Contra Trump

臣弒其君，可乎

 

On 6 November 2020, the day of Donald Trump’s defeat in the presidential election, we published A Trumpty Dumpty Denouement. It was a prelude to China Heritage Annual 2021 which was titled Spectres & Souls — Vignettes, moments and meditations on China and America, 1861-2021.

At the time, we suggested that A Trumpty Dumpty Denouement, which featured the comedic verse and drawings of John Lithgow, formed a bookend of sorts with A Golden Monkey’s Journey to the East, the essay with which we launched China Heritage on 1 January 2017. ‘For the moment,’ I suggested, ‘the Great Disrupter remains in orbit and there is little doubt that his constellation of malevolence will continue to ensnare the heart-minds of many long into the future.’

In January 2025, Trump returned, trailing clouds of monarchic pretence.

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In Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of the Great Leader (1995), I quoted Marquis de Custine who observed of the Russian autocracy:

Sovereigns and subjects become intoxicated together at the cup of tyranny …. Tyranny is the handiwork of nations, not the masterpiece of a single man.

This resonates with qualis rex, talis grex — ‘as the king, so the people’ — the title of this chapter in Contra Trump. An expression attributed to Alphonso I, the king of Naples and Sicily, it suggests that subjects readily adopt the morals of their rulers.

We contrast Alphonso I with the Chinese rubric of the chapter — 臣弒其君，可乎 — a line in a famous passage in Mencius:

The king Xuan of Qi asked, saying, ‘Was it so, that Tang banished Jie [a tyrannical ruler], and that king Wu smote Zhou [a tyrant]?’ Mencius replied, ‘It is so in the records.’

The king said, ‘May a minister then put his sovereign to death?’ [臣弒其君，可乎。]

Mencius said, ‘He who outrages the benevolence proper to his nature, is called a robber; he who outrages righteousness, is called a ruffian. The robber and ruffian we call a mere fellow. I have heard of the cutting off of the fellow Zhou, but I have not heard of the putting a sovereign to death, in his case.’

齊宣王問曰：湯放桀，武王伐紂，有諸。
孟子對曰：於傳有之。
曰：臣弒其君，可乎。
曰：賊仁者謂之賊，賊義者謂之殘，殘賊之人謂之一夫。聞誅一夫紂矣，未聞弒君也。

—《孟子 · 梁惠王章句下》
trans. James Legge

In other words, to kill a tyrant is not regicide.

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My thanks to Jeremy Goldkorn for introducing me to Garrett Graff’s Doomsday Scenario.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
24 February 2025

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What’s It Going to Take?

Historian Johann Neem, a specialist in the American Revolution, turned to political theorist John Locke to explore the larger meaning of Trump’s destructive course. The founders who threw off monarchy and constructed our constitutional government looked to Locke for their guiding principles. In his 1690 Second Treatise on Government, Locke noted that when a leader disregards constitutional order, he gives up legitimacy and the people are justified in treating him as a “thief and a robber.” “[W]hosoever in authority exceeds the power given him by the law and makes use of the force he has under his command…ceases in that to be a magistrate; and, acting without authority, may be opposed, as any other man, who by force invades the right of another,” Locke wrote.

Neem notes that Trump won the election and his party holds majorities in both chambers of Congress. He could have used his legitimate constitutional authority but instead, “with the aid of Elon Musk, has consistently violated the Constitution and willingly broken laws.” Neem warned that courts move too slowly to rein Trump in. He urged Congress to perform its constitutional duty to remove Trump from office, and urged voters to make it clear to members of Congress that we expect them to “uphold their obligations and protect our freedom.”

“Otherwise,” Neem writes, “Americans will be subject to a pretender who claims the power but not the legitimate authority of the presidency.” He continues: “Trump’s actions threaten the legitimacy of government itself.”

— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 23 February 2025

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In the Senate, on Thursday, February 20, Angus King (I-ME) also reached back to the framers of the Constitution when he warned—again—that permitting Trump to take over the power of Congress is “grossly unconstitutional.” Trump’s concept that he can alter laws by refusing to fund them, so-called impoundment, is “absolutely straight up unconstitutional,” King said, “and it’s illegal.”

