Terminator Trump Must Be Toppled Now
Clearly unfit for office, he deserves to be impeached. Before it’s too late.
Michael Harris YesterdayThe Tyee
Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker.Our journalism is supported by readers like you. Click here to support The Tyee.
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Ground him. Protesters march with a giant inflatable Donald Trump in Los Angeles on Oct. 18. Photo by Ethan Swope, the Canadian Press.Listen to this article
12 min
Trump’s fit of pique decision to “terminate” trade talks with Canada and boost present tariffs by 10 per cent is typical of this thin-skinned tyrant with a perverse appetite for retribution.
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Seven million of his own citizens recently rejected his power-grabbing tantrums when they filled streets to march and shout, “No kings!”
And now, keying off Trump’s Canadian ad tantrum, the Wall Street Journal has mocked the president for claiming “he’s not ‘a king,’ but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.”
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has it right. Donald Trump is a grave threat to democracy who disregards the rule of law while engaging in “blackmail on a daily basis.”
Indeed, given the gravity of Trump’s transgressions against freedom and brutal policies on health care, immigration, and international law, it has become clear that the man who would be king should be removed from office as unfit to be president. Before it is too late.
Normally an American politician would take notice that his acts have sparked mass protest in all 50 states. In fact, Trump has got the whole world on edge. That’s why the No Kings rallies spilled over into Canada and Europe.
Trump’s response? He posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet-fighter over Times Square in New York, dropping feces on protesters. This stupendous vulgarity was posted on the president’s personal Truth Social account.
Trump couldn’t have registered his utter contempt for his own citizens more blatantly. Or showed more graphically why he is totally unfit to occupy the Oval Office.
That said, his response was perfectly in keeping with the basis of Trump’s burgeoning tyranny. Either you are for him, no matter what he says or does, or you are the enemy. There is no such thing as legitimate opposition in Trumpworld, just falling in line or getting traduced and, if possible, crushed.
That’s why Trump called the No Kings protest the “Hate America Protest.”
That’s why he threatens to lock up mayors and governors who resist his policy of sending the military into their cities and states to deal with non-existent emergencies.
That’s why he constantly links Americans exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protests to communism, terrorism, and Hamas. That’s why, like Richard Nixon, Trump has an enemies list.
Upending the rule of law
Before democracy fails, there is an intermediate step that any would-be dictator like Trump must take: the dismantling of the rule of law. The supreme law in the U.S. is the Constitution. Though he swore an oath to uphold it at his inauguration, Trump has since worked assiduously to upend it.
Most journalism south of the border refers to this process as Trump’s “norm breaking.” The euphemism is wholly inadequate to describe what is really going on. Trump is not norm breaking, he is law breaking.
Just as he did as an elected official when he tried to subvert the will of the American people by asking Georgia’s Secretary of State to “find” him 11,780 votes so he could win an election he lost.
Just as he did when he pardoned all the violent protesters from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Just as he did as a private citizen when he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide his antics with a porn star.
Or when New York Attorney General Letitia James found the Trump company guilty of long-standing tax fraud.
An autocrat and his loyalists
Consider some of the other profound transgressions that sycophants in his own party have allowed to take place in Trump’s second term without raising so much as a whimper.
The U.S. system of governance is based upon the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Trump has violated the checks and balances of that arrangement at every step of the way. He sees himself as the Big Kahuna directing everything.
A case in point. Trump has usurped Congress’s power of the purse, as guaranteed by Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution.
The president, at his whim, has frozen or “paused” billions of dollars of funding already passed by Congress. That is illegal under the 1974 federal Impoundment Control Act, which expressly forbids the executive branch from delaying funding already approved by Congress.
Trump violated the Constitution when he usurped the power of Congress to impose tariffs. He even declared a false emergency in order to give him the power to bring in a series of draconian tariffs that hurt not only close allies like Canada, but his own citizens. The U.S. auto industry is on track to pay $10 billion by the end of October as a result of Trump’s auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
Under the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, public figures, including the president, aren’t supposed to profit from holding office.
According to reporting by David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, Trump and his family have raked in $3.4 billion since he took office in 2017.
That includes $28 million from merchandise sales, including the infamous USA Bible, Trump hats, shirts and sneakers. And then there was that free jumbo jet from Qatar, and billions of dollars from Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia.
Trump is currently using the government shutdown to pursue other actions that have no basis in law. The president and his head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, have set out to conduct mass firings in the public service. A federal judge recently issued a temporary injunction against those illegal firings.
