We live in strange times. The political situation since Donald Trump assumed office resembles the 1865 English children’s novel by Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. Alice saw a white rabbit with a pocket watch complaining he was late. She follows him down a rabbit hole, (much like the voters followed Trump down his political rabbit hole)  to a strange an bizarre world. We seem to be like Alice when she asked the Chesire cat sitting in a tree: “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” The cat responded: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to” and Alice said, “I don’t much care so long as I get somewhere..” The cat replied, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go if you only walk long enough.” The question for this administration is where does it want to go and which way it ought to go from here?

The political actions of this administration make about as much sense as the scene in Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22 about how to make a profit selling eggs.  Milo Miderbinder explains he buys eggs in Malta for seven cents each and sells them to the mess hall at the base for five cents each. When asked why he would do that he says he does it “in order to make a profit.” The administrations actions make even less sense than Milo’s explanation.

David Brooks, New York Times columnist wrote a column, “The Six Principles of Stupidity” on January 30th this year. He pointed out:

“Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern.”  He warned that people who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. He says it is the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. He applies this idea by pointing out:

“The administration produced volleys of stupidity this week. It renewed threats to impose ruinous tariffs on Canada and Mexico that would drive up inflation in America. It attempted a broad and general purge of the federal workforce, apparently without asking how that purge would affect government  operations. But I’d like to focus on one other episode: the attempt to freeze federal spending on assistance programs, and Trump’s subsequent decision to reverse course and undo the freeze. This Trump policy was like trying to cure acne with decapitation.

The flurry of executive orders from the White House is like the actions of a monarch or a dictator responsible to no one else. The issue of whether the president has this power is irrelevant if Congress does not step in to exercise their responsibility and the courts fail to enforce constitutional as well as legal restrictions. In the meantime, we are left to deal with the firing of all FBI agents, making Canada a 51st state and developing the Gaza strip into a prime recreational area along with 1500 other executive orders.

What is clear to me, is that the relationship between Elon Musk and Donald Trump will inevitably end up in an atomic bomb size dispute. The world’s richest man took questions from reporters in the Oval Office as he stood next to President Donald Trump, who has told him to slash the size and spending of the federal government. Musk, in a black MAGA hat, long dark coat and with his son (whom he named “X”)  sometimes perched on his shoulders, answered questions from the media as the head of the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Musk stood next to the president’s desk and maintained his work was in the interest of the public and democracy. President Trump sat behind the desk, chiming in with approval as he let the world’s richest man expound for roughly 30 minutes on the rationale for the drastic overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. He rejected the mounting criticism that he was operating with unchecked power and no accountability. These claims in spite of the fact there have been dozens of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration’s efforts.

History, however, has proven what  Lord Action famously pointed out that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What we now have are two pompous, self-obsessed men who have seized the power of government to implement and impose their own political views on Americans. A proverb says: “If a nation is ruled by two kings, both the kings and other subjects will perish.” What was obvious to me is that the president was not at all comfortable with Musk getting all the attention and not Trump. It seems delusional to me that we would expect the world’s richest man the president of the country to be comfortably sharing power and public attention comfortably when they both have an uncontrolled ego with a compulsion for attention.

There’s little voters can do about this so long as the courts and Congress sit on their hands allowing it to occur. In 1803 Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, for the Supreme Court the decision in Marbury v. Madison that established that the courts have the power to declare laws passed by Congress unconstitutional if they violate the Constitution. That raises the issue of the Trump administration challenging the ruling by simply refusing to obey rulings of the judiciary. In an even darker view, remember that in 1933 Hitler took dictatorial power of Germany by a series of ruthless and violent actions—including the Reichstag Fire and the Night of Long Knives.  He was able to seize dictatorial power after disabling the religious, political and governmental power restraints that had been in place.  We might as well sit in the bleachers and watch this drama play out while praying it does not result in disaster for our country because it is out of our control.