OPINION: Please, Someone, Knock The Crown Off Trump’s Head

Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, he’s been acting more like a monarch than an elected official who won the popular vote by a mere 1.5 percentage points.

His tyrannical moves prompted millions of Americans to join the “no kings” demonstrations on June 14. And on Tuesday, the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice held an online discussion called “The Rise of the Imperial Presidency.” 

“The Trump administration is … literally claiming, much like a royal prerogative, that the president is above the law, or at least above the laws that Congress passes and that the president doesn’t like,” said Samuel Breidbart, counsel for Brennan Center’s democracy program.

Like flesh-eating parasites, Trump and his accomplices have inserted themselves into federal agencies to, at best, erode their independence. Justice Department officials function as his personal lawyers, and he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer for releasing employment numbers that don’t show the “golden age” he promised during the campaign.

This administration is denying due process to immigrants of color, regardless of their legal status, and shipping them to corporate-owned concentration camps. It’s tried and sometimes succeeded in cutting off congressionally approved funding, and it has interfered with schools, nonprofits, law firms, state governments and businesses.

Many have submitted, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes proudly, sometimes without being asked.

New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin recently told MSNBC host Ari Melber about a CEO who was taking the unprecedented step of asking the White House for permission to hire someone who’d worked in the Biden administration.

After the recent mass shooting in a midtown Manhattan office building, Sorkin suggested that corporate America speak up against gun violence. Some CEOs privately agreed but deemed it a losing argument right now. One even said: “The president, if he wants to put me in jail, he can put me in jail.”

And I thought billionaires were just complying with Trump’s whims to get more tax breaks, deregulation and government contracts.

Nearly all GOP members of Congress treat his wishes as their commands, whether to confirm useful idiots to oversee and in some cases destroy important government agencies; deprive constituents of health care; or slash funding for clean energy, weather forecasting, scientific research and numerous other programs.

Mike Johnson just got a Time magazine cover story that said he’s “given the president what he previously lacked: a Speaker willing to turn the House into an instrument of Trump’s agenda.” Johnson himself touted his chamber as “a well-oiled machine.”

Before and after the election, some GOP House members took bootlicking to new levels by introducing bills to put the Trump name and/or likeness on anything they could think of. (Or did those wacky ideas come from the POTUS himself?)

Newsweek compiled a list that includes carving his face on Mount Rushmore (where he gave his history-whitewashing speech in 2020); issuing $100, $250 and $500 bills with his image; renaming all coastal waters as well as the D.C. Metro and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him; and declaring his birthday (and Flag Day) as a national holiday. Then there’s the measure to name the Kennedy Center Opera House after Melania.

Surprisingly, no one’s suggested plastering Trump’s name on the Supreme Court, whose GOP majority functioned as his judicial support system even before he was elected. Besides pretty much shielding presidents from prosecution for crimes they commit in office, it blessed partisan gerrymandering, paving the way for Trump to order Texas and other red states to rejig congressional district lines to give the GOP even more seats next year.

With Congress and the high court in his corner, there’s no question that the outlook for democracy is bleak.

But rolling over isn’t the answer, Fordham Law School Associate Professor Jane Manners said at the Brennan Center program. Instead, she stressed the need to keep talking about how politics shouldn’t determine how agencies regulate elections, our economy and the airwaves, as well as investigate government corruption, protect consumers and make many other decisions affecting our daily lives.Both she and University of Michigan law professor Julian Davis Mortenson turned to Founding Father Thomas Paine’s declaration that all patriots must remember: “In free countries [like ours is supposed to be] the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Lisa Von Ahn is an experienced columnist previously published in the Pottsville Republican Herald newspaper.

Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.

Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.

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