Ken Olson observes politics, the natural scene and other subjects from East Andover, Maine, and Jackson, New Hampshire.

 “Following his administration’s intervention in New York congestion pricing in February 2025, Donald Trump declared on Truth Social, ‘LONG LIVE THE KING!’”

—Google search result for the terms “trump king language.”

Historian and Maine resident Heather Cox Richardson’s online “Letters from an American” recently cited Trump posts of Feb. 23:

(7:06 a.m.) “The supreme court (will [sic] be using lower case letters for a while based on a complete lack of respect!) of the United States accidentally and unwittingly gave me, as President of the United States, far more powers and strength than I had prior to their ridiculous, dumb, and very internationally divisive ruling” — his self-contradictory spaghetti logic.

Trump, in imperial fettle, said he could “do absolutely ‘terrible’ things to foreign countries” with new tariffs, which “can all be used in a much more powerful and obnoxious way, with legal certainty, than the tariffs as initially used” — meaning the ones the Supreme Court tanked wholesale, irritating a man who sets international policy according to what nations peeve him by not kissing the king’s Rolex.

(9:34 a.m.) “Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to. BUYER BEWARE!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” —

And OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

(9:49 a.m., marking three hours of POTUS salving his id on company time) “As President, I do not have to go back to Congress to get approval of Tariffs. It has already been gotten, in many forms, a long time ago! They were also just reaffirmed by the ridiculous and poorly crafted supreme court decision! President DJT” — Take that, Congress.

Congress, most know, is the leaderless body whose Republicans flop supine when DJT burps in the general direction of Capitol Hill and who acquiesce in, thus underline proudly, their institution’s irrelevance as a constitutional actor. Such are the majority trustees of our legislative branch.

Professor Cox Richardson notes Trump lied again — ho-hum — about his losing the 2020 election. The globe is accustomed to his unremitting dishonesty. New to some, though, is this fatuous claim about absentee ballots:

“Republicans don’t get theirs and they’re calling frantically to get their ballot. A Democrat will get three, four, five, six, and even seven ballots,” Trump said. “That’s what they’re good at, they’re professional cheaters.”

The “cheating” fairytale comes from a classy fellow convicted of 34 felonies and found
liable for sexual assault and whose companies — including his “charitable” foundation that prosecutors dismembered — engaged in financial self-dealing and other swindles.

Add Wikipedia’s report: “Trump and his businesses have been involved in … over 4,000 total cases in U.S. federal and state courts before his first presidential term, including as both plaintiff and defendant.” USA Today confirms he welched repeatedly on hired contractors, stiffing them big.

This conniving lout is the GOP’s most esteemed public servant.

Cox Richardson was kind not to mention Trump’s grade-school word mastery, gibberish syntax, pointless exclamation points, arbitrary capitalizations, unnecessary quotation marks, goofy non-sequiturs and pathetic, gratuitous, flatulent use of the pronoun “I”, the most conspicuous sign of a king-sized inferiority complex. Psychiatrists galore say he’s mentally unwell. Lay people understand he’s the unsurprising result of incomplete child rearing.

Saddest is that a sub-adult convinces grownups that down is up, out is in, black is white and the blue sky is as red as the Queen of Hearts, as through the looking glass in “Alice in Wonderland,” a yarn by Lewis Carroll, who, in his 1871 poem “Jabberwocky,” invented Trump-speak:

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.”

We don’t have a president, we have the Mad Hatter, a court fool who will commence a war mimsy whimsy. Meanwhile, independents and disaffected Republicans might consider turning Democrat. After all, they can vote seven times.