I’ve asked one simple question repeatedly since November 2024:
“What would George Washington think?”
You know, back in the good old days before the “Gulf of America” and the threats to annex Canada, Panama, and Greenland?
In 1775, men and women of good conscience declared war against the tyranny of King George. Now, in 2025, America has another mad king to contend with, aided and abetted by apathetic/low information voters, spineless politicians, a pliant media, and a motley crew of cronies and sycophants who are in the process of enthusiastically divvying up the United States to the highest oligarchs.
Unelected bureaucrat, Elon Musk, spent well over $250mn to help elect Trump, and now this petty tyrant is ready to collect his debt through the agency DOGE run by barely legal tech nerds.
It’s fair to say that our Founding Fathers – honorable, decent, civic-minded people of character – couldn’t have conceived, in their wildest dreams, that a “third-rate” celebrity / inept businessman / serial predator / conman / felon could lie his way into the White House, not once, but twice. Even now, I have a hard time believing it. It’s comedy bordering on farce. As an author and screenwriter, if I had written this scenario as a book or a screenplay, it would’ve been rejected for being ludicrous and outlandish. Forget about Wag the Dog. This is White Potus come to life.
When you stop to consider it, it’s stunning; shameless. And breathtaking in its audacity. Yet here we are. As legendary actress and activist Jane Fonda so eloquently put it, “we’re living in our own documentary”. So, what side of history are you on? The British?
Ambush in plain sight
Since Trump was inaugurated, it’s been one crisis after the other: a helter-skelter of executive orders (EOs) designed to illegally dismantle federal departments, break contracts, eliminate badly needed services to the poor and sick around the world, can DEI, fire critical federal employees including disabled veterans, and likely to gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Between EOs, he’s insulted and snubbed our allies, cozied up to Vladimir Putin and other brutal dictators, crushed critics and any form of dissent, and rewritten history with regard to January 6. And all this in barely a month!
Stalin, himself no Einstein, put it succinctly: “You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.”
But let’s be honest, no one should profess shock or surprise at what’s going on or what’s about to happen. It’s been in the works for years, a conservative wet dream. The stars aligned for the GOP when they threw their spines, principles, and family values out the window and embraced the cult of MAGA.
And what do you know, it worked, at least in the short term. It’s not as if Trump and Musk hid what they planned. They shouted it from the rooftops. It was snake oil in plain sight. Project 2025 was the blueprint, despite the (wink, wink) disavowals on the campaign trail. Hogwash became the truth. Case in point: JD Vance’s sham about immigrants eating pets. How could anyone forget the havoc that little gambit caused? Schools and hospitals were evacuated. But it made for soundbites, and a lapdog media dutifully lapped it up like mother’s milk.
Heads in the sand
Even so, many warned, but few listened. The noise was just too much. Instead, voters (at least the gullible ones), gave this PT Barnum hustler his get-out-of-jail-free card despite two impeachments and 34 felony convictions.
How far we’ve fallen.
Remember the days when Jimmy Carter had to put his beloved peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid any impropriety? The brouhaha over Barack Obama’s tan suit? It sounds quaint, now. Behavior that would have sunk any other candidate became a shield for Teflon Don. It’s easy to say it’s a cult. (It’s a cult).
No, too many people chose to believe the balderdash or simply flat out ignored it. If I had a dime for every time I heard “how bad could a second Trump term be?”, I’d be a cryptocurrency billionaire. Or that Democrats were fear mongering. I heard it in my own family. “We survived the first Trump White House, didn’t we?” Covid notwithstanding. Or, “Of course, we know Trump’s lying his ass off, but that’s part of his schtick. Besides, he’s not going to do half of what he says.”
Well, as events have borne out, that bromide aged about as well as bad fish.
And to think that Democrats jettisoned a good, kind man with a roaring stock market – Joe Biden – over fears that he was “too old”, inflamed and cheered on by pundit sharks out for blood and ratings. Poor Kamala Harris was tasked with the impossible. And suddenly, the presidential election hinged on who worked at McDonald’s, a murky and questionable assassination attempt, and the price of eggs.
We were in an upside down, bizarro world where science was trashed and fact was denigrated. Being honest and decent was bad. Being cruel and incompetent was good.
The state of the union
The disconnect was on full display in the recent State of the Union address to Congress. It wasn’t a speech, it was a campaign rally, a tsunami of fiction. Republicans are too afraid to show their faces to hold in-person town halls because of constituent backlash going viral, but here they gladly kissed the ring and bent the knee.
As for Democrats, only Rep. Al Green dared to point out that the Emperor Had No Clothes. Boldness takes courage, something that is sorely lacking in Washington, DC. And yet ten DINOs voted to censure Rep. Green for raising cane, to the outrage of their base.
And now we’re embroiled in a senseless tariff war where everyone loses. Someone needs to put a muzzle on Mad Donald. Each day brings a new low. It’s a raging five-alarm fire, arsonists burning the house from within and doing so with impunity. The last line of defense is the judiciary, but lawsuits take time, and justice delayed is justice denied.
So while Puppet Trump plays golf and spouts nonsense, President Musk of the Kevlar vest wields a wrecking ball as his Space X rockets explode and pollute our atmosphere, free of FAA scrutiny.
Let’s get real. If Musk was truly interested in cutting out waste, fraud, and abuse, he would hire forensic accountants, not guys named Big Balls. It would be a slow, deliberate process, like Bill Clinton did. Instead, it’s a rush to crush. And why is that? Because they know that this is hugely unpopular, but who has the will to stop it? Laws are only as good as the people who enforce them, and right now, heroes, like eggs, are in short supply. And as Humpty Dumpty discovered, once something is dismantled it’s not easy to put it back together.
So it’s little wonder that old George – and most of the world – must be looking at our grand experiment with horror and disdain. Unfortunately, as long as this collection of clowns and crazies are in charge of this ongoing kleptocracy, and unless people wise up to what’s really going on, I see little hope of it getting better anytime soon. That is, if we even have future elections, for these aren’t the actions of people who fear consequences in 2026 or 2028. Their goal is to install a permanent, white, male-oriented, conservative autocracy. Now there’s talk of Donald Trump Jr running in 2028.
Buckle up, buttercup.
We want to hear your views. Please send any comments to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
