1 week Ago
When the historians are finally released from prison, they will no doubt write of the warning signs we all ignored. Those would include, embarrassingly enough, things the president was saying out loud to anyone who’d listen. Among them: He was going to wield tariffs like a scimitar, disadvantaging countries that dared sell their wares to his countrymen and punishing those countrymen even more.
He would replace the nonpartisan civil service with an army of loyalists to do his bidding, no matter how self-serving that bidding — or the loyalists — might be. He would put ideologues in charge of education, crackpots in charge of health, climate-change deniers in command of environmental policy and business executives at the helm of agencies that regulated their products. He would cut the budgets of all those functions by trillions of dollars, causing both profits and fatalities to soar.
He would jail or deport any politician, journalist, intellectual or four-star general whose utterings displeased him. He would round up every brown-skinned foreign-language speaker he could get his hands on, confine them all in deportation centers and return them to the countries of their birth — which, for the most part, refused to accept them. They ended up back in the camps making license plates.
As a result of those roundups, factories were idled and crops went unharvested; schools closed for lack of students and hospitals for want of staff. He would deploy the military to break strikes, shoot protesters in the legs and patrol cities that had not voted for him in sufficient numbers. An eerie silence prevailed.
He would pull the U.S. out of NATO and hand Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova to Russia.
Also, he would tear up every remaining military, trade and climate agreement he had not already abrogated. Russia and Hungary became the main U.S.
allies. He would populate federal courts high and low with friendly judges to shield him from legal challenges, criminal prosecutions and, ultimately, term limits. What he had not foreseen was that all this would be so easy.
The president had expended relatively little money and effort getting elected, conducted a grim campaign full of threats and insults, and then coasted to victory. The opposition flapped in perpetual disarray. The press continued to obsess over him.
In the end, it was his thirst for attention that undid him. The president — as Alice Roosevelt Longworth observed of her grandfather, Teddy Roosevelt — “always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” That desire to hog the spotlight made the president an easy mark for flatterers, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Tesla’s Elon Musk — both of whom profited greatly.
Ironically, the agent of the president’s undoing had a White House office just down the hall from him. The vice president, too, was skilled in the art of flattery and careful not to upstage his boss. The president didn’t read much.
He had coasted through school on money and bluster. Even as commander in chief, he rarely perused his briefing papers, let alone that musty Oval Office copy of the Constitution. There, he would have found the 25th Amendment.
Enacted in 1967 after an Eisenhower heart attack and a Kennedy shooting, it allows the vice president, backed by a majority of Cabinet members, to declare a sitting president debilitated and assume the office himself. Which is exactly what transpired. The president’s mental faculties had long been in question, but electoral success had silenced the critics.
Eventually, however, the Cabinet, the Congress and just about everyone began to grow weary of the president’s act — the endless bombast, the endless sentences. When he announced his intention to run for a third term, few people cheered. The poor guy didn’t see it coming.
In fact, he still doesn’t know it came. The former president now passes his days in blissful oblivion at the new presidential library near Mar-a-Lago. From an exact replica of the Oval Office, he gives orders, signs documents and rages long into the night on Truth Social.
The staff is kind, and there is a working McDonald’s on the premises. The man who replaced him has turned out to be just as dangerously imperious, if less entertaining. He takes much satisfaction from having arranged a graceful and fitting retirement for his predecessor.
As allowed under the 25th Amendment, the new president has chosen to leave his old post vacant for now..