“[T]he reason the framers designed our Constitution the way they did was that they were afraid of concentrated power,” King said. “They had just fought a brutal eight-year war with a king. They didn’t want a king. They wanted a constitutional republic, where power was divided between the Congress and the president and the courts, and we are collapsing that structure,” King said. “[T]he people cheering this on I fear, in a reasonably short period of time, are going to say where did this go? How did this happen? How did we make our president into a monarch? How did this happen? How it happened,” he said to his Senate colleagues, “is we gave it up! James Madison thought we would fight for our power, but no. Right now we’re just sitting back and watching it happen.”

“This is the most serious assault on our Constitution in the history of this country,” King said. “It’s the most serious assault on the very structure of our Constitution, which is designed to protect our freedoms and liberty, in the history of this country. It is a constitutional crisis…. Many of my friends in this body say it will be hard, we don’t want to buck the President, we’ll let the courts take care of it…. [T]hat’s a copout. It’s our responsibility to protect the Constitution. That’s what we swear to when we enter this body.”

“What’s it going to take for us to wake up…I mean this entire body, to wake up to what’s going on here? Is it going to be too late? Is it going to be when the President has secreted all this power and the Congress is an afterthought? What’s it going to take?”

“[T]his is a constitutional crisis, and we’ve got to respond to it. I’m just waiting for this whole body to stand up and say no, no, we don’t do it this way. We don’t do it this way. We do things constitutionally. [T]hat’s what the framers intended. They didn’t intend to have an efficient dictatorship, and that’s what we’re headed for…. We’ve got to wake up, protect this institution, but much more importantly protect the people of the United States of America.”

— Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 23 February 2025

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On King Donald I

A suggested guide to how the US media should be bravely — and clearly — covering our national crisis

Garrett Graff

22 February 2025

I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of wanna-be dictator Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. A month ago, watching Trump and Musk’s then-unfolding coup in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch and show how I think the US media should be covering this troubling and world-altering story. (If you’d like to read those earlier dispatches from previous weeks, start here: The first installment, second, and third.)

Without further ado, I give you our fictional correspondent William Boot’s all-too-real latest report:

“King Donald I” Accelerates White Nationalist Purge of Military Leaders

By William Boot

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a late Friday night purge, Donald Trump — America’s often ramblingly incoherent ceremonial commander-in-chief — fired three of this country’s top generals and admirals, the latest assault in weeks of efforts to install loyalists at top military and security posts and restore the primacy of the white male ruling class that has traditionally held power here since the country’s founding two centuries ago.

The purge included the nation’s groundbreaking and widely respected top four-star general, C.Q. Brown, who was the first of the country’s oppressed racial minority Black community to rise to head a branch of the military, and also removed the military’s top lawyers as well as the air force chief and the one female currently leading a military branch. The purge completes Trump’s removal of the both the first-ever and second-ever women to rise to the highest ranks of the military.

Traditionally, incoming US presidents remove precisely zero military leaders and the collective firings stand as all-but unprecedented in the 80-year history of the modern military, which prides itself on itself on studious political independence, but had looked increasingly inevitable since Trump installed a white Christian nationalist as defense minister who has been openly hostile to women serving in the military and who has cut back on recruiting Blacks to join.

Trump in his previous presidency had actually selected Brown to head the nation’s air force, until turning on him more recently as insufficiently supportive of the country’s ongoing political and corporate domination by a caste of mediocre white men — people historically unable to succeed on their own merits or competency — that includes Trump himself as well as the newly installed defense minister. (Unsurprisingly, Trump announced Friday his intention to replace Brown with a less qualified white male general, who had — unlike Brown — never attained the military’s top rank.)

With the ouster of Brown and the naval commander, Admiral Linda Franchetti, the remaining top military leaders — known as the Joint Chiefs of Staff — are once again all white and male, a particularly pointed power imbalance given the fact that the country’s racial and ethnic minorities make up nearly 40 percent of national forces and women constitute fully a fifth of the ranks.

