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Video: #ListenFirst Friday Ellis Watamanuk
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A critical analysis of Trump’s use of power, personality-driven leadership, and the role citizens must play to defend democracy and constitutional balance.
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Trump, The Poster Child of a Megalomaniac
Feb 05, 2026
There is no question that Trump is a megalomaniac. Look at the definition: "An obsession with grandiose or extravagant things or actions." Whether it's relatively harmless actions like redecorating the White House with gold everywhere or attaching his name to every building and project he's involved in, or his more problematic king-like assertion of control over the world—Trump is a card-carrying megalomaniac.
First, the relatively harmless things. One recent piece of evidence of this is the renaming of the "Invest in America" accounts that the government will be setting up when children are born to "Trump" accounts. Whether this was done at Trump's urging or whether his Republican sycophants did it because they knew it would please him makes no difference; it is emblematic of one aspect of his psyche.
But while in most other instances one could criticize Trump's passion as tacky, they really did not benefit him in any material way. The "Trump" accounts are a different matter. Here you have an account that the government plans to set up for children when they are born (and at least one philanthropist is planning on adding to) to enable them to partake of the wealth of America, not through their labor but through investment.
Millions of children will forever have these "Trump" accounts, which will make them feel indebted to Trump, and by connection to the Republican Party, not to the government. It's as if Social Security were called FDR Security and Medicare and Medicaid were called LBJ Care/Aid.
The idea is ludicrous. These are all government plans, paid for by taxpayers, that benefit people who need assistance, whether it's the elderly or the poor. The person who was President and pushed for their legislative passage gets credit, but not by having his name attached to it.
When Republicans are no longer in control of Congress, the accounts should be returned to their original name: "Invest in America." Actually, a better name might be "Invest in Children" accounts.
Another recent example is the renaming of the Kennedy Center as the Trump - Kennedy Center to honor Trump. The Center's Board (all Trump appointees, with the one Democrat representative muted out of the vote) voted to make this change. Again, this was not instigated by Trump, rather by allies who wanted to please him, which he was, saying that, "I was honored by it."
While his petty megalomania is probably the least of his faults, it is nevertheless unseemly. It is something one would expect of the president of a "banana republic" or some dictator, not the President of the United States.
Far from petty and potentially harmful to the United States are the aggressive domestic and international actions that flow from his grandiosity. His exalted regard for himself has resulted in taking all domestic power unto himself and exacting retribution against his many perceived political enemies.
Internationally, we have seen this recently in his actions towards Venezuela and his ongoing talk of seizing Greenland; again, his exalted opinion of himself is reflected in his quest for power, his feeling that he is God-like—what he says or thinks is the final word.
The most forthright example of this came in a recent interview with The New York Times. He said that the only limit to his global power was, "My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Unfortunately, the fact that he is a caricature, a buffoon, will not cost him any votes. As long as his supporters think he is good for them and for America, he will have their support. The New York Times reported that most Republican voters approve of his actions in Venezuela because, although they disapprove of nation-building, they think his actions were good for America because they projected strength while not committing American troops on the ground or costing American lives.
Bottom line, his grandiosity will unlikely cause him any damage politically, unless an action fails embarrassingly (e.g., had the hit command helicopter over Caracas crashed rather than flown on).
When America is ruled by a President who relishes brute power and displays example after example of megalomania, America has fallen in stature, not just in the eyes of the rest of the world, but, more importantly, in the eyes of all Americans who understand the importance of humaneness to what made America great.
What can you, as an individual citizen, do to return our government to one based on reason and respect for others? There are three basic things that the individual can do to protect our democracy: engage in mass peaceful demonstrations; encourage discussion of this issue within your community by suggesting such programs to local organizations and schools; and ultimately to vote in the upcoming midterm elections to return Congress to the control of the Democrats and thus restore the balance of power that the Founding Fathers intended, enabling the people's representatives to put a brake on the unbridled exercise of Presidential power.
It is absolutely critical that masses of individual citizens raise their voices. It shows the President and his supporters that they will pay a price for their actions. It shows the silent majority of Americans who are offended by the President's actions that they are not alone and encourage them to not sit on the sidelines, saying, "What can I do?" And it shows the rest of the world that the President does not speak for many of us; that he has not been given a blank check to govern.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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When institutions fail, what must citizens do to preserve a republic? Drawing on John Adams, this essay examines disciplined refusal and civic responsibility.
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John Adams on Virtue: After the Line Is Crossed
Feb 04, 2026
This is the third Fulcrum essay in my three-part series, John Adams on Virtue, examining what sustains a republic when leaders abandon restraint, and citizens must decide what can still be preserved.
