The situation in 2025 is dire. Democracy is, of course, under attack by the Mad King. All at once, the greed, incompetence, and lies of the Trump regime are an inspiration for comedians, activists, the media, from progressives to the mainstream to shocked Republicans.

Around the kitchen table, almost all Americans have strong opinions, with diminishing numbers of True believers of the remaining bold MAGA horde. A frequent Trump rant is recapitulated weekly, swearing that his loss in 2020 was the result of a stolen election and sometimes justification for an unconstitutional third term when he is 85, while he still distributes Trump 2028 red caps.

Meanwhile, the State of Oklahoma will now teach high school students that sacking the U.S. capital to keep Trump in power was “patriotism 1.” Giant images of Trump are beginning to appear on Federal buildings. First is the Agriculture Department building on 1400 Independence Ave.

There are almost no limits on Trump's desire for power and revenge. There are no wise men and women to caution the Mad King about what he can and cannot do. The wise Generals and the sage foreign policy experts are gone, replaced by fools and a claque of the power-hungry.

With stunning speed, Trump, with his tariff madness, has fundamentally damaged the global status of the United States as a durable world leader wielding economic, military, and soft global power. Canada, of all places, wants to have little or nothing to do with the U.S. on an economic or military basis. Canadian provinces are launching their own punishing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. trucks and cars using the Alcan Highway connecting Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska.

Trump actually believed his tariff regime would make the world rush to make deals with the U.S. and be an enormous source of income that would replace income taxes, instead of leading to a U.S. recession and economic contraction. The global Trump tariffs still roll on with some cutbacks, like the absurd tariffs on China now down to 60 percent. Shipments to the U.S. keep shrinking as the world finds new lucrative economic pathways. There are still new tariffs by whim, for instance, the latest 100% tariffs on films made outside the U.S. The Republican congress has the power to block the tariff lunacy, but has failed to act. Trump has his way. His focus now is to intimidate the courts.

A majority apparently hate what Trump has unleashed upon the U.S. in less than half a year. The speed is dizzying. The lies and falsehoods are stunning. The illegality, nearly continuous. Leading villains like Elon Musk have come and apparently are almost gone as key administration figures with enormous concocted powers of DOGE.

With avarice, greed, and constitutional violation, Trump was gifted a stunning jet plane fit for a king for his use from the Qataris, allegedly a gift for Trump to keep. Why would be buy influence? said the Qatari PM. Hint, the word is out that Trump is a sucker in pursuit flattery and wealth.

There is the little matter of the Emoluments Clause2 of the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8. Individuals holding "any Office of Profit or Trust" under the U.S. are not to accept any "present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State" without consent of Congress. On advice of Pam Bondy, and Trump's retainer, the new Attorney General, this was ok. Of course, Pam's previous job was a highly paid Washington lobbyist working for Qatar, earning 115,000 dollars a month. More coming.

According to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Pam Bondi was a registered lobbyist with the Washington, D.C. firm Ballard Partners. Before she became Attorney General, Pam Bondi failed to identify several key conflicts of interest, including her job as a Partner with Ballard that included her Qatar lobbying. Pam also lobbied for private prisons, which became a major feature of Trump's immigrant deportation plans. This apparently was no obstacle for her becoming Trump's Attorney General. She was considered by Republican Senators a welcome choice instead of disgraced House Member Matt Gatz of Florida. He was Trump’s first choice.

Trump has a sense of humor in his picks for high office that required Senate Consent. He selected a rogues gallery of the unqualified but MAGA loyal, that included many Fox News veterans like Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon, a man who has become famous for using unsecured commercial messaging to discuss war planning and more.

