Trump's Tyranny, Part III: He Acts Like a King

Today is my third essay (of four) in a series examining the reign of Donald Trump and damage to our country, as we head into the two weeks before the midterm elections — when a lot of decisions about our country’s arc and fate as a democracy will be made individually and collectively across thousands of election races in every corner of the country. As I wrote in the first installment — focused on the rise and reign of terror by Trump’s secret police force — my hope is to emphasize that we’ve already gotten used to a level of fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption that would be unthinkable and shocking to us just a decade ago.

These essays specifically highlight five areas where I fear we’ve lost sight of the sheer scale and horrific departure-from-normality that we’re all living through: (1) The abuses of the regime’s secret police force, a.k.a. ICE and CBP; (2) the day-to-day petty crime and grand corruption infecting the operations of the US government; (3) the political weaponization of the Justice Department; (4) the president’s abuse of our “normal” process of government; (5) the squandering of our nation’s standing around the world.

Today, I want to tackle that fourth theme — how Donald Trump has corrupted and abused the normal functioning of government in ways that should represent an impeachable affront to our system of checks-and-balances, and how he has attempted to remake the presidency into a monarchy.

Before we dive into today’s subject, two quick updates on the first two installments of this essay series: The reign of terror of Trump’s ICE, and the administration’s weaponization of the justice system.

First, ICE continues its violent and civil-liberties-abusing rampage across the country. I remain horrified by the continuous stream of videos of ICE officers running people down with their vehicles and assaulting people with no even attempt to pretend there are legitimate law enforcement needs for their brutality. Just in the last few hours, we’ve seen video surface of masked ICE officers leaping out of cars to slash the tires of US citizens who are committing no crime. How can we tolerate that behavior by federal agents as a democracy?

Second, just in the hours following my Monday essay about the weaponization of the Justice Department, we’ve seen two more substantial developments: That afternoon, the Justice Department attempted to charge Jim Comey for a third time, with a case in some ways even more weak and laughable than the first two (and that’s saying something since the second case had to do with … threatening seashells). As Comey said, “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice — one that we cannot become numb to.”

Then Tuesday, word came that the Justice Department failed to secure an indictment from a grand jury as it tried to charge January 6th whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson. It’s both the latest attempt to persecute a Trump adversary — and the latest embarrassment for the Justice Department. Time and again, the Trump DOJ keeps attempting to bring case and being rejected by grand juries — a situation that is all-but unprecedented in modern proceedings.

Normally, a “no bill” from a grand jury would be considered a horrendous career-stalling embarrassment for a prosecutor; as the old saying goes, a prosecutor can usually indict a ham sandwich — but in this era of clownish Justice Department behavior, Trump’s team literally failed to get an indictment of the guy who threw a sandwich at federal agents in D.C.

Additionally, we saw reporting yesterday that Trump “erupted” after learning Alina Habba reportedly scored a $50 million deal to secure a presidential pardon from him — notably, he didn’t erupt out of anger at HER corruption, he erupted that he wasn’t getting his own piece of it: “Angered at the size of [the] deal, Mr. Trump has told aides and allies that she should donate a portion of that money to his future presidential library or another Trump-related entity, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.”

Now unto today’s topic:

The Corruption of Government

In ways that would normally be unthinkable and unimaginable, Donald Trump has taken routine, supposedly nonpartisan functions of government—many administered by career civil servants—and turned them to corrupt ends, ranging from political rewards and punishment to tests of personal loyalty or ideological enforcement. Many of these individual instances may not seem all that important, but together they represent a clear escalation and twisting of presidential power; together, they make clear that under Trump the United States has moved away from a systems of three co-equal branches of government, complete with checks-and-balances and independent institutions focused on serving the nation as a whole, and toward an authoritarian system where government institutions operate at the president's personal direction.

We’ve seen Trump himself brag about this: “I didn’t go to Congress. Remember Sleepy Joe? ‘Oh, if they would give me approval in Congress!’ You're not gonna get approval. You just do it. You’re the president.”