Part I, John Adams Warned Us: A Republic Without Virtue Can Not Survive, explored what citizens owe a republic beyond loyalty or partisanship. Part II, John Adams and the Line a Republic Should Not Cross, examined the lines a republic must never cross in its treatment of its own people. Part III turns to the hardest question: what citizens must do when those lines are crossed, and formal safeguards begin to fail. Their goal cannot be the restoration of a past normal, but the preservation of the capacity to rebuild a political order after sustained institutional damage.
When the Republic Fails Its Own Test
A government that mistreats its own people does not stop because citizens are polite or because leaders rediscover conscience. It stops when the costs of abuse rise and the supports that make abuse possible begin to fracture. In modern states, that fracture often arrives as a political wave, when legitimacy loss, institutional resistance, and electoral consequences converge faster than power can adapt.
John Adams understood this tension. He supported independence from Britain, yet distrusted disorder, mob violence, and passion unmoored from law. His defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre trials reflected a belief that standards must be upheld even when anger is justified.
When a republic fails its own test, citizens face a choice. They can answer lawlessness with lawlessness, often strengthening the hand of power. Or they can practice a more demanding form of resistance: disciplined refusal. As used here, disciplined refusal is nonviolent action that imposes real political, legal, or economic cost by disrupting implementation, exposing abuse, or denying legitimacy in ways power cannot easily absorb, while preserving legitimacy for whatever comes next.
The old normal is gone at the institutional level, even if much of daily life appears unchanged. Authoritarian drift leaves residues, reordering coalitions in ways that benefit power and normalizing behaviors that outlast any single administration. Moving forward depends not on restoring those old alignments, but on forming new coalitions capable of closing the divisions that authoritarian governance relies on.
1776, Honestly Assessed
Did disciplined, nonviolent resistance work in 1776? Only up to the point where political authority foreclosed every remaining nonviolent path.
Before independence, the colonies exhausted nonviolent levers. Boycotts, nonimportation agreements, and committees of correspondence created a functioning system of coordinated refusal. By 1774, the Articles of Association imposed real economic pressure on British trade and social pressure within colonial communities to enforce compliance with non-importation and non-consumption agreements. Enforcement was local and social as much as economic; communities policed compliance themselves, demonstrating capacity for self-rule even before independence.
Parliament responded with coercion. The port of Boston was closed. Massachusetts’ charter was altered. Military authority expanded. When colonial leaders appealed again, the Crown refused to engage, rejecting the Olive Branch Petition. That refusal closed the political path. Independence followed not because violence was preferred, but because alternatives had been foreclosed.
Adams supported separation while remaining wary of what unrestrained passion would do to the republic after the fighting stopped. He believed legitimacy itself was a form of power the public controlled, and once squandered, difficult to recover. His concern was never only how to break from tyranny, but how to avoid becoming it, a throughline in the Adams Papers Digital Edition.
What Disciplined Refusal Preserves
Disciplined refusal does not guarantee success. It preserves conditions without which success becomes impossible. It operates across society: citizens willing to accept personal risk, professionals and civil servants bound by ethics, local officials protecting normal life, and institutions that slow or resist abuse rather than implement it smoothly.
Nonviolent resistance preserves coalition breadth. It allows participation across levels of risk and belief and denies power the polarization it needs to endure. Authoritarian systems survive by forcing the public into two camps. When opposition turns violent, it shrinks its own tent and hands the regime the story it wants to tell, that only repression can restore order.
Disciplined refusal does the opposite. It keeps the door open for conservatives who still care about constitutional constraint, for civil servants and professionals bound by ethics, for local leaders protecting normal life, and for citizens who reject both cruelty and chaos. In a polarized system, restraint is not passivity. It is strategy.
It also preserves institutional capacity. Courts, agencies, and laws remain usable when the crisis passes because they were strained, not obliterated. Privately held preferences can build beneath the surface, creating latent pressure for change that becomes decisive when political conditions shift, a dynamic analyzed by Timur Kuran in Private Truths, Public Lies.
When Violence Becomes Unavoidable
History does not show that violence is never used. It shows when violence ceases to constrain power and begins to reinforce it.
In 1776, violence emerged only after imperial authority foreclosed every remaining nonviolent mechanism. Petitions were rejected, self-government dismantled, and military rule displaced civil authority. British power still depended on broad colonial cooperation. Once that cooperation collapsed, armed conflict became the dominant fact rather than a chosen strategy.
That configuration does not hold in modern states in the same way. Britain’s imperial power, though militarily dominant, still depended on broad colonial cooperation to govern. Contemporary governments possess professional security forces, centralized intelligence, legal mechanisms for emergency rule, and the capacity to suppress violent challengers without relinquishing administrative control. In that context, violence rarely weakens power. It consolidates it, supplying justification for repression and narrowing opposition to a risk-tolerant fringe.
