Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is

 

 Who's the Mad King Now?:

... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...

Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”

He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...

“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”

Mad King Ludwig, who is quite clearly nuts, says LA would have been completely obliterated had he not sent in the California National Guard, proves it by sending in more, and 700 US Marines

 

“We made a great decision in sending the National Guard to deal with the violent, instigated riots in California,” he said in a post on Truth Social.

“If we had not done so, Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated,” said Trump.

Trump called Newsom “incompetent,” and said the governor and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass should be thanking him, saying “YOU ARE SO WONDERFUL. WE WOULD BE NOTHING WITHOUT YOU, SIR.”

More.

Mad King Ludwig's soul is in chaos, full of conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy: Trump now calls for letting Congress spend without limit weeks after touting tax increases on the rich to pay the bills

 Trump calls for scrapping debt limit  (June 4)

Trump pushes Republicans to have rich pay more taxes (May 8)

Trump pivots, says GOP should ‘probably not’ raise taxes on rich  (May 9)

Trump millionaire tax hike idea upends Republican political wisdom (May 10)

He belongs in a psych ward, not in The White House.

 

Rag-headed heathen bastard King of Qatar to award Mad King Ludwig of America lavishly appointed $400 million 747-8 jumbo jet to use as Air Force One until Boeing gets its act together

 Trump administration poised to accept 'palace in the sky' as a gift for Trump from Qatar: Sources

Trump poised to accept Qatar jet gift as Air Force One

 

 

 

The bond market is more powerful than both the pope and the president combined, so it's telling that Mad King Ludwig The Impotent does this

 

Mad King Ludwig is in a foul mood this Easter Monday because the Supreme Court ruined his weekend deportation plans

 Trump ramps up attacks on Powell, demands ‘loser’ Fed chair lower rates ‘NOW’

 

NY Governor Hochul tells Mad King Ludwig to go pound sand

 

NY Gov. Hochul says congestion pricing will remain despite federal deadline to end the program Sunday

 

... The Trump administration sought to kill the program on Feb. 19, with the president declaring himself “king” in a social media post that celebrated the potential end of congestion pricing. ...

Hochul fought back, declaring: “The cameras are staying on.” ...

Pete Wehner calls Trump America's mad king, lists twenty examples to date fewer than 90 days in

 

 

... He is more impulsive, more vindictive, and more anarchic than in his first term. ... Trump is America’s Mad King. ...  as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. ...

 

The whole thing is here.

Crimes in high places: Mad King Ludwig admits he decided to pause tariffs early in the morning on Wednesday when he also posted "This is a great time to buy", which amounts to market manipulation

 

 Trump was asked by a reporter on Wednesday when he decided to put a pause on the tariffs. 

“I would say this morning. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about it. Fairly early this morning,” he said.

Quoted here in "Fund managers quietly fear Trump doesn't have a tariff plan and that he 'might be insane'".

The tyrant has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy: Mad King Ludwig says zero tariffs not good enough

 

They're all nuts.

 

Vietnam's Zero-Tariff Offer 'Means Nothing'

Peter Navarro, CNBC

Normally you institute protectionist policies like tariffs when you already have something to protect, not before

But our Orwellian Republicans put the cart before the horse.

You can't return to something which no longer exists. The net trade deficit for 2024 is nearly $1 trillion, instead of flat like during the post-war up until Reagan, who first ran in 1976 against Ford, when tariffs still had something to protect but we listened to the siren song of free-trade instead.

That is why the Trump administration has had to cast about for at least six different reasons for instituting tariffs at the present time, none of which are at all convincing otherwise there wouldn't be six of them, not to mention that the math used for them is preposterous, or that they are the farthest thing from reciprocal.

The real reason for them, however, is that the tariffs, like the executive orders which now number over 100, are the immediate strings available to our Puppet Master, which he can pull this way one day and that way another, your ever present reminder of who is in charge around here. Suck up to him and he'll make a deal.

Trump's White House laughably brags about these things.

New taxes, which is what these tariffs are, are liberating don't you see!