Much as I zeroed in earlier in the week on eight distinct buckets of Trump’s financial corruption, I want to zero in on ten specific areas where Trump has reshaped and corrupted the process of government that should alarm us and many of which, would under normal circumstances, be worthy of impeachment for abuse of power:

• Tariffs: One of the primary public concerns heading into next week’s election is the cost of living and how Trump, after campaigning against the price of eggs under President Biden, has made everything more expensive. Much of that has been driven by his capacious, unilateral, corrupt, and always-changing tariff policy — which has cost the average household hundreds if not thousands of dollars, cost hundreds of thousands of US jobs, cut the nation’s GDP growth, and generally upended the world economy. All through his use of a power he doesn’t have, as court after court have found his tariffs illegal. And yet he keeps inventing new schemes to pretend he can arbitrarily and overnight rewrite world trade on a whim.

• Bending Enforcement: We’re seeing the president, who is supposed to be at arms-length from business deals and lawsuits, personally intervene and dictate to companies both lawsuits and mergers. Among the more egregious: The Trump administration intervened to force a settlement between the Justice Department and LiveNation, after Trump met with the LiveNation CEO. He apparently told Netflix it couldn’t merge with WBD — and instead steered the deal to a friendly right-wing owner in the Ellison family. He illegally ignored a large bipartisan majority in Congress and kept TikTok operating in the US. He undid export controls and allowed the world’s most advanced AI computer chips to be sold overseas, including to China, in exchange for a governmental stake in maker NVIDIA (a stock he continues to trade personally as well). And how can we forget the weirdness of when Trump, as a private citizen, sued the IRS, which he controls, and “settled” with himself by creating an “anti-weaponization” fund to pay $1.8 billion to his friends and allies and securing a promise that the IRS would never audit him again? It was a rare moment so nakedly corrupt that a court overturned it.

• Bending Science, Health, and Economic Data: Government data and science is supposed to be the gold standard of nonpartisan work, but time and again we’ve seen the administration suppress economic and health data it didn’t like, fire or remove those in charge of key data sets for apparently political purposes, and hide, unpublish, or wind down key data collection that undermines decades—or more—of longstanding work. A Senate report from a year ago documented 57 instances where Trump had interfered with science just in his first months. As the Democratic senate minority wrote, “The harms from the Trump Administration's cuts and firings will accumulate for years, indeed for decades, to come: lives that might have been saved by studies the Administration defunded; the loss of scientific innovation as scientists flee to countries where their work is not censored; or kids who develop life-long vaping habits the year that the Office of Smoking and Health was eliminated.”

• Impoundment and Governmental Destruction: One of the strangest aspects of the “constitutional crash” of the last two years has been how Trump has simply ignored the most basic of federal laws and the requirement that he spend the money allocated and appropriated by Congress in the manner that Congress attended. He has rescinded or withheld millions—and collectively billions—in federal spending legally mandated by Congress, undermining the once-unquestioned congressional “power of the purse.” He has illegally dismantled the Education Department, fed USAID into the “wood chipper,” illegally seized the US Institute of Peace, and wrought fundamental destruction across the org chart of government without congressional approval or sanction. This is not a new area of debate — Nixon’s attempts as so-called “congressional impoundment” were actually a major part of the impeachment debate amid Watergate.

• Loyalty Tests: Since the administration’s earliest days, we’ve seen Trump toadies enforce loyalty tests on nonpartisan civil servants, from intelligence and FBI professionals to military leaders. Critical agencies like the NSA have been upended by “loyalty” complaints and tweets from people like Laura Loomer. He has removed longstanding protections for federal workers, firing civil servants across government for political reasons rather than performance, and brought mass firings to places like the State Department, where promotions now hinge on loyalty tests. Just this month, the Washington Sun reported, “The State Department has asked some foreign service officials up for promotion who they voted for in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections,” a clear violation of federal law and standard norms. All of this is on top of and distinct from how the administration has fired, stalled, and neutered the supposedly independent inspectors general who serve as watchdogs against fraud, waste, and abuse across government.

