Following up on this, Andrew Sullivan’s diagnosis is candid and accurate; an excerpt:

Trump is…a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy…..

But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case…..

Trump’s mouthpiece justifies [the declaration of non-existent emergencies] this way: “President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

Meanwhile, America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.