Trump: Exceptions Will Be Made; The Electorate: Unless We Stop Him

Sitting at the kitchen counter where ninety percent of Ye Olde Blogge gets written, Ma Belle Femme asked about the Orange Caricature’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. “How can he do that?” she asked. “Doesn’t he need Congressional approval? Don’t y’all have a system of checks and balances?” She’s Canadian, so she isn’t as familiar with the sophistication of our democracy and how it works.

“Who’s going to stop him?” I asked her, knowing full well how this was going to go.

“But, it says in the Constitution that Congress has the power to declare war. How can he go to war without Congress approval?” she asked, her exasperation growing palpable.

“Who’s going to stop him?” I asked her again.

“Congress!” she answered.

“Really? How? How will Congress stop him?”

“Can’t they pass a law or something? Haven’t I read about a war powers act?”

I could see why she might be confused. In Canada, most politicians are still making a good faith effort to follow their constitution, laws, norms, and duties. After all, the Conservative Party voted to make the Liberal Party’s Mark Carney prime minister forming a unity government in the face of Trump’s tariffs and antagonism. You know, for the good of the nation, they put the needs of the country ahead of party politics and personal gain. And as of last night’s by-elections and a few people switching parties, Carney has his clear majority. I could see how she’d be confused coming from THAT tradition instead of the mishegas that passes for democracy and good governance in the States nowadays.

“To be effective, laws have to be followed,” I said trying to find the source of her confusion. “If you don’t follow the law…”

“But, Trump has to follow the law!” she cried. A new tack was needed. She was reacting as if Trump were a normal politician who wanted to govern well, enact policies, pursue a program based on beliefs and ideals. How quaint, I thought.

“When was the last time you were speeding? Did you get a ticket?” I asked. “The law only works, if we all agree to follow it.”

The problem the US government is having right now has two causes and a clear solution.

The Effects of Trump’s Narcissism

Because of Trump’s narcissism, he truly believes that the rules don’t apply to him, exceptions will be made for him. You can see it in his social mediaing about his war crimes in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. When he posts, “open the fucking strait you crazy bastards,” he means for them to do it as a personal favor to him. He is frustrated out of his mind because they won’t no matter what he threatens them with. It sounds crazy, but sometimes you have to accept the evidence that lies before your eyes.

Trump’s Narcissistic Syptoms

Consider Trump’s narcissistic symptoms:

Despite his high office, he has vastly over rated his importance. It frustrates him when other world leaders dismiss him or ignore him. It’s what makes him so easy to manipulate. All you have to do is give him the impression that you’re making an exception for him. Who’s your daddy Mark Rutte? But that doesn’t mean that he always gets what he wants, right Prime Minister Takaichi? How many ships is Japan sending to the Strait? All of that faux praise props up his delusion of being Ralph Wiggum special.

Every time you hear him address a reporter, he’s always jactating about some damn thing that he pretends he’s done. Hell, he was even boasting to the children at the White House Easter Egg Roll that they could sell his signature for $5,000.00 on E-Bay. Yeah, to himself bidding against the RNC. Hearing him talk about how great he is often feels like you’ve stumbled into a Rule 34 AI generated sex tape, but it is just Trump putting on the peep show that no one ever wanted. It’s the “Sir! Sir! How’d you now that?” stories of his pure insightful jenius that means he has an infinite number of get out of jail free cards.

His delusion of perfection is so fragile, though, that his staff tiptoe around him pretending their shoes fiit. His feelings are so delicate that they have to show him highlight reels of things blowing up instead of real briefings on his war crime in Iran. It’s either lie and make an exception for his brittle facade or suffer his apocalyptic rage.

Exceptions Will Be Made

All of these people have colluded with his gaslighting to maintain his delusion of exceptionalism. He really does believe he’s some kind of Wylie E. Coyote stupid genius playing elebunty billion dimensional Vulcan chess while the rest of us are scratching our ass as we fill Acme orders. He really thinks that he isn’t transparent and he’s pulling one over on us. And, even if we did realize, we’d make an exception for him.

