Shamocracy
MAY 30, 2026
When it comes to war (and more war), the USA is a dictatorship.
Consider Trump’s words that he will make “the final determination” whether the Iran War will persist. Roughly 342 million Americans and 93 million Iranians await Trump’s decision. The decision of an egotistical narcissist who’s convinced he must always be seen to be “winning”—that all that really matters is his own self-image.
Trump, America’s de facto dictator, if not yet de jure, recently told the American people he didn’t care if the war was hurting their finances or making life more difficult for them. As Dick Cheney once said about American opposition to the Iraq War: “So?” So what? Who cares what the people think. What matters is what the dictators think.
What’s especially shameful here is mainstream media coverage, which presents Trump’s absolute power over war as completely normal—even legal.
Remember when wars were supposed to be declared only by Congress in the name of the people?
Saying when to fight, when to go to war, when to send U.S. troops into harm’s way, is the ultimate power, literally the power over life and death, and we the people, as much as I hate to say this, have accepted with little protest that Trump has total power here.
Meanwhile, the Democrats mutter something about affordability. And there’s always a Democrat or two (“the rotating villain”) in Congress who prevents any curb to Trump’s war-making authority.
Welcome to America’s shamocracy. We might be able to remove Trump’s name from the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, but we can’t remove Trump from sending U.S. troops to their deaths in an illegal war. Where’s Congress? Where’s SCOTUS? Why do they leave war-making to the whims of one greedy and power-driven man?
Bracing Views 
Recently came across reference to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” which through “incisive analysis and historical examples, examines the gradual decay of political institutions through the actions of authoritarian leaders, highlighting how established democracies are vulnerable to collapse not by external forces, but from within, via the erosion of unwritten rules of political conduct.”
Call it what you will, “slippery slope” or “greased skids,” the trajectory is steepening downward for this country: the 1% already has the most toys (though that won’t stop them from grabbing more), so they’ve won; the pinnacle of the judiciary, the Supreme Court, concocts legal interpretations and decisions green-lighting further aggrandizement, thus thievery is legalized; the press is complacent, merely echoing, not telling truth to power; more is spent on “guns” – now on the order of over $1 trillion per year – than on “butter” – $900 billion cut in Medicaid over ten years only partly to pay for all that, the rest being put on the credit card, the interest on which consumes more and more of the Federal budget, leaving less and less for things like infrastructure, itself graded D+ by the Society of Civil Engineers, and so on, and so on, and so on… until it no longer can possibly go on.
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