A month after returning to the presidency after evading criminal charges for his attempted insurrection in 2021, and three weeks after a fast-moving coup by junta forces loyal to South African oligarch Elon Musk reduced him to a mere figurehead, Trump has seemingly embraced his new limited role as head of state. He has increasingly taken to styling himself as a “king” in recent official communications and begun talking openly that he will forgo constitutional limits on his tenure to serve as long as he wishes — although most capital observers wonder more how long the power-sharing agreement between Musk, the world’s wealthiest man who is operating as the head of government, and Trump, an increasingly senile mid-level oligarch who made his fortune in reality TV and real estate, will continue.

Another recent post by the self-aggrandizing regent to Trump’s own social media company brazenly suggested the ahistorical and factually incorrect premise that breaking the law in service of the country was acceptable — a post many took to invite future violence by the paramilitary militias that backed his 2021 coup attempt who he pardoned as soon as he returned to office on January 20th. Notably, one of those militia leaders — who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for participating in Trump’s coup and had been serving a 22-year prison sentence until Trump ordered him released — was re-arrested Friday afternoon by independent police forces loyal to parliament after he returned to the grounds of the national assembly known as the US Capitol, which he had helped storm in 2021.

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While Musk’s mercenary forces, known as DOGE, continue to ransack and loot sensitive data from key agencies and tussle with civil servants as they attempt to force their way into ministries — including in recent days the nation’s internal revenue service — Trump has been largely absent; he’s spent fully half of his month-long presidency at his own resort properties and played golf on a third of the days he’s been in office so far.

Tensions this week seemed at times to rise between the two camps, though, including after Musk’s son appeared to wipe a booger on the presidential desk. (Trump, a notorious germophobe, insisted the near-immediate removal of the historic desk for “refinishing” was a mere coincidence.) Trump officials, who had initially appeared quiescent following the seizure of the national treasury last month by Musk’s junta, have increasingly started to whisper about their unhappiness with his growing power, although their actual ability to resist Musk’s whirlwind appeared limited.

Across the capital, the new regime accelerated its sweeping removals of government workers, evoking comparisons to the disastrous “De-Ba’athification” movement that the United States instituted in Iraq in 2003 that removed huge swaths of civil servants after the country’s invasion. That move is now widely considered one of the greatest mistakes of the occupation, though it now appears that Musk and Trump are seeking equally disastrous results in the capital at home.

While traditionally a small number of political appointees turn over in a new presidential administration, Musk’s coup has been followed by massive, disorganized, and chaotic firings at many government agencies and ministries. Last weekend, DOGE mercenaries actually blindly fired a large chunk of the agency that secures the country’s vast nuclear weapon stockpiles before attempting to reverse their mistake.

Other firings appeared equally ill-conceived and executed—including the removal of veterans working on suicide crisis lines, public health staff combatting bird flu, and medical workers supporting the country’s indigenous populations. Inexplicably, the mass removals also included more than 400 engineers, technicians, and personnel who help keep safe the nation’s airspace, which has long been the envy of the world but under the Trump regime has already suffered a series of troubling incidents.

It’s increasingly clear that the mass firings and reprisals are less a thoughtful exercise in management or efficiency gains and instead a wholesale effort to dismantle the long-respected administrative state’s capability and regulatory structures have might hem in the ambitions and profits of the nation’s oligarchy, which has been emboldened since November by Trump’s surprise electoral victory. The country’s banking regulators, now firmly in the regime’s control, made clear in a series of actions this week that they would look the other wayamid egregious abuses by the cryptocurrency industry, an electronic financial system favored by Musk and criminal groups.

Over the course of the week, Trump and Musk, who seem keen to reduce the world’s leading $27-trillion-a-year economy to banana republic status, tightened their grip on the country’s key institutions of power, most notably assaulting traditionally apolitical security services and targeting independent media outlets, following a classic would-be authoritarian playbook deployed in many a third-world country in recent decades.

Trump’s loyalist factions, known as MAGA, have used increasingly bold threats of violence to cow parliament into subservience — it has rubber-stamped the most craven of his appointees, no matter how unqualified they are, to the point that one imagines, in the tradition of Caligula, an ambassadorial nomination for Trump’s favorite horse can’t be far away in the future.