He is a fierce Trump loyalist who is working to strip the military of women Generals, trans soldiers despite their medals, and make the celebrated war records of soldiers like Jackie Robinson, the Navaho Code Talkers, and the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen. African American fighter pilot trained in Alabama, flying combat missions first in French Morocco in April 194,3 and served from bases in Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. The group with an additional three squadrons became the 332nd Fighter Group under the Command of Benjamin O Davis Jr as Colonel, who became a General. The group earned a Distinguished Unit Citation for an escort mission to Berlin on 24 March 1945. Public rage restored the memory of Robinson, the Navaho Code Talkers, and the Tuskegee Airmen.

Trump 2: the hype and the reality

On the hype front, Trump promised that 10 to 15 million undocumented aliens would be swiftly rounded up and deported. The alleged focus would be on criminal aliens and drug dealers.T he reality is that there is “little empirical evidence that arrests and removals are higher under trump3” according to the Transactional Records Access Clearing House (TRAC) analysis of Immigration and Customs data comparing the Trump an Biden administrations. What has changed are high-profile raids and publicized arrests to terrify immigrant communities and workers.

The Trump administration is working hard to reduce the legal and political rights of immigrants. The end result is not deportation of millions, but to maintain a subclass of workers with little or no rights to be abused and be forced to stay in the background. There are already 4 million pending immigration cases, and far from a sufficient number of judges to conduct trials. The American Immigration Council 4 estimated that to process 10.6 million cases within 11 years, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) would need to hire an additional 181 immigration judges per year. There is little sign that the Trump Administration is beyond high high-profile transfer of Venezuelans to a notorious El Salvador prison.

The latest is the deportation of people to South Sudan5. The Trump administration is now deporting immigrants to countries they are not from and will not tell Federal Judges where or who they are exactly, and where they have been taken to, claiming the information is classified. The clear Trump goal is to block the Justice system from stripping constitutional protections of U.S. residents, citizens or not. That’s just the start for the Mad King ending U.S. democracy.

What also interests Trump is to begin blocking the birth rate citizenship and create a new class of stateless Americans, which will create a new class of helpless and exploited workers.

This is the Trump Legal System at work. A number of Federal Judges have blocked Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship, and most likely Unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

Ever creative, the Trump lawyers were aware there was next to zero support for stopping birth right citizenship. They demanded instead that there be a hearing by the Supreme Court on blocking Nationwide injunctions by Federal Judges. The Supreme Court now limited only left to debate, not the merits of scraping Birth Right Citizenship, but decide only the validity of the Nationwide Injunctions to stop Trump’s plans, or Nation wide injunctions be scrapped and the Trump plan could be allow to go into effect with Red States like Louisiana and Texas with Trump favorable Judges.

Another recent plan is to end Habeas Corpus rights and allow both citizens and non-citizens to be jailed, disappeared, or deported with impunity and zero rights. Cristi Nome, head of Homeland Security, did not know the meaning of Habeas Corpus. She defined it as the ability of President Trump to protect the United States from an invasion of illegal immigrants.

Trump’s plan is apparently to destroy large parts of the U.S. government. The Lee Zeldon EPA is working hard to strip wetlands protection and increase fossil fuel production, and has no interest in climate change. What could go wrong? The Doge destroyers have fired 280,000 thousands of Federal workers across 27 agencies.

Trump’s goal is is make his administration free from legal and political limits. His latest Big Beautiful Bill includes in the House version the ability of Trump to block legal limits on his actions. "No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued," the provision in the bill, which is more than 1,000 pages long, says. The provision "would make most existing injunctions—in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases, and others—unenforceable," Erwin Chemerinsky, the Dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

Empire’s end

Trump is pushing ahead with tariffs and huge tax cuts for the rich, as well as deliberately accelerating US debt by another $3.8 trillion in ten years. This was a similar habit in the Trump Regime.

The debt-to-GDP ratio will reach 125% by 2034. Debt in 2025 is already $36.2 trillion.

The "big, beautiful bill" is projected to add $3.8 trillion to the U.S. national debt over the next decade. According to Statista, by 2034, the gross federal debt of the United States is projected to be about $54.39 trillion U.S. dollars.

