Toddler-in-Chief

 By Bob Travica

By February 21, 2026, the paramilitarized immigration police killed three American citizens and had six inmates killed in its detention centers, as part of operations to "make the country safer". During just one year, the U.S. President has grabbed excessive powers and seriously damaged the institutions of the Democratic Republic. 

Donald Trump 2.0, unleashed in 2025, is more prepared, determined, and dangerous than his 1.0 version (2016-2020). He took over the White House (the WH) with Project 2025 under his belt, the plan for a right-wing revolution aiming at dismantling the democratic Republic, which included a database of officers to carry it out [0]. The Project had mostly escaped public attention, although it kicked in with nominations for key positions even before Trump 2.0 moved to the WH. When the ominous moment came in January 2025, Trump 2.0 took part in the oath-taking ritual, failed to stick his lips under the bizarrely broad rim of his wife’s hat (a remake of the fabled alien Zoro, huh?), and went to his office to self-indulge into signing a pile of executive orders, with joy, determination, pomp, and vanity. That’s how American history took a turn back to the age of royal governance over 250 years ago – colonial then, domestic under Trump 2.0.

Smash It All!

Oceans of digital ink have been spilled over assessing Trump 2.0. I don’t mean to parrot the criticism of his faults and his deviant personality. He’s been matched with the psychopath profile and mocked metaphorically. An American journalist labelled him Vulgarian-in-Chief when Trump showed the middle finger (twice) to a factory worker, calling him “pedophile protector”. He’s been named Liar-in-Chief, based on numerous fact-checking outlets that evaluated most of his statements as false. Anti-Trump memorabilia (coffee mugs, flags, posters, T-shirts, etc.) gave rise to the label Clown-in-Chief. And both his collaborators and analysts pointed to his toddlerish character. I’d like to draw on the idea of Toddler-In-Chief (TIC), which political scientist Drezner promoted by the end of Trump 1.0 [1]; the focus then was psychological, but I’ll write more about the Trump 2.0 behavior.

As a toddler, Trump is intellectually and emotionally immature. Yet, he is the chief toddler playing with a juggernaut at home and the nuclear arsenal globally. Here are some examples. Infants don’t make sensible economic decisions. TIC whimsically imposes import tariffs allegedly to lure foreign exporters to invest in American manufacturing for the benefit of American workers and consumers. However, modern automated production can’t boost employment, nor can higher domestic production costs deliver more affordable goods. Instead, tariffs pump up inflation and break supply chains and trade agreements at the detriment of the American economy.

Toddlers may grab everything in their reach, shake it, and throw it down. That can be dad’s whiskey, mom’s jewelry, a precious souvenir, anything. TIC follows suit: he throws down laws, agencies, companies, people, groups, treaties, alliances, countries, anyone, and anything. He ruptures, destroys, annihilates ceaselessly, as it befits a nasty chief toddler.

TIC whines endlessly over anything that irritates him: the previous administration, “fake media,” stubborn economic statistics, banking authorities rejecting his quirks, missing the Nobel Peace prize, a lack of recognition and love... He is all drama and revenge like a spoiled, rude kiddo. He’s happy only during the signing of countless executive orders with letters growing in size, or when he’s babbling before cameras. Oh, yes, and when he tinkers with his currently favorite toy – a new ballroom attachment to the WH under construction. Just recently, TIC interrupted his cabinet’s meeting to walk to the window overlooking the construction site, while the present officials smirked. After all, they must comply with the rules of the kinder garden-style WH.

TIC is burning down the fire station, but this is no longer funny. America is sinking into an autocratic, chaotic abyss: many state agencies are destroyed, Congress is defunct, the Supreme Court is aloof or appeasing, the DOJ and FBI are weaponized against opponents and dissidents, while ICE and border police (CBP) terrorize and gun down city residents as if they are given a license to kill. In January 2026, they killed two American-born citizens, peaceful protesters against policing raids in Minneapolis. This adds to six deaths in ICE-run detention centers, and one public murder of an American citizen in Texas, concealed for a year till the last update of this text (February 21, 2026). Thus, the paramilitarized immigration police, which doubled in size in 2025, bears responsibility for death of nine people, and yet no visible investigation is going on so far. If repression and despotism increasingly antagonize masses, as we see it on American streets, conditions for large social unrest are maturing along with the likelihood of the regime’s even larger repression. The “beacon of democracy” resembles more and more a fascist banana republic.

