Frank's Musings

The analogy has never been clearer:  any spoiled brat always ignores rules.  World order is only kept up by every nation's acceptance of collaborative behavior--i.e. conformance with expectations.  Dysfunctional families are a product of insisting on or awarding exceptional treatment to one of its members.  

Maybe it was Trump's presentation of himself as an exception to the customary acquiescence of liberal democratic leaders to the rule of law that won presidential elections.  But both domestic and international patience with his petulance is finally disappearing.  Hopefully, this year's midterm U.S. elections will carry that impatience into the heretofore subservient Congress. New majorities in both legislative Houses will be able to fulfill their parental responsibilities and discipline America's embarrassingly disorderly President.

 The plan of the Trump administration to offer refuge in Congo to America's Afghan collaborators sheltering in Qatar (cf. New York Times, 4/21/2026) is another example of the cruelty, not to mention immorality, of the Trump administration.  Its failure to fulfill the country's obligation to them is horrifying.  Another instance of such disregard of civility has been Trump's refusal to recognize the assistance and support that the U.S. received from its NATO allies for its retaliation against the Taliban for allowing Al-Qaeda to use Afghanistan as the base from which to mount the 9/11 attack.  Now Trump acts ungratefully by treating shamefully those Afghans who courageously helped us penalize the terrorist plotters who had trained on their soil.  

Hopefully, Trump's embarrassingly selfish attitude towards fulfilling universal norms of human behavior will be corrected soon and considered by the people of other nations as only an aberration, to the extent possible.  Otherwise, finding powerful allies in the future will be next to impossible.

Has our liberal democratic government become too institutionalized? Do we rely on our institutions not just to carry out the will of the people, but to form it?

Americans have become very dependent on the ubiquitous media for their opinions and therefore unresistant to propagandized political messaging from the federal government. When a media-savvy group can win the approval of an electoral majority, it is also able to subvert democracy’s foundational principle—that rule should ideally be entrusted to most of the people.

The recent No Kings rallies are reminiscent of the antiwar marches against Nixon and Ford’s Vietnam policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Both then and in the 2020s Americans show they have not abandoned their personal commitment to assuming responsibility periodically for directly reviving individual participation in managing self-government.

Tariffs were the most common source of government revenues before the liberal enlightenment that motivated many democracies in the nineteenth century to use tax receipts to correct obvious inequities between the lives enjoyed by wealthy and poorer citizens. Now that social welfare programs have become popular and expensive, raising enough tax revenues in socially equitable ways would impose more of the burden on the class of high income-earners who support the current President and his collaborators.

President Trump has often stated that he’s a lot smarter than most others. That arrogance has led him into numerous bankruptcies. It has also made him an avatar of people who think they have been unfairly deprived of their deserved recognition or reward. Sometimes, however, even they cannot deny he has gone too far.

Trump uses immigration enforcement to captivate a large group of resentful political supporters. Indeed, they are susceptible to his message of retribution. After all, it is mainly wealthy industrialists or other entrepreneurs who are dependent on the labor and energy of refugees.

However, the domestic workers displaced by immigrant laborers often are abandoned by their employers or by new capital-strapped entrepreneurs who forsake an opportunity to build on the experience of legacy workers by investing in upgrading their skills. This simplistic definition of our democracy, that its goal is to let the majority rule, can result in the perceived discrimination against less motivated residents whose jobs and expertise are threatened by talent imported from abroad.

The definition of democracy which characterized the Weimar Republic was that same simplistic replacement model. When Hitler and his cohorts recognized an opportunity to manipulate that foundational political principle and then repress and eliminate Jews and other non-Aryans, they were able to capture control of the government and conduct the Holocaust.

Beside other measures harassing immigrants, for example, the administration now is using the processing delay for green card applications as another excuse for detaining and deporting even legal immigrants. In fact, this is only a way further to discourage any “undesirable” immigration. The whole policy smacks of ethnic cleansing.

Trump’s successes, like those of P.T. Barnum, are based on the misperception that a sucker is born every minute. In Trump’s case, those suckers are those who believe they will be better off if they are left to their own devices and continue to be exploited by snake-oil salesmen like the Donald.

Overthrowing a dictator has been shown to have occurred non-violently several times in history (cf. "Strategic Nonviolent Conflict,"1994, by Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler).  It should be simple, therefore, to use the same tactics to prevent another one from emerging.

Obviating tyranny was the leading objective of the founders of the U.S. Constitution. Ironically, the provisions of that document also provide a pathway for an authoritarian to capture control of the government.  He or she can legally establish an administration that parades as a democracy while appealing to most voters’ regret of having historically submitted to the better judgment of a select class of elites.  In their minds, that seems to be no better than a dictatorship.

If a written democratic constitution can be manipulated to facilitate a dictatorship it should also enable a determined group of restorationists to return power to the people. For that to happen, however, requires (a) a leader unreservedly dedicated to inspiring voters’ self-confidence and (b) funding to purchase sufficient media access to advocate and instruct voters to assert their political power rather than passively do what they’re told.

Until that leader is found, Congress can, at least, limit the demolition of America's democracy if opponents of an authoritarian presidency overwhelmingly win the 2026 mid-term election.  Perhaps that campaign will result in identifying likely 2028 presidential candidates from one or both political parties who would restore our liberal democracy.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Donald Trump’s Greenland Episode isn’t only the latest demonstration of his total detachment from reality; it shows how vulnerable our republic has become to the talents of a determined, wealthy, and deluded carnival barker.  We ought to have expected  him to act within his own twisted concept of reality, in which nothing of any importance exists other than himself.  However, we must recognize that he has been able to manipulate our democratic system of government to respond to insistent declaration of falsehoods instead of to our own critical analysis.

Oh, how we have fallen prey to our reliance on professionally designed media presentations for trusted commercial information and highly esteemed entertainment!  It may not require a real security threat for so vulnerable an electorate willingly to abdicate responsibility for protecting its self-interest if it allows civil society to be “run” by a single person.  Certainly, its elected representatives have already shown themselves to be much less inclined to protect the electorate’s welfare than their own.  Indeed, that is probably the main reason for the ambivalence that twice put Mr. Trump in office.

Both national political parties have decayed into mere career paths for glad handers.  The public apparently has wizened up to this, as evidenced by the growing number of independents.  Therefore, to serve the public’s true welfare and avoid the chaos of fashion, congressional Democrats and Republicans both need to remove or, at least, confine the rambunctiousness of our 47^th President.  It’s hard to believe that so unfocused and ignorant a leader could restructure our government; but his administration could seriously harm our liberal democracy, even before the end of his current term in office.  That damage must be limited to give his successor a chance to restore America’s pride.