The lesson of 1776 is not that violence restores liberty. It is that violence followed only after legitimacy and cooperation had already broken down. Where modern states retain coercive dominance, armed rebellion is more likely to consolidate authoritarian control than restore democracy. For that reason, disciplined refusal remains decisive, not as a moral preference, but as recognition that legitimacy, compliance, and coalition breadth remain the levers that determine whether power fractures or hardens.
What Remains
John Adams did not believe that republics survive because power learns restraint. He believed they survive because citizens do.
That belief was not sentimental. It reflected hard experience with how easily justified anger becomes ruled by force. The country that emerges from this period will not be the one that preceded it. That question is settled.
The remaining question is whether it will still be governed by standards or only by force. Guardrails with real enforcement power emerge not from unity alone, but from durable alignment across differences. They are enforced through institutions and coalitions rather than through informal restraint.
Adams would say that is the responsibility that remains.
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U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives to testify during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on January 28, 2026 in Washington, DC. This is the first time Rubio has testified before Congress since the Trump administration attacked Venezuela and seized President Nicolas Maduro, bringing him to the United States to stand trial.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Marco Rubio: 2028 Presidential Contender?
Jan 31, 2026
Marco Rubio’s Senate testimony this week showcased a disciplined, media‑savvy operator — but does that make him a viable 2028 presidential contender? The short answer: maybe, if Republicans prioritize steadiness and foreign‑policy credibility; unlikely, if the party seeks a fresh face untainted by the Trump administration’s controversies.
"There is no war against Venezuela, and we did not occupy a country. There are no U.S. troops on the ground," Rubio said, portraying the mission as a narrowly focused law‑enforcement operation, not a military intervention.
Ranking Member Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D‑N.H.) sharply questioned whether ousting Nicolas Maduro justified the political and financial costs, citing estimates that the raid and U.S. naval blockade could total as much as $1 billion. Shaheen and other Democrats also raised alarms about Venezuela’s interim leader, former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez; as Shaheen noted, “the Drug Enforcement Administration has reportedly identified Delcy Rodríguez as a significant actor in the drug trade.”
Rubio responded that Rodríguez remains unindicted compared with Maduro and insisted the administration’s short‑term goal is stability, even at the cost of dealing with leaders the U.S. finds untrustworthy. "We are dealing with individuals that in our system would not be acceptable in the long term," Rubio acknowledged. "But we are in a transition to stabilization phase. You have to work with the people currently in charge of the elements of government."
Rubio’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee offered a compact primer on his political instincts: calibrate messaging to reassure skeptical Republicans, defend administration actions as lawful and limited, and pivot to competence. In testimony about U.S. policy toward Venezuela, Rubio repeatedly sought to tamp down fears of broader military entanglement. That posture — insistence on control, reassurance to wary colleagues, and a steady stream of talking points — is precisely the leadership style he would bring to a presidential campaign.
That style has upside. For Republican primary voters who prize experience and foreign‑policy gravitas, Rubio’s record and his command of the hearing room are assets. He can credibly argue he knows how to manage crises, brief allies, and sell difficult decisions to a fractious Congress. Rubio’s ability to convert a contentious episode into a disciplined narrative is a skill many candidates lack.
But there are clear liabilities. Rubio is now visibly associated with an administration whose actions in Venezuela and elsewhere have provoked bipartisan concern. His defense of those actions — even when carefully worded — ties him to controversies that could be weaponized in both the primary and the general election. Moreover, the GOP electorate remains divided between establishment figures and insurgent outsiders; Rubio’s resume may read as establishment to voters craving disruption.
Strategically, Rubio’s path depends on the Republican mood in 2027–28. If the party prioritizes stability, foreign‑policy competence, and a candidate who can reassure international partners, Rubio could be a consensus choice. If the party continues to reward insurgent energy and anti‑establishment branding, Rubio’s association with the administration and his measured demeanor could be liabilities.
If Rubio does decide to run for the White House, it wouldn’t be his first bid: he launched a high‑profile 2016 campaign, gained early momentum, but suspended it after losing the GOP primary to Donald Trump—an outcome that underscored both his appeal to establishment conservatives and the limits of that appeal in an insurgent primary environment.
A familiar figure on the national stage, the Cuban‑American politician rose through the Florida Legislature (serving in the state House from 2000 to 2008 and advancing into leadership roles) before winning a U.S. Senate seat in 2010 and building a reputation as a fluent communicator on domestic and foreign policy issues.
Rubio is a manager of narratives: he defends policy by narrowing the frame, emphasizing limits, and offering procedural assurances. That temperament, showcased in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, can be a virtue in a president — or it can read as defensive and overly cautious when voters want boldness.
Should Rubio run in 2028? Yes, if the GOP wants a steady hand and foreign‑policy credibility; no, if the party prizes novelty and distance from the Trump administration’s flashpoints. His Senate testimony this week made both the promise and the peril of his candidacy plain.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network, and twice president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
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Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.