vote, with swift conviction by the Senate to follow. If the president can get away with behaving like an absolute monarch without suffering consequences, much of the Constitution has become a dead letter, and the rest may follow at the jefe’s discretion. The United States of America is acting like a rogue state in its behavior toward Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, and forfeiting its standing to condemn brazen aggression by Russia or China.
If there is any hope, it is that Trump’s war with Iran may prove unpopular, especially if it goes badly, and we may finally see Trump and his gang discredited and removed from power. I fear, however, that tens of millions of American voters are either fascists, or bamboozled by the fascists and their fake media. This is a problem that cannot be expected to go away soon.
If Congress were responsible, and if its Republicans were not terrified of offending Trump and his MAGAts, the House of Representatives would be busy impeaching him now, by a bipartisan vote, with swift conviction by the Senate to follow. If the president can get away with behaving like an absolute monarch without suffering consequences, much of the Constitution has become a dead letter, and the rest may follow at the jefe’s discretion. The United States of America is acting like a rogue state in its behavior toward Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, and forfeiting its standing to condemn brazen aggression by Russia or China.
If there is any hope, it is that Trump’s war with Iran may prove unpopular, especially if it goes badly, and we may finally see Trump and his gang discredited and removed from power. I fear, however, that tens of millions of American voters are either fascists, or bamboozled by the fascists and their fake media. This is a problem that cannot be expected to go away soon.