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BY KIM SHINKOSKEY

It is hard to miss what is going on with all the slashing of federal government employment. Donald Trump claims he is using a scalpel to surgically make things better, but he is really using a machete to hack away at any federal government activity whatsoever.

His extra-legal DOGE operation has not been respecting the authorizations required to cut programs, or prioritizing the activities to be cut, or considering the performance evaluations of employees, or targeting fraud, waste or abuse first. MAGA sees all federal activity except the Defense Department as fraudulent, wasteful and abusive. Musk’s team of private-sector bean counters know nothing about public-sector rules, regulations, processes and accountability. They don’t care about any of that.

MAGA feels it has a mandate from the people to kick-start a new form of government without seeking Congress’ approval, without running the idea past the judicial branch, without calling a constitutional convention, which requires a supermajority. In other words, Trump’s activity is pure usurpation and pure extra-judicial, extra-Congressional, extra-constitutional dictatorship. Such radical changes in government require much more green-lighting than just a razor-thin majority of voters.

Trump clearly doesn’t care what effect his policies have on people, except for maybe rich people. It’s not complicated, folks. He has no stake in the future of this country except to use protectionist tariffs to lard the coffers of friends in corporations who suffer from cheap foreign products and labor. The needs of big corporations and CEOs are the only law of the land as far as he is concerned. He wants to suffocate small business enterprises and employees however and whenever he can. For example, he prohibits the USDA from allowing schools to buy food from nearby small farms. He places a one-dollar limit on the travel passes of civilian Defense Department employees. He freezes federal employee credit card use. He knows all about these business perks because he has exploited them all in his own businesses.

Trump knows he is going to be in the ground soon. He just wants to take what little opportunity he has left to rule the world like Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Peter the Great or Vladimir Putin—all figures accountable to no one but themselves. He wants to be the font of all wisdom, the hand that turns every wheel, the face of every decision.

America is surprisingly okay with what he is doing because his electoral base has never learned much in school in the way of social studies, history, science or law. They don’t know how severely he is subverting the law, disrespecting our ancestors, destroying our written Constitution, ripping apart our republican institutions, deep-sixing our reputation in the world, and evaporating our future possibilities on this continent. His supporters slipped along in school from grade to grade while entertaining themselves on their smartphones and learning little in class. They spent their time planning mischief then—and bigger mischief now.

Trump just wants to push people around, gamble on their futures, and make things either great or miserable for every last soul in the land. His own family is secure, with money in the bank and lavish homes to live in, so he has no worries about others at all.

Evidence from a cave in Eastern Europe suggests that 18,000 years ago, human beings were cannibalistic. We have worse than that today. Today, we have political party leaders who are constantly cannibalizing people’s brains with outrageous, unattainable political promises only made possible by illegal executive orders.

MAGA wants America in a tizzy of uncertainty, outrage and disbelief concerning MAGA’s political usurpations, its feints, its whiplash moves and countermoves, and other public disruptions of our slow-moving, Puritan-like past. The MAGA nipple is free. There is money to be made. All we have to do now is ignore the law!

(Robert Kimball Shinkoskey is the author of The American Kings: Growth in Presidential Power from George Washington to Barack Obama.* He lives in Salt Lake City.)*