Lame Duck Despot
Donald Trump's second term has collapsed. Usually this happens to a president after the midterms of his second term. But it happened now in the spring of 2026. In trying to force everything to happen all at once, the courts said no. It started with a few judges last year. But it has grown to nearly all courts this spring. Day after day, week after week, Trump is losing in courts.
Courts are where we have and will stop Trump.
Judges have finally caught on that the DOJ has wrecked the the presumption of regularity.
Every Judge asked to grant Trump the power to re-write election rules on a per state basis has rejected that demand.
And this year has seen a collapse of the DOJ. They are bringing forward ridiculous indictments and are losing almost every single one of them.
The second indictment of James Comey, dead.
The egregious, illegal indictment of Davey Hearn, embarrassingly dead. The consequences of this illegal indictment could be dire for so many.
The indictments of the Broadview 6, dead, and the consequences of that are coming.
And in July, it got worse still. And as Trump tries to move forward with Todd Blanche as indefinite acting Attorney General, the DOJ cracks further as the fallout from unlawful indictments will reverberate for years. And it will harm other departments, starting with the Department of the Interior, which oversees landmarks and parks in DC.
Where does that leave us at the start of our sixth August under a Trump administration?
We're in the middle of a chaotic mess. Trump is trying to restart import tariffs, which are largely responsible for holding GDP under 2% growth. They are also partially responsible for keeping inflation above 2% his entire presidency. The war in Iran is nowhere near resolved, as Trump prefers to manipulate financial markets week after week, leaving any possibility of a lasting cease fire in permanent doubt. The GOP is in danger of seeing the Democrats take a 52-seat majority in the Senate come February.
Furthermore, Trump has been weaker and less attentive in his second term. He spends a ridiculous amount of time approving AI slop to post on his broken social media platform. His Cabinet meetings are just a round of praise and compliments to the old man - our late era despot. These are the most embarrassing recurring events in Trump's second term. Trump clearly doesn't have the stamina he had even two years ago on the campaign trail. He dozes off. He does press conferences sitting down.
And through it all, Trump and his administration are now rushing everything as the midterms approach. The incredible ICE mobilization and arrests in Minneapolis were supposed to be the start of a sustainable DHS surge to deport 100,000 people. It wasn't sustainable, nor did it shock the people of Minneapolis into submission. Trump ordered the DOJ to rush ahead with indictments that prosecutors knew wouldn't stick (again, see the David Hearn saga).
The old man cannot rush the creation of a 20-year dictatorship. It's too late. Augusto Pinochet became dictator of Chile at age 57. His reign of terror lasted 17 years.
Francisco Franco was 46 when he took power in 1936 and stayed in power for over 40 years before fading away and having his regime toppled by a decentralized opposition movement.
Both Pinochet and Franco controlled horrifying fascist regimes. Franco's was more deeply entrenched, supported by the UK and US, and tied to the Catholic Church. Pinochet's regime was also supported by the UK and US. Both started out with brutality and murder to shock and pacify their societies.
Pinochet is the one I think of more often because he's of my time. I was born a few months before his US-supported coup in 1973. And Pinochet's murder machine went straight to work. Five days after taking power in a violent coup that killed democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, Pinochet's military started slaughtering his opponents in detention centers, primarily Estadio Chille, where it is estimated that 3,000 were killed in September 1973. The most prominent victim was folk singer and leftist advocate, Victor Jara.
Imagine Richard Nixon ordering the torture and murder of CSNY, or Donald Trump doing the same to Bruce Springsteen.
See, that's what Trump should have done on January 21, 2025. He should have had Bruce Springsteen tortured and killed. And thousands upon thousands of others. There should have been executions in the streets, carried out by the military and the DHS. And hell, the cops, too. All the police should have started shooting leftists in the head in our 4 major cities. There should have been a great, bloodsoaked purge.
But thankfully for us leftists, there wasn't. Trump and Miller blew their opportunity to start a 20 year dictatorship. And now it is too late to force it into existence. Now all we have is Trump naming or renaming both infrastructure and architecture, his family's incredible, naked corruption, and the sad cult of Republicans loyal to him who will spiral down when he dies.
And he will die. That's the final stage of a despot. But before that final stage, we got a new late stage with the debut of Trump's first new hairpiece since December 2024.