It doesn’t matter whether it is committing war crimes in Iran, usurping the powers delegated to Congress, or grifting billions of dollars through the Mar-a-Lago membership fees, the donations to his ballroom construction project, and his various and sundry other schemes, he does not think he should be held accountable because he is so exceptional, so special, so beloved.

The Goals of the Republican Congress

If there is one thing that you’ll never read in Ye Olde Blogger, it is that the Republican Congress is spineless and afraid to stand up to Trump. They’re afraid all right. They’re afraid of being primaried. They’re afraid of Trump’s flying monkey squad of trolls harassing them and their families with death threats. But, it isn’t because they are spineless. It is because they want what he wants.

They want a single party pseudo-democratic minority-rule oligarchical autocracy. They want to be the Duma to his Putin. They want to be the doormat to his dirty boots.

For whatever reason, they have given up on democracy. They see it as taking too much of a risk of spreading the largesse of the United States across too many people who don’t look enough like them.

Watch what they do, not what they say. Or in honor of World Autism Month, behavior is communication. They aren’t passing no war powers resolution act to slow his roll in Iran. They gave hella tax cuts to the billionaires and cut trillions from Medicaid and other social safety net programs to pay for it. They fully funded ICE for years with billions of dollars and refused to fund FEMA, TSA, and the Coast Guard. They’ve voted for the SAVE Act repeatedly.

It isn’t that they are not brave enough to stand up for what they believe in, it’s that they are doing what they believe in, gutting our democracy and stuffing it with authoritarianism. They looked at Viktor Orban’s illegitimate illiberal democracy as an demonstration project, and now that he’s lost his election, as a cautionary tale.

The only reason they are upset with Trump now is that his policies, tariffs, ICE, war crimes are terribly unpopular and they can’t quite get there on how to rig the 2026 elections.

The Republican Congress is as much of a threat to our democracy as Trump is. The Founders envisioned three co-equal branches of government, checking and balancing each other, to enact the will of the people. But, Congress isn’t a co-equal branch as much as a co-equal threat. They aren’t checking and balancing Trump as much as they are enabling and accelerating him. They’ve handed him the keys to the kingdom.

We Are The Heroes We’ve Been Looking For

As our Hungarian siblings just demonstrated to us, the only way out of this authoritarian mess is through. It is through overwhelming numbers. Election 2026 is no time to be no Puritopian as the politics nerds say. We need veto proof majorities in both Houses of Congress if we’re going to right this shipwreck of state.

Our decentralized election system may be the only thing that saves us. We’ve watched in real time as Republicans have tried to gerrymander seats, stack state election boards, purge voter rolls, and tried to allow the Executive Branch to federalize our elections. But, there are too many moving parts. If they get a grip on one state, they’ve got five more countering them. The gerrymandering fight is the perfect example. They might’ve just gerrymandered themselves to a minority.

As soon as voters get a whiff of voter suppression and nullification, they are even more determined to vote. Just ask Senators Perdue and Loeffler of Georgia how those tactics worked out for them. Look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where the last Republican to have won was 2016. Since then, It’s been a clean sweep.

Since the Minnesota ICE protests and the No Kings rallies, it feels like we might could be on a roll here. With Viktor Orban being steamrolled in Hungary and Carney winning an outright majority in Canada, democracy seems to be in ascendence. With rising prices and unemployment and the continuing confusion in Iran, it seems like Trump may have finally gotten enough rope to shoot the Republican Party in the genitals.

What is clear in this Great Civics Lesson we’ve been living since 2016, we’re the heroes we’re looking for. We only win if we vote for people who are going to follow the Constitution and our laws.

Image Attribution

This image was found on Jose-Ramiro Deviant Art and has a Creative Commons license.