The sprawling roots of an authoritarian diktat

"We’re going to be celebrating big on Saturday," said Trump about his Immaculate Conception Day Tanks & Troops Procession. He then celebrated the squalid extravaganza's larger objective: "If there’s any protestor who wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.... They will be met with heavy force."

And so, in step with the Constitution's other annihilations, down goes the First Amendment's guarantee of the people's right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Most of them not yet aggrieved soon will be, which they'll need to keep to themselves or risk jackbooted bloodbaths.

A U.S. official later told The New York Times that discussions were taking place inside the Trump administration, including at the Pentagon, about deploying National Guard or active-duty troops to cities beyond Los Angeles.

"Discussions" translated: the it-can-happen-here plan already in motion, as imagined by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth.

The Pentagon estimates that Trump's Wehrmacht parade will relieve Treasury of $134 million. Of additional calculation is this historical pre-history of America's weekend blight, absent only its war-hunger retelling.

My fervid hope is that Reichstag enabler Warren Davidson (F-OH) relieves Treasury of much more than $134 million so that his exultant dream, too, may be realized: superabundant funds for NIH to "conduct or support research to advance the understanding of [misunderstood] Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Unimaginable is a worthier study, since psychiatric exploration-assured is that Trump is deranged — indeed, frightfully psychotic. Yet unearthing TDS's perfectly apt double meaning is of far greater import, which is to say, Trump's supportive throngs are as dreadfully out of touch with everyday reality as he is.

Acute case in point. Yesterday the hydrophobic manchild foamed that California's governor — whom he calls Gavin Newscum when drawing on his co-syndrome of infantile tonguage — is "causing a lot of death." In the psychotic mind, no deaths can morph into multiples of manslaughter; in Trump's, Q.E.D.

Given such preexistent evidence of the self-idolizing authoritarian's grave derangement, our intrepid researchers must dig into the still unfathomable —

Among the hundreds of clinically diseased options available for adoption, why in the name of electoral choice did American millions select the even graver derangement of embracing a megalomaniacal halfwit who'd been openly promoting the systematic assassination of the nation's founding principles they claimed to cherish?

Preliminary findings suggest the neuroscientific certainty that Trump's rolling thunder of homicidal glee is more accurately diagnosed as the suicidal request of more than 77 million Americans — numbers thrice MAGA Asylum's headcount. With nothing more than raving madness aforethought, America's commonplace rube rabble loaded the undisguised killer's pistol — and fired it at the republic's head.

Thus reads the medical chart of the once-free United States. Prognosis, undetermined.