"An American Dictatorship," episode 1, take 40

I was late to today's catastrophic news, the 20th such day of double the news. This was a mistake. Trump's catastrophes come like unending cyclones; miss a few hours and you've missed the latest megadisaster. I shall never repeat this mistake.

I had already begun to write a piece based on already overtaken news from yesterday — an update. Reported was that "state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits" have filed more than 40 lawsuits that "seek to erect a bulwark in the federal courts against [inaccurate title] President Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive actions that have upended much of the federal government and challenged the Constitution’s system of checks and balances."

What I had written on cyberpaper consumed, fortunately, only three sentences: "Who thinks Trump will suddenly begin obeying existing law? He's determined to rule as an autocrat and so autocratic he shall be. In his typhoidal brain he imagines that some pliant legislative bod y has passed a Hitlerian Enabling Act, except this one is just for him." I then realized my mistake.

Enter today's materializing news, which answered, or rather annihilated, the question. Its launch landed on Friday, when 19 attorneys general, imbued by quaint fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, filed a detonating lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s use of "special government employees" — Elon Musk & Friends — to access Americans' personal information and, while they're at it, dismantle the federal government.

Judge John Coughenour, Western District of Washington state, agreed with the attorneys general. Ruling as any coherent, unintoxicated federal judge would rule, he affirmed "the Constitution is not something with which the government may play policy games. That’s how the rule of law works."

Trump's counteroffensive was to send in his Schutzstaffel of pettifogging velociraptors, unburdened by niceties such as America's founding document. In court the hideously fanged S.S. declared that a judge's order even temporarily obstructing Musk's carefree destruction "impinged on the [autocrat's] absolute powers over the executive branch, which they argued the courts could not usurp."

On the court order they slapped the label "markedly overboard," demanding that the vile, anti-authoritarian lawsuit be dismissed or enjoined. It was that which violated the Constitution, they argued from Wonderland. In blood they scrawled "[the order] draws an impermissible and anti-constitutional distinction" by overlooking — irony alert — the separation of powers; it also denied the Berlin-relocated chancellery's right to do as it damn well pleased.

There was more, and the more is unmistakable. An official dictatorship is about to descend on our constitutional republic and representative democracy. Imminent Vice Despot JD Vance announced that federal courts and their judges cannot "control the executive’s legitimate power." He may be a Yale Law grad but evidently he's never heard of Marbury v.

Madison, 1803, from which sprang the never-violated doctrine of judicial review.

Not evident but certain is that the be-all diktator has never heard of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall either. Ranting in classic Teutonic style, Trump spittled that no mere federal court could block his personalized Reich wishes. This he executed by deploying his severely diseased brain's severely limited vocabulary: The court's action was a disgrace, and no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.

I ask again, even though the question is bootless — no one would gainsay the now-bloody obvious answer to Who thinks Trump will suddenly begin obeying existing law? When the heretofore invisible JD emerged from his undisclosed location to reveal that no U.S. court can control the power of Trump's fledgling authoritarian state, and when its bossman added that no judge should be allowed to make that kind of a decision, it was all over.

In should, Trump was saying will. For he is the visionary one who harbors some incomprehensively legitimate, Nietzschean Will to Power. It would seem he was trying to beat his Austrian predecessor's self-entitled Enablement, which took 51 days. Success. Trump's took only 20.

And to my country I say, So long, it was nice knowing you — but please do come back someday; asap, if you're interested.