Drezner’s prediction came true: traits of a toddler make Trump ill-suited to the presidency and will show lasting, harmful impacts on American democracy and foreign policy.

 Time To Get Rich

TIC’s character has been recognized around the globe, and respect for him as a statesman exists only in apothecary doses. Yet, parties that depend on America in certain respects shower him with sweet talk and gifts. However, don’t mix gifts with the gifts of a significant monetary value, that is, a bribe! And this brings me to the TIC profile’s core – an insatiable greed.

TIC is tirelessly looking for opportunities to enrich himself and his family; securing proceeds for tycoons that chipped in bribes is sometimes also on his agenda. Indeed, most of his domestic policies can be understood as money-grabbing scams. Specifically, the “follow the money” lens reveals the background of his tariff frenzy. A country attacked by high tariffs negotiates with TIC behind closed doors, and offers him some benefits in return for lowering the tariffs; Vietnam gave TIC concessions for putting up golf courses and hotels to get the artificially set 46% tariffs down to 20%. Note that deal-making can happen on the back-end as well: American companies affected by specific tariffs (as investors into the overseas business or importers of raw materials and semi-goods) may plead with TIC for lowering tariffs in exchange for financial favors (they may buy his cryptos, invest in real estate projects, give gifts to his family, etc.).

TIC’s avarice also provides the key to understanding the core of his acting internationally. Examples include Ukraine (posturing around rare minerals in exchange for military help and “peace making”), Middle East (TIC’s peace plan envisions Gaza as a seaside resort with his stake in it), Venezuela (brazenly stealing that country’s oil by using American military), Greenland (prospects of operating and owning mines of rare minerals with the prospective earnings), and Canada (pushing military spending to benefit TIC’s friends in the American military industry, pressures on various companies and industries with prospects of extracting racketeering fees for loosening up chokeholds).

Overall, most of TIC’s policy-making is about creating opportunities for him and his family to squeeze out illegal income. This amounts to unabashed corruption, possibly treasonous. And TIC has spewed it out with his typical uncouth bluntness: “It’s the time to get rich;” actually, “richer” since this applies just to the already rich minority. This personal enrichment aspect has attracted less attention than TIC’s shockingly aberrant personality, and only recently is being probed [2]. Yet, it reveals the background of his seemingly illogical moves. The wealth accumulation isn’t just a byproduct of his power grab, but the primary motive behind it. That’s how things work in banana republics.

T. Rex and Minions

In the second half of the 19^th century, America was occupying the pedestal of global superpower, one of two at first, then the only one since 1992. Its image created through self-promotion and onlookers’ presumptions was a peculiar mix of admiration and fear, the beauty and the beast. The young country earned admiration for its achievements in science, technology, economy, higher education, sports, and particularly popular culture (film, music, strip, practical fashion, and imaginings of freedom). This was the irresistibly beautiful face of America, an embodiment of soft power. In contrast, being a heavyweight fighter in global affairs, America instilled fear as well. Economic and political might, plus the military that never stops growing and fighting. Huge hard power. That face of beast had its own fans among those seeking special shelter or merely worshipping might. But it was despised too, although hate was softened by beauty and a hope that self-control would develop with maturation.