There is a dramatic increase in the price of U.S. Bonds. Current U.S. Treasury bond prices are for a 1-year T-Bill yield of 4.2%, a 5-year Treasury Note yield of 4.06%, a 10-year Treasury Note yield of 4.55%, and a 30-year Treasury Bond 5.08%.

What is shocking is that back in February 1, 2022, the 1-year .33%, 5-year 1.50%, 10-year 1.65%, and 30-year Treasury bond yields were 2.08.

This is extraordinary. One-year T-Bill increased price from a negligible .33% in February 2022 to $4.2% this May.

At that price with 4.2% interest, Warren Buffett isn't selling many of his stocks while waiting for a coming market collapse. He is buying T notes, happy to earn billions before the collapse, where he can pick up good deals from select well-managed companies that do well in hard times, like Modello Beer and Kroger Supermarkets.

Trump has put the United States in a position similar to Great Britain after WWII, forced to depreciate the pound in the face of enormous war debt.

Trump is making fortunes in crypto grift and appears to welcome the collapse of the dollar, which will make American exports cheaper, while the collapse of the dollar accelerates.

A new economic order is taking shape. In the short term, the U.S. is likely to be afflicted by stagflation and then a market collapse, opening the door to a new global financial architecture.

Over time, the U.S. Dollar will no longer be able to simply print dollars to make economic problems disappear. Printing money will lead to massive inflation and the inability to sell US bonds at less than usurious prices. The US under Trump has squandered its soft power and decades of goodwill.

China and the EU are leading a global path away from carbon dioxide and toward electrification and leadership toward global survival. China and the EU will assume global leadership and be able to work with the U.S. states. To the extent that Trump succeeds in manifesting his authoritarian desires and crackpot economics of high tariffs and a cheap dollar , the more dire the consequences for the U.S.

Trump is threatened by a free and fair midterm election in 2026. He cannot allow defeat and lose power in the House of Representatives, almost certain, and potentially the loss of the Senate. He is already taking steps to block Democratic fundraising. But this may not be enough if an economic crisis is upon us.

Martial law6 is in the dictator’s playbook. Chaos and economic collapse will likely lead to state resistance not only in Blue States, but in Red States like Alabama that have already suffered substantially under the Mad King’s dicta of tariffs and blocking state funding approved by Congress and stolen by Trump from Red States that really need the money.

Constitutional convention: saving us from the Mad King

A Constitutional Convention, specifically for proposing amendments to the U.S. Constitution, is governed by Article V of the Constitution.

A nonviolent state-based call for a Constitutional convention in the context of an economic collapse and a Trump push to end democracy could become a state-led Constitutional Convention that empowers the states and leaves the Mad King without power.

Calling the convention:

Congress is mandated to call a convention upon the application of the legislatures of two-thirds, 34 states.

Proposed amendments:

The convention would propose amendments to the Constitution, which need to be ratified by either state legislatures or conventions in three-fourths of the states (currently 38 of 50).

No specific rules:

The Constitution doesn't specify the rules, procedures, or even the scope of a convention.

Secrecy:

No mandated rules for the federal level. The original Constitutional Convention of 1787 had a rule of secrecy.

State-level examples:

Some states have their own rules and procedures for their own constitutional conventions.

The Mad King appears willing to unleash the US military to force states to obey his desires. It is much easier for states to call for a Constitutional Convention to reclaim the best features of American Democracy.

Notes

1 Oklahoma to require schools to teach Trump's 2020 election conspiracy theories on USA Today.
2 Emoluments Clause of the U.S.Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8: “And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
3 Little empirical evidence that arrests and removals are higher under Trump on Trace Reports.
4 Mass deportation: devastating costs to America, its budget and economy on American Migration Council.
5 A look at South Sudan, where the US is accused of quietly sending migrants on AP News.
6 Martial law in times of civil disorder on U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs.