The Felon: America’s Mad King

Bridgerton fans have seen in the series how as George III became increasingly mentally ill and detached from reality, Queen Charlotte and George III's ministers effective took control of the government and during the last nine years of his reign, his son, the prince of Wales (later George IV) served as regent.  Fast forward to 2025 in America and we are witnessing a mad would be monarchy who frighteningly is surrounded by yes men, third rate cabinet members, and sycophants who only serve to enable the madness and detachment from objective reality, where non-stop lies and untruths and efforts to gaslight the American populace are the daily norm. Much of the MAGA base, feeling empowered to exhibit their worse hatreds and prejudices and "owning the libs", for now continue to cheer on the madness - but what happens when prices rise and the GOP makes devastating cuts to Medicaid upon which many MAGA voters rely is an open question.  Another open question is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will side with the U.S. Constitution and uphold rights to due process and freedom of speech or allow the madness and authoritarianism to continue. A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican looks at where America finds itself caught in madness, incompetence and outright cruelty. Here age excerpts:

Last Monday [a week ago], Donald Trump, seeking to fortify public support for his massive, across-the-board tariffs, posted: “The United States has a chance to do something that should have been done DECADES AGO. Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).”

By Wednesday, Trump had caved. His witless, incoherent, and incompetently executed policies—his administration had imposed tariffs on an Australian territory that is home to no people but to many penguins—created a financial panic that risked devastating the American economy and triggering a global recession. Trillions of dollars of stock-market value evaporated in a matter of days.

A man who has spent most of his life, and much of his presidency, gaslighting the public ran into the brick wall of reality. Misinformation, disinformation, bullying, and nasty social-media posts proved ineffective. Stock and bond markets weren’t intimidated by the threats of the aging president.  Trump fought reality, and reality won.

WE’RE FEWER THAN 90 DAYS into Trump’s second term; many more collisions between the president and the real world will come. So what can we expect, based on what we’ve witnessed?

We won’t see qualities from Trump that we haven’t seen before, but we will see them in a more extreme version. He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore,” a White House official familiar with Trump’s thinking told The Washington Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”

Trump is America’s Mad King.

Compounding the problem is that the president has surrounded himself with men and women who are utterly loyal to him, unwilling to challenge him, and certainly unable to contain him. . . . On top of that, this is an administration filled with third-rate intellects, conspiracy theorists, and misfits. They aren’t qualified to manage Oak Hill, Alabama, or Monowi, Nebraska, let alone the federal government. Their combination of maliciousness and incompetence has produced enormous, dangerous, and in some cases lethal disruptions. Some examples:

• The formula Trump used to calculate his tariffs was not just ill-advised but nonsensical as well.
• In his mania to purge diversity, equity, and inclusion content, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave orders so vague that the Defense Department flagged photos of the Enola Gay for deletion from all websites and social-media posts. (The B-29 bomber that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima was named after the pilot’s mother, Enola Gay Tibbets. One wit on social media said, “Enola Gay will henceforth be known as Enola Straight.”)
• Another order by Hegseth led to the removal of Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library but left copies of Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, on the bookshelves.
• In an appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy and the lead negotiator tasked with ending the war in Ukraine, was not only effusive in his praise of Russia’s totalitarian leader, Vladimir Putin, but even repeated Kremlin propaganda . . . 

  The Department of Health and Human Services, which is run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, hired a discredited vaccine skeptic to study whether vaccines cause autism. 

  Amid a measles resurgence in the United States, Kennedy is also making unsupported and misleading claims. ProPublica reported that leaders at the CDC ordered staff not to release its assessment linking the spread to areas where many are unvaccinated.

• The National Institutes of Health, the global leader in biomedical research, is getting irreparably damaged by dramatic and reckless cuts being made by people who have no knowledge of the agencies they are gutting.
• Also being decimated is PEPFAR, the global AIDS initiative started by President George W. Bush in 2003, which has saved more than 25 million lives; until the Trump era, it enjoyed strong bipartisan support. PEPFAR is estimated to save 1.6 million lives each year.

This kind of malicious incompetence is evident in almost everything Trump and those in his administration touch. You can be sure, too, that there are many more similar acts of ineptitude we don’t yet know about. And Trump still has more than 1,350 days to go.

THE SECOND TRUMP PRESIDENCY, more even than the first, will be defined by Trump’s authoritarian desires and his ineptitude. It might be that the latter impedes the former; ruthless efficiency can help in the dismantling of democratic institutions, but having an administration filled with freaks and fools can impede that effort and catalyze public disaffection and even resistance.

We’re already seeing that reflected in a handful of election results, in mass protests across the country, in focus groups and public-opinion polls, and in the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which provides a snapshot of the U.S. economy’s health. Early this month, we learned that index had hit its second-lowest reading since 1952, dragged down by fears of higher prices and unemployment. Expectations for inflation hit the highest level in 44 years.

But here’s the danger: Vindictive narcissists like Trump hold grudges and harbor resentments, blame everything on someone else, and weaponize information. They have a mean, even sadistic, side, belittling others to feel better about themselves and using, abusing, and discarding people.

So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.

Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost. It didn’t have to be this way. There are 77,302,580 co-authors of this catastrophe. They have left a crimson stain on this Republic.

While I worry about children in MAGA households (for numerous reasons), I hope the adults truly feel some suffering.