SAINT DONALD HAS ARRIVED. CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT . . . .

Welcome to the Church of Trump who’s only intercessor is the Donald himself. He doesn’t heal the lame or offer entry to heaven for his followers, but he demands unquestioning fealty or woe betide his critics upon whom the wrath of the Justice Department or FBI will fall. His sermons sound increasingly like claims to have been personally anointed to carry out god’s will upon the United States; whether he actually believes in his holiness or this is just more Trump-pucky, only he may know. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s grant of virtual unrestricted presidential immunity he has now explicitly claimed that whatever he does is above the law: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” his Truth Social feed’s new masthead now reads. DT frequently labels centrist Democrats as “communists”. He issues edicts in flurries rather than systematically, and they range from plastic drinking straws in federal commissaries to summary firing of thousands of congressionally mandated federal employees without cause to imposing arbitrary tariffs against friendly nations, never mind that the rebound from them seems likely to be inflation -- possibly rampant -- for his worshipers. We have seen others claiming to be god’s chosen leaders, and it has never ended well.

Whether Trump will obey any adverse court determinations, even should they come ultimately from his personally selected U.S. Supreme Court, now seems in serious doubt. The spineless MAGAs in Congress will never pass a bill of impeachment no matter how flagrantly illegal the conduct. DT is free now to shred the U.S. Constitution. Separation of church from state? He has resurrected a newly empowered White House Office of Faith and installed it in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House because -- and I kid you not -- Christians in the U.S. are being persecuted and discriminated against. Urgent steps are needed to “defend the rights of Christians”, so said DT on 6 February 2025. Here are the real numbers: 63% of Americans identify as Christians; 29% as unaffiliated, 2% as Jewish and 1% each Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu.

A free press? He persistently calls the legacy press the “enemy of the people” and has banned Associated Press from the White House, Air Force One, and other access to the president allegedly because AP refuses to recognize the name change to the Gulf of Trump. I don’t think people recognize the magnitude of this disestablishment of the AP which has twice as many domestic and foreign bureaus as the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times combined. Major newspapers and broadcasters of all political stripe rely upon the AP for content. It is a nonprofit cooperative, an essential news source and far more relevant than the extreme-right fringe operations favored by Trump and now ensconced in the White House. In addition Trump has evicted NBC News and the New York Times from the Pentagon and installed instead pro-Trump and hyper-conservative media organizations. He relishes filing lawsuits against the media he opposes, extracting settlements from a few which choose not to maintain costly defenses and causing huge expenditures for legal fees to already cash-strapped media even in cases which go nowhere.

Meanwhile almost overnight the Justice Department has been thoroughly weaponized; only Trump enemies will be prosecuted, and even the mayor of New York City earned a free pass from federal corruption charges by agreeing that NYC will help clear out the undocumented aliens. The FBI is about to become a Trump-pocket organ, and our health care system is in the hands of a brain-worm crackpot who declared he would “not take sides on 9/11” (? hello ?) and that Anne Frank had more freedom hiding from the Nazis than Americans under vaccine mandates!

Trump and acolytes are embracing ever more extreme positions by the hour. JD Vance VP, the shameless political chameleon, positively stunned European leaders by instructing them to embrace Neo-Nazi parties in their midst, specifically describing Germany's extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland and going out of his way to meet with the AfD candidate for German chancellor. Born forty years after the holocaust, Vance is blatantly tone deaf to history and utterly insensitive to the suffering it inflicted on the European continent. DT who called it “a very brilliant speech” is even worse, there being no present or past dictators he doesn’t admire.

Robert Weissman, president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, nailed it by pointing out that Trump may be president, but Elon Musk is definitely now the CEO of the United States. Elon’s increasingly bizarre ideas and beliefs have come to be government policy to the detriment of the poor, the sick, the liberal, or just different people domestically or world-wide. Admirers of Musk -- and I concede there are still many, perhaps even a majority -- were put off by liberal criticism of his Nazi salute. We were told he was just being enthusiastic to his audience, or that we throw around the Nazi label too loosely, or that he’s supported Jewish causes in the past (“some of [his] best friends are . . . .” -- you fill in the blank, but we all know, wink wink, that this be the bigot’s anthem). But, if there was doubt, his full-throated endorsement of the AfD has proven us right. Addressing an AfD party rally (via virtual appearance) on 25 January, Elon stated, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that” and praised AfD as "the best hope for Germany." Musk and other big money right wingers will next round spend insane sums to try to insure U.S. elections swing even further to the right -- if we actually bother with federal elections next round since our Great Leader claims all blue (and even some red) state elections are heavily tainted by fraud and might just try to suspend them by federal edict because, after all, he is the “one who Saves his country.”

All this as the government almost daily shuts down more and more websites of federal agencies, removing possible watchdog activity from outside after having fired Inspectors General and thus eliminating watchdog activity from inside. At the same time, Elon Musk’s minions are accessing our IRS tax records and are capable of interfering with who know what federal payments by unsupervised messing with Bureau of Fiscal Service computers in the Treasury Department.

If this actually plays out as Trump & Co. intend, can we predict what this country and our allies will look like in two years? The Constitution essentially already in tatters, the courts and Congress, already diminished, will be a shadow of their present selves. The military, already mobilized to perform non-police functions at the southern border, will be increasingly politicized and directed illegally to perform police functions in more liberal communities which refuse to carry out Trumpian directives, perhaps even to fire upon alleged suspects. Prices will continue to rise as more countries refuse to toe the Trump line when he imposes tariffs on their products and inflation grows as the federal deficit increases because of Trump tax breaks for the super rich Muskers. Abortion may well be banned nationally or at least almost impossible for all but the very wealthy. And it will be back in the closet for the LGBTQ population, but you can forget about “don’t ask, don’t tell” because it will be perfectly acceptable to out and discriminate. The Department of Education will be gone and dozens of thousands of teaching positions defunded, free public education be damned. The Consumer Protection Bureau and Environmental Protection Agency hollow shells with few employees and zero funding. Large chunks of the fifteen million undocumented residents of the U.S. either already deported or locked in concentration camps on the southern border or in Guantanamo and thousands of American businesses and farms crippled by the absence of such unfortunately affordable labor. Good luck with job searches if you’re not a straight white Christian -- but OK if you have a history of spousal abuse and sexual predation. Internationally Ukraine, partitioned like Vichy France, will disappear as a European democracy and be returned to the embrace of Putin/Russia. I predict Trump will yank the U.S. out of NATO, perhaps anticipating Article 5 united action if he actually seizes Greenland.

It might even be illegal to criticize the president.

Too surrealistically dystopian? I continue to hope so . . . but I fear not, and I could go on (and will in future postings) enumerating outrages. But I’ve probably agitated all of us more than enough for today.

It used to be a joke, but I increasingly wonder how large the emigration of wealthier American liberals will be to live outside the U.S., perhaps permanently! But don’t worry about us; we have Topaz, our rescue dog, and it likely would be too dislocating for her (and us) to relocate abroad, so I guess I’ll just keep trying to write these essays which I hope you find both amusing as well as provocative. On tour for the next couple of weeks, back next month. In the meantime, as before I’d sincerely appreciate your help to enlarge the conversation by passing this along and inviting some people we might enlist just to keep liberal discourse alive.

Arne Werchick, after fifty years as a litigation attorney with emphasis on medical-legal issues, pro tem judge, law writer and lecturer, former Presiding Arbitrator of the State Bar of California, and past president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, moved to Hawaii and lives with his wife Ruth and their rescue dog Topaz. He can be contacted at liberalmind@werchick.com.