Trump ruptured the magic of delusion and hope, and declared: America is the beast, inside and outside! A brutal regime that elevates loyalists and tramples disobeyers within the country and abroad. To paraphrase a Californian politician: it’s a T. rex that you either mate with, or it devours you. TIC flaxes muscles relentlessly, scouring the way for his urges, psychosis, and insatiable greed. Mind spins fitting fictional dystopias serve brainwashing: dismantling of democratic institutions “rationalizes” the government, price increase “reduces” inflation, terrorizing citizens “secures” the borders, murder in cold blood by police is “self-defense,” attacking weak countries “increases” America’s security…

Worshippers of might and hordes of self-interested opportunists make the willing builders of TIC’s evil empire. Notice how boot lickers rush to surrender every bit of conscience, to see and think what they are ordered, to justify the unjustifiable. Enter foreign minions who crawl and appease TIC, or shower him with valuable gifts, such as that disgusting surrender of the Nobel Peace prize by the laureate, a shameless beggar for power, whose country TIC terrorizes. These crawling minions bolster TIC’s power because social power emerges in a relationship necessitating the receiving end that takes in the influence of a power holder.

TIC was let in the office by 77 million voters. Perhaps some of them regret the choice they had made now that they see a malignant regime metastasizing before their eyes. They didn’t know enough, they were running away from the opponent’s abhorrent policies, they trusted campaign promises – all this is possible. Yet, such voters neglected that their candidate was a convicted felon, twice impeached in the House, and the instigator of the failed coup to overturn the 2020 election results. Not to mention unethical and illegal private affairs, several bankruptcies, tax evasion, and indecent public behavior inappropriate for a statesman. True, misled voters may have a chance to correct the mistake, provided that free elections will be held in the future.

Although TIC may have lost part of his voting body, a sizeable part of it is likely to survive among his blind followers who believe that America-the-beast is the right one. They will undermine the possibility of rooting him out of office. And even if that happens, he’ll leave chaos behind. Enter the structural weaknesses of American democracy predating this ongoing right-wing revolution: the rule of plutocrats who manipulate the corrupted two-party Congress, a significant income disparity, and a de facto Constitutional order that overweighs the executive branch at the expense of legislative and judicial branches (I wrote about this in relation to Trump 1.0 [3]). When one of the two major parties controls both chambers of Congress and the WH, and the President is autocratic, the system of checks and balances is thrown out of the window. Put another way, the fact that democratic institutions collapsed just within one year indicates that the 250-year-old Republic was weak. A more robust construction would keep in check the President’s awkward personality and avert this catastrophic collapse.

On its anniversary, America is all shook up, and so is the world that either likes or despises it.

@

[0] Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Heritage Foundation, 2023.   https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

[1] Drezner, D., Toddler-In-Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency. The  University of Chicago, 2020.

[2] Kirkpatrick, D., How Much Money Is Trump Profiting from the Presidency? The New Yorker, 2025.      https://youtu.be/cpOE3aAt8XU

[3] Travica, B. Trumping the Constitution.  https://cogito-bob.blogspot.com/2020/09/

America’s Elections: Brace for Impact!

By Bob Travica

Mayday, mayday, a big bang is coming up as America is crash-landing on the upcoming elections day, when a new President and Congress are to be decided, and the world should brace for impact! Why? Because there is going to be a huge mess regardless of who'll win the Oval Office and Capitol Hill.

If the Democratic party runner Kamala Harris wins, the Republican opponent Donald Trump will set in motion what he’s already consistently rehearsed since the last 2020 election he lost: an adamant denial alleging that the election was “rigged“. If Trump wins, he’ll start large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him, sent him to courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years, and he'll try to dismantle constitutional order. In both cases, law enforcement, security structures as well as armed groups of citizens, and spontaneous crowds will act, disrupting public safety and business as usual.

A disastrous crash in American society seems inevitable with unforeseen consequences. Let me put forward a scary one: civil war-like developments may unfold.

Irreconcilable Divisions

American society has been characterized by deepening rifts for a good part of the 21^st century. The economic divisions that lingered throughout the 1990s erupted in the 2011 Occupy movement led by the economically disadvantaged majority (the alleged 99-percenters juxtaposed to the super-wealthy one percent of Americans). It was a powerful earthquake that capped tectonic changes in the global economy unleashed by globalization, which lured capital to economies in transition (China, Indochina, India, East Europe) and disrupted American labor markets (less demand, smaller pay). [1] The impoverishment of the masses, a staggering loan burden on individuals, homelessness, and unaffordable health care occupied the minds of various streams of the Occupy movement. In the end, a few years later, the movement dissolved, and capitalism survived, but not without a financial rescue by the government and the workings of security forces. Dissatisfaction with income inequality and with key institutions (banks, government, big corporations) remained.