Despite the fact that under the nation’s constitution the congress actually controls the power of the purse, supplicant loyalist members of the House and Senate have taken to begging Trump to intervene with Musk, who is canceling legally mandated payments, grants, and government expenditures by personal fiat. In comments to reporters, Senator Tommy Tuberville, who is regularly cited as the dumbest member of the national senate, said he was fine with the new dynamic of personally appealing to the unelected oligarch to support his state back home: “If we have to lobby for, ‘Hey wait a minute, what about the bridge in Birmingham?’ or, ‘There’s a bridge in Mobile’ or whatever, I think that could be very possible.”

At the top of this week’s rubber-stamps was Trump’s appointment of a far-right extremist, loyalist, and conspiracist to head the country’s premier national law enforcement agency. While all previous directors of the agency — known as the FBI — have been either nonpartisan federal judges or esteemed law enforcement leaders, the new director is best known for his aggressive hawking of Trump branded merchandise, authoring childrens’ books that venerate Trump as a “king,” and, recently, his controversial and extensive Chinese financial holdings. The new director — who even standard Trump loyalists balked at as stunningly unqualified and who opposition leaders believe lied about how he helped orchestrate a purge of the FBI’s top ranks even before taking office — has promised to hunt down “Deep State” resistors and weaponize the traditionally independent agency against political enemies and media in the capital.

Musk appeared in public this week at a loyalist political rally wearing sunglasses and wielding a chainsaw on stage and moved to formalize his own loyal paramilitary units, having his private personal security force officially deputized as federal marshals, a move one law enforcement archly described simply as “rare.” On stage at the far-right rally, Musk declared, “I am become meme” and marveled at the ease of his government takeover: “There’s living the dream, and there’s living the meme. And it’s pretty much what’s happening, ya know?”

As they settle into power, both men appear to be merging their official roles and private feuds and business challenges.

This week, Trump — who ranks near of the bottom of the nation’s wealthiest, has failed at nearly every business line he’s entered across his career, is a convicted felon surrounded by fraud allegations, and faced an outright ban from leading organizations in the province of New York — has long harbored resentment towards the nation’s powerful moneyed elite who live in the vast nation’s coastal urban centers. Now finally in a position to deliver retribution for a lifetime of slights, he is moving to flex the official powers in long-simmering fights among the country’s oligarchy.

News report indicated this week that he hopes to assume control of the country’s independent postal authority, an illegal move but one he has long coveted. In the past, he has frequently criticized how the postal service’s main customer is increasingly the online shopping portal known as Amazon — a site akin to the Chinese powerhouse site Alibaba — that’s run by oligarch Jeff Bezos, who is the nation’s second-wealthiest man after Musk. (Recognizing that he would be in Trump’s cross-hairs, Bezos has spent recent months cozying up to Trump, including funneling a $40 million payment to Trump’s wife.)

For his part, Musk also apparently is attempting to leverage his new official powers for business purposes, as reports alleged that his social media company — a less successful version of the Chinese microblogging site Weibo that’s known as “X” and now largely populated by Nazis and the many mothers of Musk’s 13 children — attempted to blackmail advertisers with adverse government action unless they raised their spending with his company.

In newly released custody filings, the mother of Musk’s most recent child — who was announced on “X” last Friday — provided some notable insight into Musk’s current mindset, saying Musk texted her, “I’m #2 after Trump for assassination,” and then added, “Only the paranoid survive.”

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Source:

• Garrett Graff, “King Donald I” Accelerates White Nationalist Purge of Military Leaders, Doomsday Scenario, 22 February 2025

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The U.S. Army Chorus performed a song from Les Misérables at the White House Governors’ Ball Sunday night—and the internet doesn’t quite know what to make of it. One of the most instantly recognizable tunes from the hit 1980 musical, the epilogue piece “Do You Hear the People Sing?’ features such lyrics as “Will you join in our crusade? // Will you be strong and stand with me?” in expounding its themes of a downtrodden proletariat rising up against a tyrannical regime.

President Trump has played the anthem before, during both his 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns, but social media users have been quick to point out the perceived irony of his administration continuing to stand by its lyrics now he’s back in office. “The whole point of the show (and the French Revolution) was to free themselves of this sort of rule or in this case, a performance for the MAGA king,” as one person put it. “Gosh, it probably went right over their damn heads,” another said.

— U.S. Army Chorus Belts Out Strange Choice of Anthem at White House, The Daily Beast, 24 February 2025

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