The Trump administration is a teenage fantasy of a presidency

 The mental age of the Trump administration is about 14.

All that they know about government appears to come from shallow observations based on movies and television. They don't have the attention span to read a comic book, let alone a real one with no pictures.

When confronted with a crime or a mistake, they lie, make excuses, and pout. They clearly don't understand the complexity of governing an enormous world power. They screw things up because they're going through the motions of how they think it works. 

They're using the US military like characters in a game. They're using apps to circumvent parental authority. They're experimenting with juvenile delinquency, as if deciding whether they will grow up to be criminal masterminds. Only they're all adults, clearly criminal and demonstrably not masterminds.

They're in charge.

The Supreme Court gave the president unlimited power to commit crimes as long as it could be tied in some flimsy way to "official acts." The president can't be accused of anything worse than poor judgment, no matter how many people get killed and what gets destroyed.

Legal scholars debate whether the protection extends in any way to the functionaries carrying out the orders. The Nuremberg trials did not accept the "only following orders" defense from Nazis facing the consequences of their heinous acts, but that was a simpler time. Who knew that in the United States we would raise a generation that actually longed to look out over fields of corpses such as the liberators of the death camps found?

Fascination with the Nazis is another teenage phase. The sharp uniforms, the cool-looking ships, planes, tanks. The unflinching cruelty. What does it mean to be a man? Not every boy goes through it. I thought that most grew out of it, but clearly I was wrong.

Everything they do is a caricature. 

Look around your area to see who still has flags and signs out, supporting the idiot in the Oval Office. We have representative government. These are the voters that this government represents. The House of Representatives is supposed to represent the common people most directly. The GOP House members support the regime. We'll find out in 2026 whether they still represent the voters who put them in office, but in 2024 they did. Disillusioned Republican voters have confronted their elected representatives so forcefully that the representatives won't face them in public anymore. But where it counts, in Congress, where they could impeach the President and send him to trial in the Senate, they do nothing. No one wants a government-paid trip to El Salvador, I guess. They're afraid they'll lose. It's a national version of the rape victim who won't testify, or the organized crime witness who knows that they will die even if the mob boss goes to prison.

This is the difference between actual teenage fantasy and the nightmare we're in now. Voters who can't tell the difference put this regime in office. Now they're finding out. They voted for corrupt, greedy, cruel, lying, emotionally immature people to be in charge of every single department of the federal government.

Elon Musk has brought in actual sociopathic teenagers to help with the destruction. Why not? They fit right in.

The US is no longer a great power

 Isolationists have succeeded in taking the United States from being a global power and a force for good and converting us into a global threat and an untrustworthy ally, possibly forever.

The politicians who cultivated a base of voters who live in anger and fear thought that those voters were stupid and apathetic enough to remain controllable. But somewhere along the line they started believing their own shit. We have a whole regime devoted to destroying our strengths both domestically and internationally.

We could have been great. Sure, we made mistakes, usually propelled by the same greedy impulses that have now led to this complete undoing of all progress. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. The same is true of corporations. But in the case of nations those interests can align with what's kind, moral, and just, as well. Everything does come down to philosophy eventually.

Kindness, morality, and justice, have gone in the shitter with this regime. It's all about the money and power.

It is much easier to impose a regime of cruelty than one of kindness. A free society always contains the seeds of its own destruction. The people who hate the freedom of anyone who is not like them will take advantage of the freedom to speak and assemble, to spread their anger and fear to anyone susceptible, and organize their militias and pressure groups. 

The fact that the regime's budget proposal rips away large sections of the social safety net for chronically underpaid "essential workers," the elderly poor, and children proves that they hate spending money on much more than foreign aid. They're demonstrating if not admitting that they consider anyone below a certain financial threshold to be a useful idiot at best and vermin at worst. And you could be in both categories.

The oligarchs believe that they do represent American values. They represent you, because you would certainly do what they are doing if you had the chance. This is depressingly true in a lot of cases. Now it's our nation's global posture. Turning inward has never worked out well for us in the past. We always get blown out of our complacency by world events and have to play catch up because we had let our global awareness and capability deteriorate.  This time around, our rivals will fill in behind us, and then sweep over us. The current regime is the most ignorant, inept, and corrupt in the history of the United States. Their lust for power will end up leaving them with none, and the rest of us with the ruins of what had been a promising young nation.

We could dust off the Constitution and start applying it in the more inclusive way that those soft-headed liberals had been suggesting before we decided to go ahead with the right wing's experiment in unbridled greed and cruelty. It will be too late for US standing as a global leader. We might even be a vassal state of China by then, in which case our Constitution is just a historical curiosity for underground scholars to remember wistfully. Same goes if the victor is Russia, but I don't think that Russian leadership is capable of global dominance the way the Chinese are.