If this economic hardship applied equally to American working people regardless of their ideological orientation, the election of the first President with African roots did not. Old political and cultural divisions resurfaced and new ones erupted. White supremacists revived racist traditions born with America’s primal sin of slavery (granted, inherited from the British colonial period). Battling the legacy of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, reviving old fears of the Anglo-Saxon majority, and adding new conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” (allegedly, non-whites systematically replace whites across the globe). [2] All this intoxicated the public space.

The anti-racist Americans pushed back. Still, both camps used the black race roots and appearance of President Obama to their advantage: Supremacists strived to prove a growing “disenfranchisement”, whereas anti-racists strived to prove the truism that a black person can run the highest office in the country. The adversaries blew the same horn even though Obama’s mother was a white woman, and so he is half white and half black (fathered by a Kenyan immigrant). It appears that the uniting potential of his half/half background was in nobody’s interest in the nation focused on emphasizing differences rather than similarities.

The divide over the racial issue indeed characterizes the main division in American society today between conservatives and liberals, represented in the Republican and Democratic parties. The conservative camp embraces racist ideas, anti-abortion (“pro-life”) laws, unrestrained gun rights (purchase, own, carry, expose), creationism and closer ties between religion and education, opposing the LGTBQ exposure, strict law and order, and restrictive immigration policies. Liberals hold diametrically opposed views. And then comes Mr. Trump to foment the disintegration of the social fabric.

Crowdsourcing Political Power

The former President/the second-term hopeful belongs to the conservative camp but that’s only by pragmatic necessity. Trump is no ideologist and could go along with any party that feeds his interests if not the party he’d establish (an option he’s tinkered with). He is no politician either, despite riding wildly through the political circus for about a decade. If politics is an art of reconciling different interests and aggregating them into feasible governance decisions and practices, Trump isn’t there. Rather, he’s still a hard-handed business owner who views the whole country as his own business he can rule at whim.

Trump understands that managing by a stick-and-carrot method works in national politics as in organizational politics. He’s been assured so with taking over the Republican Party years ago and reassured he’s still controlling the party even after losing the election after his first term in Office, getting impeached twice in the House, and being sued multiple times for various offenses and crimes. However, Trump is still missing the differences between business and the political sphere. Society is a few orders of magnitude beyond a business firm in terms of players, interests, tactics and strategies, fight-and-flight developments, chance events, etc. Not even the largest corporation matches society in complexity. The implication is that autocratic governance of a country isn’t the same as running a centralized company. At least, an extensive mechanism of state oppression must be kept in motion to rule over citizens’ minds and bodies and contending power circles, which indeed happened in 20th-century Europe and elsewhere.

What in particular feeds Trump’s wings are his MAGA followers (Make America Great Again) – the  Trumpists, his devoted voting machine, and partly the recruitment basis for street fighters that showed up during his rule and finally stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Make no mistake of equating MAGA supporters with conservatives. For example, Trump’s Vice President Pence is a conservative but no MAGA supporter. Trumpists share conservative values and add some more. They are for strengthening the police, protectionism, isolationism, and leaning toward an authoritarian attitude and a strong leader. Trumpists uncritically buy every word of their leader, including the denial of lost 2020 elections and numerous conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid-deniers, anti-vaxxers). They ardently follow him as if he’s a cult leader, filling his rallies, spreading his word through social media, and following his marching orders to intimidate opponents if not inflict worse damage. If Trump takes aim at the institutions of the republic, the balance between legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, and even regular elections, MAGA will follow all this obediently.

