"No Limits"
by Bill Bonner
“Trump fundamentally changed how government works...
A future president should have no hesitation in doing the same.”
- a Liberal activist, quoted in "Perspectives"
Youghal, Ireland - "What is one to think? What to believe? How do these scattered dots join up? So many of them swirl about the person of Donald J. Trump that it is worth a quiet hour’s pondering on who the fellow truly is, what he is truly about, and what manner of wreckage he will leave behind him. Like Perón, like Mao, like every Big Man the centuries have belched up, Trump is not the sort to quit the stage leaving the scenery as he found it.
The Big Man himself has proclaimed that there are “no limits” upon his power, and he has spent a year and a half proving it. And now, "Perspective:" "He may have inadvertently sown the seeds of a new progressive age. The advocacy arms of the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for American Progress and other influential groups on the left are already assembling lists of ways a Democratic president could use the breath-taking executive power Trump has seized."
One thing is near to certain: were the Republicans to stand before the voters this very morning, they would be tossed out. They botched the spending cuts; botched the reciprocal tariffs; botched the assault on Iran. They botched the taming of inflation and lowering prices. They botched the “Golden Era” completely - GDP growth is now slower than under Biden, and the new jobs come slower too. Trump botched a plain and simple meeting with Meloni. He botched the refurbishment of the Reflecting Pool. And gasoline this morning still costs a full dollar more than it did when the year began.
Donald Trump has ever been the bull turned loose in the china shop - which is precisely the beast the voters ordered. “Move fast and break things” was his whole philosophy of statecraft. It kept the opposition forever off balance: no sooner had they puzzled out one outrage than he was on to the next.
But the way to measure of Trump is to look not at what people think he is doing, nor even upon what he fancies he is doing, but upon his Historical Role. History - or let us say the long, blind patterns of it - seems to have fetched him up for a single purpose: to whittle down the power of the American empire. That has been our working hypothesis these two years past, and it has held up remarkably well.
As History’s dupe, however, he has botched nothing whatever. And the one thing he has most emphatically not botched has gone all but unremarked. Every act of his astonishes, amuses, appalls, or enraptures some millions of his fellow men. The press and the whole guild of opinion-mongers fritter away their days guessing about what he will do next, and why, and to what dreadful end. He is the navel of the universe. They are bewitched by him. They scan his hands for the tremors of age, strain at his speech for the slur of senility, parse his small-hours postings for proof of madness. Will he strike Iran afresh? Will he sack Hegseth? How does he enrich himself on his own decrees?
It is all about him - every syllable of it. And the multitude supposes the pageant will reach its end in a few short years, whereupon Washington will slink back to its old normalcy. But thanks to Trump, the politicians of both factions have now tasted the heady, distilled liquor of unbounded power. Institutions that were once, more or less, independent have been harnessed set to do the chief executive’s work - to chastise his foes, to enact his whims without so much as a nod from Congress, or merely to fawn upon him in depraved adulation.
Questions of war and peace are settled in the small hours upon the president’s caprice. Journalists are tongue-lashed. Men are turned out of their jobs. Whole agencies are conjured into being, or abolished, with no permission asked of the legislature. People are killed. Or sprung from prison. Or herded up and shipped off. Negotiations of the great magnitude are handed to green and grinning cronies. One day we have a treaty; the next we are vowing to blow the country to kingdom come. USA Today reports: "Trump again threatens Iran with warning it will ‘no longer exist’."
Tensions in the Middle East continued to escalate on June 28, with Iran targeting U.S. military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and renewed hostilities in the region entering a fourth straight day. The intensifying attacks further undermined the increasingly tenuous interim U.S.-Iran agreement to end the war.
American presidents have always enjoyed a certain freedom of action. But until Number 47 came along, they were reined in by the people around them, by custom, by principle, or by the Constitution. But Trump has stretched the fabric of executive power to the dimensions of his own appetite - and now Democrats and Republicans alike, each with one covetous eye upon the White House, are itching to see how the garment will look on them. They have not the faintest intention of folding it up and putting it in the closet. No - they will wear the gaudy purple every bit as fondly as Trump did. Likely more.
The Democrats, Dana Milbank reports, have already drawn up their wish-list for this plush new authority: state-run health care funded out of the federal till; government groceries, government banks, government apothecaries; the breaking of monopolies, the seizing of patents, the outright nationalizing of important companies - the AI houses above all; rent control from sea to sea, housing built by the feds, power cuts for the data centers, fresh taxes laid upon the rich, day-care, consumer protection cranked to a roar - and much, much more besides.
“No limits” was the cry of the MAGA faithful. They are apt to relish the no-limits White House rather less when it has passed into the hands of their enemies. But History’s work will go forward, undisturbed."
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