Nixon: I am not a Crook. Trump: I am not a Dictator (but would like to be)

MAGA: Please help Trump become a dick-traitor. Keep supporting the jerk. 

Trump keeps "joking" about whether or not he's a dictator. In his incoherent rambling a couple of days  ago in the Outhouse, he declared, “a lot of people are saying maybe we’d like a dictator, but I am not a dictator".  Deep in his mangled brain, he's probably saying, "I wish I could be one". 

Former Trump first-term officials reveal that he continuously spoke highly of other dictators and his envy of authoritarian leaders. He fawns over Kim Jong-Un (North Korea), Viktor Orban (Hungary), Vladimir Putin (Russia), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Xi Jinping (China) and other dictators and right-wing despots. He meets with them reverentially, laying down the red carpet, and speaks nothing but good things about them. "I get along very well" with this or that other totalitarian ruler, he keeps telling us every time he meets with one. He obviously hates leftwing dictators like Maduro of Venezuela, but this is not about right and left. In Trump's mind, any dictator is better than any non-dictator.

He is enamored with the idea of having unchallenged power. All this business about checks and balances is, in his, mind an obstacle to doing whatever hell he wants to do: Judges, Inspectors General, Federal Reserve governors, etc. all government officials who are constitutionally independent from the office of President irritate him. So he unconstitutionally fires them, threatens them, files lawsuits against them and otherwise demean and berate them in public.

Sending the army into the streets for made-up reasons is a typical dictator behavior. Trump is right now engaged in such a pathway. He claims that crime in Democrat cities require him to send the army. He chooses to ignore that overall crime is 133% higher in Republican-led states and cities than in Democrat states and cities over the past 25 years. Hence, his reason for sending the troops into Democrat cities is obviously very political. It is his way of undermining the Democrat Party's standing in the country. It's so childishly stupid.
  
“Having spent time personally with the man in the first Trump administration, he would wax poetic in private about foreign dictators he admired,” Miles Taylor, who in 2018 penned the famous “anonymous” op-ed against Trump while serving as Homeland Security chief of staff, told CNN.

Trump “was jealous of their ability to exert total control over their populations,” said Taylor, who himself earlier this year became the subject of a Department of Justice investigation after Trump claimed his conduct while working for the government could be “properly characterized as treasonous.”

Asked about that Trump remark, Taylor replied: “Look at what Trump said five years ago. He said when you are president of the United States the authority is total, and that’s how it’s got to be. And five years later he’s still saying things that would indicate his interest in being a dictator.”

The clock is ticking. Trump is clearly an authoritarian ruler who challenges the courts, surrounds himself with yes-subordinates, and seeks retribution against those he feels oppose him. Time will soon confirm that Trump is indeed a dictator: watch his behavior in the lead-up to the 2026 legislative elections, in the 2026 Los Angeles World Cup and in the presidential elections of 2028.

For example, I expect him to want to open the games like Hitler did in 1936 Berlin Olympics, with all the MAGA paraphernalia and America First junk merchandise. He will certainly try to bash California Governor Gavin Newsom and compete with him over primacy at the games.

When he first showed up  on the political stage, we used to laugh at his entertainment antics. But now his antics have turned into malice and cruelty, and we don't laugh anymore.

Then there is this:

Because of Trump, the United States is now a global pariah. There is a growing list of countries choosing to pause mail deliveries to the U.S. because of Trump’s tariff chaos. They include Australia, France, Germany, India, Spain and South Korea.

Multiple international postal services have now paused shipments of packages to the U.S. amid confusion over Trump’s decision to scrap the so-called “de minimis” exemption, which waives tariffs on low-value packages.

“Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” said DHL, Europe’s largest shipping provider.