Trumpists originated in the U.S. and spread to Canada, Latin America, Europe, and possibly elsewhere. I was shocked to face such people outside North America, who babbled about Trump’s messianic role in fighting evil across the world. In the U.S., typical MAGA supporters are older, retired, Christian, men, earning income at the lower middle-class level; about 30% have at least a college degree. [3] We could see former marines and police officers among violent protesters on January 6, 2021. But there are also supporters with higher academic degrees and prestigious jobs, and they are spread across the country. These insights undermine the belief that MAGA is confined to the blue-collar and rural populations.

Trumpism is a populist movement, where the leader crowdsources political power, to use the contemporary management term. A billionaire who pretends to be in the same boat as ordinary people by using various rhetorical tools. [4] The man whose hairstyling costs more than the annual salary of his typical supporter, gets under their skin by speaking simply, showing anger and hate straightly as simple guys do, mocking the political machinery in D.C. as if speaking their mind, promising to defend them against “deep state” (the usual evil suspect) as well as immigrants that take their jobs and even “eat their home pets”, assuring them of material wellbeing he’ll bring to bear and a mythical resurgence of the golden past…

He leverages this crowd-controlling power to gain support in the Republican Party and silence the traditional conservatives. Power over the masses is the reason why that party has clung to Trump despite his losses, legal troubles, and the demonstrated and still promised undermining of the American Constitution and Republic. Democrats warn about this by portraying Trump as a threat to democracy and national unity but in vain: MAGA refuses to listen, the Republican Party lost its identity, and others either don’t make sense or don’t care. Does the other side really want a democratic republic and one united nation, as liberals assume?

Civil War Prospects

Calling out civil war may sound like a pessimistic exaggeration. The term is usually associated with the war between the Union and Confederate states in the 1860s. But a hundred years later, the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War unfolded over the years, with violence on city streets involving opposed groups as well as establishment defenses. Half a century later, the Black Lives Matter movement arose and culminated in 2020 due to revealed cases of police brutality. It coupled with ongoing street brawls between leftist and rightist violent, armed groups. These events resemble civil war acts, even though they may not fit the orthodox definition of such a war. The upcoming elections will surely follow suit and may trigger something worse.

The ball is in Trump’s yard. If he loses, he’ll just continue to deny the regularity of elections and repeat doggedly that he won. The “Stop the Steal” protests will reemerge, lawsuits get reenacted, protesters fill the streets, right-wing armed groups awake, their leftist counterparts respond, election officials be threatened, the police and FBI become very busy, and so on. The final counting of electoral votes could be accompanied again by rampant violence. The traffic, commerce, work, education, and whole public life could be derailed for a significant period. Timing of disruptive developments could be tricky to predict so that there’s a calm before the storm (as in an old song).

Should Trump win, he’ll start to rule by pardoning himself and his supporters for various misdeeds they committed. Then, he’ll unleash a large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him in the House, supported the impeachment in the Senate (although it didn’t pass), accused him in courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years. He’ll install loyalists in federal law enforcement institutions and the military, grab more executive powers, and fill again the innermost power circle with his family members and sycophants. Most of the mainstream media (he calls (“fake news”) will be sidelined and pressured. Tracking down undocumented immigrants and mass deportations will unfold. Enter his possible tinkering with the Constitutional right to vote, having in mind the dream of every dictator to obscure and eventually disable it. (He promised the MAGA crowd to alleviate them of the voting burden after this election.) This grave scenario might be somewhat moderated by a prospective Democrat majority in the House/Senate. Still, the American political system already skewed toward executive power will provide a broad basis for monarchic rule. Serious consequences would follow for large parts of the world as well, but that’s another topic.

 Brace for impact!

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228341417_Informing_in_the_Flat_Rough_World_Balancing_Globalization_Gone_Awry

[2] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2022/05/17/racist-great-replacement-conspiracy-theory-explained

[3] https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/demographics-group-affinities/

[4] https://www.eurasiareview.com/03112024-trumpist-conservatism-how-it-differs-from-classical-american-conservatism-analysis/