Our mad King Ludwig needs this constant adulation. The tyrant has desires which he can never fulfill, Plato warned us.

But of course all this can be undone by the next president, which is no way to run a country. It makes for deep institutional instability and distrust throughout the global economy, for which few can reasonably plan.

The message remains the same: Expect Kaos. 

 

Mad King Ludwig says his tariffs will bring in $1T in the next year lol

 President Trump has argued that some of the tariffs he's imposing this week could help the government raise over $1 trillion in the next year or so

 S&P 500 loses $2.4 trillion in market value, biggest one-day loss since 2020

Mad King Ludwig says pigs will fly

 

You're going to see billions of dollars, even trillions of dollars coming into our country very soon in the form of tariffs.

-- here, 3/25/25, and here

Mad King Ludwig will never get the Nobel Peace Prize now, even if he does end the Russian war in Ukraine

 

US cancels visa of Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias

The former president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, says his US visa has been revoked.

Arias, a Nobel laureate, said he was informed of the decision weeks after he had publicly criticised Donald Trump, comparing the behaviour of the US president to that of a Roman emperor.

The 84-year-old, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering an end to conflicts in Central America, said US authorities had given no explanation. ...

US imports came to $4.11 trillion in 2024: You'd have to tariff this out of existence to pay for the nearly $7 trillion in federal outlays in fiscal 2024

The tariff rate would have to be 170%, not 20% or 25% or even 50%.

Those are not serious proposals. 

The tax base is much too small.

Humoring Mad King Ludwig about this is an errand worthy only of fools.

I sense a lot of dissension in Mad King Ludwig's palace: Lutnik attacked over crazy tariffs, Lutnick counterattacks over crazy vaccine skepticism fallout from RFK Jr

 

‘I don’t know anyone that isn’t pissed off at him’: Trump world turns on Lutnick

RFK Jr. is a ‘conspiracy theorist’ endangering lives, say analysts at Howard Lutnick’s former firm

 

Absolutely stunning: Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatens to shut down Social Security last night, takes it all back this afternoon

 

What a shit show. This guy needs to be fired stat.

This is America under Mad King Ludwig.

Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek threatened Thursday evening to bar Social Security Administration employees from accessing its computer systems in response to a judge’s order blocking the U.S. DOGE Service from accessing sensitive taxpayer data.

Less than 24 hours later — after the judge rejected his argument and the White House intervened — Dudek is saying he was “out of line.”...

“[The White House] called me and let me know it’s important to reaffirm to the public that we’re open for business,” he said. “The White House did remind me that I was out of line and so did the judge. And I appreciate that.”...

Dudek first made his threat to close down the agency during a Bloomberg News interview Thursday night. ...

Such a dramatic move to effectively shut down the agency would have been unprecedented in the agency’s history and would immediately begin halting benefit payments for millions of Americans.

“For almost 90 years, Social Security has never missed a paycheck — but 60 days into this administration, Social Security is now on the brink,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. “Acting Commissioner Leland Dudek has proven again that he is in way over his head, compromising the privacy of millions of Americans, shutting down services that senior citizens rely on and planning debilitating layoffs, all in service to Elon Musk’s lies.”     

More.

Putin is much better at cruelty and humiliation than Mad King Ludwig, makes Trump wait an hour, agrees only to a narrowly defined ceasefire with Ukraine, and then immediately breaks it

 

Mad King Ludwig flies into a rage all because a judge told him Nay Nay

Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.

Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.

"He who is the real tyrant," said Plato, "whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind."

 

 

 

"He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles."

 

Federal Judge William Alsup orders tens of thousands of federal employees fired by Mad King Ludwig rehired

 

 Thousands of fired federal workers must be rehired immediately, judge rules 

... Alsup, a San Francisco-based appointee of President Bill Clinton, ordered the Defense, Treasury, Energy, Interior, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments to “immediately” offer all fired probationary employees their jobs back. The Office of Personnel Management, the judge said, had made an “unlawful” decision to terminate them. ... Alsup is the first federal judge to order the administration to broadly unwind the firing spree that has roiled the federal workforce during Trump’s first two months in office. ...