Editorial
View From Here
Oligarchic, Kleptocratic, Kakistocracy
By David Mark Greaves
January 23, 2025
On a day of celebration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., It was painful to watch the nightmare as the television coverage of Donald Trump’s installation as the 47th President of the United States unfolded.
The first hesitant glimpse was of what looked like a coronation, with Trumpets and Heralds performing while Trump stood, puffed up and smug, doing his Benito Mussolini imitation of a dictator, knowing his once-delusional Oligarchic, Kleptocratic, Kakistocracy (OKK) is being made real and he can begin the serious work of joining the top tier, the $100 billion boys club.
During his inaugural address, we learned that on his way to those financial heights, he will be assisted by club members who will help him as he helps them increase their wealth and, most of all, help his new best friend, Elon Musk, achieve his goals of both going to Mars and becoming the first trillionaire.
They will have problems achieving their goal because of Donald Trump’s lack of empathy or constraints on his actions.
We’ve learned that he will be surrounded by ideological apparatchiks whose promises to Congress, whether sworn or not, mean nothing. Their allegiance is to Trump, and we cannot expect anything more from them. Their unbending loyalty and passionate commitment, as well as the implementation of Project 2025, the plan that was so fiercely denied and yet totally embraced on Day One, may well prove to be the administration’s “Achille’s Heel.”
The power of both the OKK and the ideological apparatchiks is dependent on keeping over 50% of the voters satisfied when they sit at the kitchen table, comfortable with their lives. Voter suppression and gerrymandering certainly can help, but as we’ve learned, kitchen table issues of personal survival are always top-of-mind.
If inflation takes hold and home budgets are busted, If there is a loss of healthcare, if the richest man in the world is seen as calling for others to be satisfied with less, and while schools lack resources, if he’s calling for more HB-1 visas to admit with those with better education, then things could change in the midterm elections.
An unsettling thought for the midterms is that Trump has given a blanket pardon to over 1,500 January 6th rioters, many convicted of, and confessed to, violent attacks on police officers. He has pardoned them, giving them back their guns, and has shown he has their backs as they rejoin the militias, nursing their grievance and thoughts of retribution.
They are an army of intimidation and they are emboldened by the support of their leader.
The congress can be right or wrong, but it cannot be a coward. And yet, in our naiveite, what we may call cowardice, the Republican may call self-preservation, and not only of a political career. Standing against Trump prompts continuing threatening calls to the home, terrorizing the family and with knowledge of the children’s school travel schedule. And what must the congressperson’s and their staff’s social media look like, given the targeting by both political marketing professionals as well as Russian hacking groups, posing as constituents?
The Democrats will work to prove which economic side they’re on, and the apparatchik overreach, combined with Trump with no constraints, will at last prove, as the formerly enslaved and great orator Frederick Douglass has said, that “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
Only time will tell how much pain we’ll have to endure.
