Terry Bracy: A president Is a person, not a country

Speaking before the United Nations recently, Donald Trump again conflated himself with the country he temporarily and tragically leads. He warned that he is considering whether to “annihilate” Iran and “drive it into hell.”

There are at least three problems with this threat: first, such a declaration is probably a war crime; second, he treats war as if it were a singular decision requiring no congressional approval; and third, while claiming to speak for America – you, me, and the rest of the entire population – he speaks only for himself. Under the laws of the American Republic, decisions of war and peace require congressional approval. That notwithstanding, the incumbent President has written a new game plan for avoiding those bothersome hurdles in his race to claim absolute power. All that is required is a supplicant Congress, a right-wing partisan Supreme Court, a political cult hungry for power, and the nerve of a bank robber.

Donald Trump learned his arrogance from his mentor, Roy Cohen, who himself was schooled in the art of creating chaos as the red- baiting counsel for the nefarious Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohen taught his students to take politics personally and to leave no enemy standing. Always claim you are right, Cohen counseled, and never back down.

Unlike his first term, which had guardrails of experienced Republican figures in key jobs, Trump’s second is populated by hard-nosed right-wing apparatchiks who arrived with a plan to destroy the nonpartisan Civil Service. Key to the so-called Project 2025 was to move quickly with Executive Orders to “flood the zone” and outrun objectors who could respond only through the slow-moving courts. To disagree with him, Trump claimed, was a treasonous attack on America itself.

Not long after Inauguration Day came what the president termed “Liberation Day,” when Trump, without the benefit of sound economic advice or legal standing, placed upon allies and competitors alike a long list of punishing tariffs. The victims included widely disparate targets such as China, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, and Italy.

Not since the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs of the 1930’s accelerated the arrival of the Great Depression had such a monkey wrench been thrown into America’s economic engine. It took a divided Supreme Court almost a year to decide what the Constitution plainly stated – that tariffs and taxes were the province of Congress. By then the damage had been done. The solid economy the MAGA cult inherited from President Biden was moving in reverse from farm to factory.

With Congress in his pocket, Trump passed his “Big Beautiful Bill,” an 870-page manual on how to reverse a century of social and economic progress for working people. The chief authors of the policy are two Christian Nationalist aides, Steven Miller and Russell Vought. Vought is the big bean counter who, from his perch at the Office of Management and Budget, has been casing his bureaucratic enemies for years and now has the weapons to destroy them.

He is the brains. Steven Miller, who turned U.S.The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) into the President’s personal army, the poorly trained, heavily armed, lawless personal army force on America’s streets today. Miller is the brawn. And he responds only to the dictates of President “I”.

Trump’s personalization of the presidency has by now reached into every important element of U.S. policy. He has made it a mission to destroy NATO, the Western alliance that won the Cold War and has kept the peace for 80eighty years. Instead, for reasons never articulated, he has turned America’s future in the direction of Russia, a state ruled by force with an economy smaller than California’s. He has infected our nonpartisan Civil Service System with unqualified MAGA plants overseeing professionals of twice their ability. By acting as a bully on the world stage, he is well on the way to ruining Americans’ standing as, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “the shining city upon a hill.”

Worse, Trump has ignored fundamental constitutionally established concepts of our government, including freedom of speech, while routinely violating prohibitions against self-enrichment in office, paid-for pardons, misuse of government funds in dozens of ways, and starting wars of choice. His rationale? All of this is done on the claim that Everything he does, we support. We don’t. The only way we can begin reclaiming the America we love is to beat him at the polls, like his ally Orban of Hungary, so decisively that no oxygen remains for his lies.