by Michael O’Neill

By now I have to admit, although I have previously used words like ‘catastrophe’ and ‘abomination of desolation’ to describe Donald Trump’s narrow victory (by less than two per cent of the final vote) in the November election, not even I and my fellow anti-Trumpers could have imagined the chaos that has ensued. That Trump and his sidekick, ‘the richest man in the world’, Elon Musk, would have caused such chaos to the American government, and such horrible damage to the lives of people here and around the world, in their first six weeks in office.

We have witnessed the greatest con job in American political history and have no idea how and when this con job can be stopped. They have made a mockery of ‘law and order’, and the American Constitution’s ‘separation of powers’ between coequal branches of government – the two Houses of Congress, the Executive Branch of the presidency, and the federal Courts of Law. They have done so with their blitzkrieg on the agencies of the federal government, illegally firing tens of thousands of federal civil servants, before the courts have an opportunity to outlaw their behaviour.

We have no idea how much damage they have managed to cause, and will cause, but already it has affected people’s lives all over the country. Witness their own Republican voters in Republican-controlled states booing and making fools of clueless Republican Congress members denying what is going on. Musk and Trump had no legal authority to interfere with Congress’s control of the purse, or act like a president has unilateral control of the agencies Congress has created.

The ‘con job’ began with Trump’s campaign, which was full of ridiculous and barefaced lies, such as the fictional tale of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating house pets, and Trump himself pretending to be a populist champion of the working classes. He claimed he was going to take care immediately of inflation and the price of eggs, groceries (a word he borrowed from across the pond and seemed to be intrigued by), and the price of petrol.

Instead, after the votes were counted, he celebrated at his Florida country club Mar a Lago for the next two and a half months, with his principal purveyor of election votes, Musk, and other oligarchs, billionaires and millionaires. The working classes were nowhere to be found in or around Mar a Lago.

 Michael L. O’Neill is a retired assistant public defender.

(1)See Robert Reich, ‘Three billionaires: America’s oligarchy is now fully exposed’, The Guardian, 27 Feb 2025.

See also Michael Tomasky, “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won”, The New Republic, November 8, 2024. I found this article to be an excellent review of the lies, misinformation, and disinformation that has acted like a tsunami to swamp this country with Trump’s lies and disinformation. The fiasco in the White House today, Friday, February 28, with Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance bullying the President of the Ukraine, Volodymir Zelensky, was another display of the lies of Trump and Vance.

Photo by Jose M on Unsplash