• Blocking of Disaster Aid: FEMA is now routinely blocking disaster assistance grants to states that didn’t vote for him. In one recent instance, he approved disaster assistance to six “red” states and denied it to four “blue” states. A March POLITICO study found that Trump “has as approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.” Trump isn’t exactly hiding this: He’s bragging about it on the campaign trail — elect my guy, he says, or you’ll never get any more federal disaster aid. This one thing alone would, again, be one of the biggest scandals of any modern presidential administration — just imagine, again, how Republicans would have howled if Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had withheld needed and critical disaster aid to Texas, Florida, or Wyoming.

• Punishing and Blackmailing Private Institutions: We’ve all-but forgotten the wave of “surrender or else” ultimatums that went out to universities, nonprofits, institutions, and even law firms last spring in the early stage of Trump II. Many have failed or fallen apart, but it’s not for a lack of trying by the Trump administration to bring the nation’s civil society to heel.

• Destruction of our shared history and culture: I could write thousands of words on how Trump has done one end-run after another around all the normal processes, checks-and-balances, and court orders that protect against the president’s whims — from the destruction of the East Wing to the unfolding fig-leaf that his 250-foot Trump Arch is necessary for national security to the current kerfuffle over the destruction of a public golf course in D.C. and the closure of the Kennedy Center. (Really: If you haven’t been following the East Potomac Golf Links controversy, it’s the microcosm of Trumpism — the destruction of a well-liked public good to instead serve Trump’s personal interests and cronies, all done in clear and knowing violation of court orders as the Justice Department and Department of the Interior continues to pretend it has no plan to redo the course even as Trump literally tweets out the plans.)

• Attacks on Independent Agencies: Across government, the Trump administration has attacked and circumscribed the independence of agencies that are meant to be more of an arms-length distance from the presidency — attacks that this summer were upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter as it overturned the century-old precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor. The longstanding policy of Humphrey’s Executor was that agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, were “neither political nor executive, but predominantly quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative,” and thus their bipartisan commissioners, who served fixed terms, could effectively only be fired for cause. Trump asserted otherwise — and the Supreme Court’s Trump-empowering majority agreed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “grievously wrong.”

• Attacks on the Media: It’s easy to see the ongoing Trump administration attacks on the media, by his White House and by FCC chair Brendan Carr, as “just” grumpy score-settling — it’s Trump being Trump! — but we should be clear that all of it, from removing the press corps from the Pentagon, to firing the independent military press at Stars and Stripes, to curtailing the White House press corps, his blackmail payments from his presidential library from US media, to the millions Amazon directly paid Melania, to the FCC’s “chilling” attempts to censor and control broadcast television, all are fundamental violations of the First Amendment. These are un-American, unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern era by other presidents, and more aligned with an authoritarian regime than any democracy we would recognize.

There’s plenty more, including his ongoing abuse of “acting” officials across government, to circumvent Senate confirmation processes and install loyalists into roles they never could be approved to hold — one US attorney appointment after another across the country has been found illegal, including in Los Angeles this very week, adding to a list that includes Seattle, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, and Virginia.

Much of the above is actually illegal — but all of it is out-of-the-norm and all of it represents abuses of presidential power beyond anything we’ve seen in modern times. Just the above list should be reason enough for a Democratic majority to move forward with impeachment proceedings.

The result of all of this is a government that is less democratic, less transparent, and less accountable — either to congress or to the American people — and one that exists more to serve the president’s whims than our country as a whole.

It would be easy to say that much of this doesn’t matter — who cares if the State Department is asking who people voted for? — but all of the protections, procedures, and norms that Trump is wrecking were built up over the last 250 years because they made the country safer, more responsive to the public, and more able to build, maintain, and rely upon the specialized expertise necessary to administer a country of more than 330 million people.

At its most basic: Trump’s actions throughout this second term have upended the idea and practices — carefully created and cultivated across generations and centuries — that the US government should administer its responsibilities professionally, according to established, consistent, and transparent standards, regardless of the political affiliation of the citizen seeking help, assistance, or information. He has instead installed a regime that serves himself, his friends, and his cronies — and punishes anyone who doesn’t back him or his imagined vision of the world. That, to be clear, is not the model of a democracy.

Presidents aren’t kings. That’s kind of the entire point of our government.

GMG