The Likes of Which You Have Never Seen

Through the iron gate to MAGA macht frei.

President Donald J. Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on March 04, 2025.

Pity that the Supreme Court gave him immunity.

Pity that the Saddam’s parliament of a Republican Congress bows in abject subservience to the White House, and certainly will never impeach him.

Pity that his Dr. Caligari’s cabinet of wildly unqualified misfits will never invoke the 25th Amendment.

Because last night we all got to witness the Fourth Reich goose stepping with full impunity to occupy the former democracy called America. It was two solid hours of Trump not just boasting but obliviously confessing to a series of crimes against the constitution, liberal democracy in general and the very stability of the world.

Ignoring court orders. Usurping Congressional authority. Annexing sovereign nations. Tariff wars that are a tax on American businesses and consumers. Deputizing brownshirts to dismantle whole agencies and fire government workers willy-nilly. Withdrawing from global organizations and treaties. Packing the Justice Department and FBI with cronies tasked with vengeance against his political rivals. Drill, baby, drilling and pipeline, baby, piplining the fossil fuels that are destroying the earth. Decimating the government infrastructure for monitoring climate destruction. All of that lawlessness and predation he took credit for in all the familiar ways.

With all the lies and incoherent rambling, Trump brought to mind Robert Durst in the climax of the documentary The Jinx, having just denied murder on camera, taking a bathroom break and muttering into his still-hot mic about being the killer. Trump, in all his pathological narcissism, himself was confessing to the highest crimes and misdemeanors in presidential history. Not just confessing, but gloating for the congressional Republicans he has variously bullied and hypnotized into total submission as he unleashes his executive-order blitzkrieg on rule of law. It’s no longer astonishing, but it’s still sickening.

On ending the quest for clean energy, “Drill, baby, drill.”

On Greenland, a territory of Denmark, “One way or another, we’re gonna get it.”

On the protection of civil liberties, marginalized minorities and human rights, “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. And it is gone. It is gone.” To be replaced, of course, with Make America White Again. From now on, he said, hiring in both government and the private sector will be based “on skill and competence, not race or gender.” That from the man who is firing skilled and expert bureaucrats, agency heads and military leaders wholesale to be replaced by inexperienced and incompetent extremists whose only qualifications are total fealty to MAGA and Trump. Such double-speak is what they call “Orwellian,” but it is also classically Trumpian in railing against the very outrages he has himself committed. He demands “a mandatory death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer,” yet has just pardoned en masse the Jan. 6 insurrectionists whose mob violence claimed police lives.

He professes respect for free speech by claiming, “I’ve stopped all government censorship,” days after demanding that colleges and universities clamp down on “illegal protests” — by which he means pro-Palestinian protests — and to jail or deport protestors without due process. If you’re looking to characterize such hypocritical and dishonest rhetoric, might I suggest “unpeaceably dissemble”?

Meanwhile, in denouncing the supposed Deep State of professionals executing and enforcing the laws of the land, he bragged, “The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are gone.” This he said under the approving gaze of Elon Musk, in the balcony, who with his erratic gang of adolescent demolition nerds is illegally hitting DELETE on the very programs that “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

In Texas and New Mexico, the once eradicated childhood disease measles is raging, in one case fatally, which is a microcosm of, and eloquent metaphor for, the destruction wrought by MAGA ideology.

Thus was his rant so filled with self owns, most especially, and most hilariously and most tragically: “The problem is the bad guys have no respect for the law.” Dear God.

Which reminds me, his delusional worldview — a universe in which Trump is at the center and all existence is a projection from his sacred self — has him as a living Christ. Which is of course just what his bible-thumping Christian nationalist cult followers want to hear. And so great applause when he referred to his attempted assassination at a Butler, Pa., campaign rally. One attendee died of a gunshot wound, but that’s okay because the King of Kings was only grazed.

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said. “I believe that.”

That is how lunatics and zealots and cult leaders and dictators think, and how they lure fools into their thrall. In fact, please put The Jinx out of your mind and think of another iconic film: the previously alluded to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the surreal 1920 German expressionist allegory for the brutal and mindless exertion of authority. As sociologist and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer put it, “Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool — a technique foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale.”

Or as another commentator characterized it, “Germany’s obedience to authority and unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority.” Or put yet another way, MAGA macht frei.

Yes, the Fourth Reich is fully underway. And at the moment there is absolutely nothing to stop it.