The administration has even tried to withhold pay for public servants who have been furloughed during the government shutdown. The is also flatly illegal under the Employee Fair Treatment Act, which Trump himself signed into law in 2019.
Trump has also trampled on the basics of the justice system, directing his attorney general and others to investigate and prosecute his perceived political enemies.
After getting rid of Erik Siebert, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who wouldn’t deliver political indictments on demand, Trump appointed his own former lawyer to the post to “get things moving.”
Never mind that Lindsey Halligan had zero prosecutorial experience. Never mind that she was a slavish Trump loyalist.
Halligan advanced Trump’s agenda on request, indicting former FBI director James Comey, New York District Attorney Letitia James, and former national security advisor turned Trump critic, John Bolton. Trump has now identified others he wants prosecuted, including former CIA Director John Brennan, for what he calls “political crimes.”
Destroying checks and balances
It is notable that one of the key provisions of the so-called Project 2025 document, in which the Heritage Foundation laid out the legislative priorities of the second Trump term, was to change the relationship between the DOJ and the White House.
The separation of those powers was to be replaced by a new arrangement, with the president directing his justice officials as if they were just any other political staffers.
It has not been enough for Trump to bend all government employees to his will. The autocrat who wants to have his face on a $250 bill to mark America’s 250th anniversary, also wants to harness, humble, and humiliate the media.
That project started with a spate of legal actions by Trump against the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and ABC. Trump went on to end public funding for the public TV and radio networks PBS and NPR based on their allegedly “biased” reporting.
Under his inept and unqualified secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, journalists have been asked to sign a document agreeing to publish only those stories that are Pentagon-approved.
Forty to 50 journalists representing all the major agencies turned in their badges rather than comply. As Nancy Youssef of The Atlantic put it, “To agree not to solicit information, is to agree not to be a journalist.”
Trump’s take? “The press is very disruptive in terms of world peace,” he bloviated to reporters at the White House. “The press is very dishonest.” Strange words coming from the man who told over 30,000 lies during his first presidential term alone, according to the count by the Washington Post.
Trump has done most of his damage to democracy and the rule of law inside America.
There is ICE, his army of thugs in masks, without identification or warrants, who scoop up brown and Black people for instant deportation.
There is Trump’s cynical attempt to control the judiciary through the power of appointment, a strategy that has produced a docile and dutiful Supreme Court. That court has since empowered Trump’s drive to grossly expand the powers of the executive branch.
There is also Trump’s punitive use of the federal purse, in which the president has withheld billions in funding from jurisdictions he sees as unfriendly, such as New York.
But Trump has not limited his disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law to domestic politics. He is also wreaking havoc on the international scene.
Without any war powers approval from Congress, the President has ordered the military to blow up several vessels from Venezuela and Colombia, which he claims were carrying drugs destined for the United States. At least 36 people have been killed in those strikes.
These attacks have been carried out without any legal authority, or any evidence proving that the people aboard the vessels were the ’narco-terrorists” that Trump claimed they were. As a result, Colombia has accused Trump of murder and critics say these lethal attacks amount to war crimes.
In addition to the summary execution of suspected drug dealers, Trump has also publicly confirmed that he has approved covert operations within Venezuela by the CIA.
Now that he is also moving assets from the U.S. Southern Command into the area, Venezuela is worried that Trump is planning an invasion. The country has asked for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council over Trump’s military actions in the Caribbean.
Impeach before it’s too late
Given that Trump’s iconoclastic demolition of American values, democracy, and the rule of law have taken place in less than a year of his second term, the question must be asked. Can Americans afford to trust the electoral process to get rid of this tyrant?
Sadly, the answer is no. That’s because Trump’s unscrupulous regime has already taken steps to undermine the country’s system of free and fair elections.
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This is the president who told Texas to come up with five more Republican seats by re-districting. Other Republican states have also been asked to resort to gerrymandering or redistricting to add more seats to the Republican column ahead of next year’s mid-term elections.
Impeachment and Article 25 are draconian steps, not to be taken lightly. But given what is on the line — a dictator in the White House — it is more than justified. Trump, after all, wants to call all the shots, like a king or an emperor.
James Madison, the most quoted Founding Father of America, said it best in the Federalist Papers back in 1788.
“The accumulation of all powers — legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Trump has brazenly announced his intentions. Now the question is what, if anything, Americans are prepared to do about it.
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