Posted on October 26, 2025
MAGA-Godzilla!
Trump fundamentally transforms America
by
Daniel Clark
Remember
how righteously angry Republicans were at Barack Obama's stated goal of fundamentally
transforming America? Nobody would want
to fundamentally transform something he loves, we correctly reasoned. What he was promising was nothing short of
ending our nation as we know it.
Donald Trump successfully tapped
into the voters' anxiety about this threat with his campaign to "Make America
Great Again." Expectations that this
would mean a reinforcement of our American values seemed well founded for much
of his first term, when he reversed a slew of Obama's executive orders, signed
a doctrinaire Republican tax cut, and appointed constitutionalists to the
federal bench. Even though he's not a
traditional Republican, and his politics are not philosophically grounded, many
of his actions were, broadly speaking, conservative.
We could
see during the 2024 campaign that his second administration would be radically
different. The unspoken theme of the
Republican National Convention was, "Hey Republicans, Buzz Off!" He created his own platform, which promoted
governance by an ideologically vacant non-principle called "common sense." He conspicuously omitted the party's
traditional pro-life plank from this new platform, and then had pro-life
delegates systematically blocked from serving on the platform committee, and
instructed the committee to vote on his new document without any opportunity
for debate or amendment.
One of the
two prime time speakers on the opening night of the convention was Teamsters
president Sean O'Brien, who is so not-a-Republican that his appearance did not
even include an endorsement of the nominee.
The other was Amber Rose, a hip hop artist and model who had recently
given an interview in which she praised Satanists because "they help a lot of
women get abortions." The rest of the
four-day event never became much more Republican-friendly than that.
After his
election, Trump stocked his transition team with people who had been Democrats
until very recently, including Tulsi Gabbard, Howard Lutnick and Robert Kennedy
Jr., all of whom he subsequently appointed to positions in his administration. As a result, we now have a Director of
National Intelligence who is literally anti-national intelligence and imagines Edward
Snowden to be some kind of a hero, a Secretary of Commerce who wants to punish
commerce with onerous taxes on imports, and a Surgeon General who believes our
eating habits are a federal responsibility.
With much
of his administration populated by the opposing side, it's no wonder Trump's
policies suffer from such incongruity.
He deployed Elon Musk and his newly created Department of Government Efficiency
to reduce the size and scope of federal bureaucracy, but at the same time created
a new entitlement, by which Uncle Sam manages taxpayer-subsidized savings accounts
for people starting at birth. He blows
up speedboats in the Caribbean on the basis that drug dealers are murderers who
are mass-poisoning the American people, but he pardoned libertarian heartthrob Ross
Ulbrecht, who, if applying the same terminology, murdered countless people by
distributing poisonous drugs through his "Silk Road" dark web marketplace. He calls his IVF policy pro-life, even though
it encourages the creation of "spare" human embryos, which people are free to discard
as if they were cleaning out their refrigerators.
Late in his first term, Trump
christened himself "the law and order president," but he now governs according
to the "no controlling legal authority" evasion that was once offered by Vice
President Al Gore with regard to the use of his office to solicit campaign
donations. This is basically an
assertion that a law is not the law until it has been validated by the
judiciary.
Trump has
implemented multiple policies that clearly violate the law as it is written,
such as justifying his "Liberation Day" tariffs by declaring a phony emergency,
shipping illegal aliens to foreign prisons without due process, and postponing
the Tiktok ban indefinitely, in direct violation of the law that required it. Each of these actions is assumed to be legal
until a lawsuit is filed by someone who is found to have standing, and the case
works its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, which then rules against the
administration, by which time the issue may be moot anyway. So the passing of a bill through Congress and
the signing of it by the president is no longer sufficient to create a
law. Is Schoolhouse Rock aware of
this?
That's not
the only manner in which Trump has usurped the legislative power of Congress. He tries to create laws by executive order,
ranging from symbolic trivialities like renaming the Department of Defense to
massive undertakings like eliminating the Department of Education. Not only is he dissolving the constitutional separation
of powers, but he is also eroding our system of federalism, by suggesting the
nationalization of election laws, and threatening to take over the policing of
cities.
The
obvious counterargument to Trump's offenses against the Constitution is his
appointment of constitutional conservatives to the federal bench, but that was
the result of his marriage of convenience to the pro-life movement, which is
now over. Trump has ended his agreement
to outsource his judicial nominations to the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist
Society, and instead has taken a more Trump-centric approach. His first appellate court appointee of his
second term is the fittingly Nosferatu-faced Emil Bove, who has no discernible
judicial philosophy apart from loyalty to Donald Trump.
Trump's foreign policy has been
characterized by a realignment similar to the one he has initiated in domestic policy,
in that it succeeds in distinguishing good guys from bad guys only occasionally
and coincidentally. Its amorality is
described by its supporters as "realism," in contrast to the "idealist" paradigm
of America as a bulwark against tyranny.
Qatar, the
nation that harbors the leadership of Hamas, has become our new bestie,
enjoying Trump's promise of American military protection akin to Article 5 of
the NATO charter, as well as joint training with the US Air Force at its base
in Idaho. Meanwhile, our unwavering ally
Denmark must now live in fear of its old friend the United States, for no
better reason than that it owns a property that is coveted by our
president. Trump has often been scathing,
and even threatening, in his criticisms of many of our NATO allies, but he has
made a cause celebre of Viktor Orban, who has been busily turning Hungary into a
Chinese puppet state. He habitually
brags that he is liked and respected by the leaders of China, Russia and North
Korea, but he delights in belittling Canada.
Perhaps most outrageously, he claims the Soviet Union was right to
invade Afghanistan in 1980, but the United States was wrong to do it in
2001. Try finding the realism in that.
Since
retaking office in January, Trump has been unmooring America from its
foundational principle of free enterprise, by having the government take
partial ownership of multiple corporations.
When he's not "investing" in Intel or taking executive control of US
Steel by way of a "golden share," he's warning retailers not to raise prices in
reaction to his tariffs. He celebrates
the amount of revenue he has raised from thesee punitive taxes on importers, which
are a direct transfer of capital from the American economy to the federal
government.
So, to
summarize: There is no longer any principled opposition to the Democratic
Party. The Constitution is no longer the Republican
Party's guiding set of legal principles.
Our foreign policy no longer values fundamental human rights, the
loyalty of allies, or fidelity to international commitments. Partial state ownership of private businesses,
heretofore known as fascism, is fast becoming the norm. Democrats are being invited to become
Republicans, and hostile foreign nations to become allies, without being
required to change the ways in which they think and behave. Delineations among the powers and
responsibilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches have been further
obscured, as have those between the federal government and the states. Our foundational structures are being
challenged to the point that even the definition of "law" is being called into
question.
Donald
Trump got elected by promising to return America to what it had once been, but
now he's transforming it into something it was never intended to be. Anybody who doesn't see this needs only to
observe the unprincipled vacuole that now bears the name of the Republican Party,
and know that it serves as a prototype for what he has in mind for our nation
as a whole.
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