“Off with his head,” thundered the POTUS after proclaiming himself ‘King’ complete with a phony image adorned with a golden crown, grinning on a fake Time magazine cover emblazoned with “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
Big heads rolled at the Pentagon in an unprecedented Friday night massacre. Out went America’s top general Charles Q. Brown — a “fine gentleman” and an “outstanding leader” — only the second black man ever to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Also pushed out was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the chief of the Navy, as well as Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force, with hints of more firings to come amid a purge of “woke” generals and officers and other “DEI hires.”
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The bloodbath at the Pentagon came days after Donald Trump’s self ‘coronation’ with a cryptic post about killing a new traffic control program in the big apple. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!” he posted.
The Pentagon purge followed days of mass firings across the federal government from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Homeland Security to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which designs, builds and oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
The mass firings that could affect hundreds of thousands of people, according to official data, were in addition to some 75,000 employees who have accepted Trump’s “Fork in the Road” offer to quit later this year with a golden handshake.
Moving with dizzying speed to remake social policy by wiping out diversity, equity and inclusion programs and rolling back transgender rights, Trump issued a record 90 executive fiats in the first month of his second stint, an average of three per day — thrice as fast as in his first term and more than the combined total of such actions by Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
One sweeping executive order brought independent agencies under the control of the White House with their attorneys asked not to “advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law.”
After slaying the dragons at home, the King turned his wrathful gaze towards distant lands. Playing peacemaker in Ukraine in an imperial fashion, he flipped the script on its head as he opened talks with Putin’s Russia in Saudi Arabia without a seat for European allies or President Volodymyr Zelensky on the table.
Accusing Zelensky — “a modestly successful comedian” — of starting the war, Trump called him a “Dictator without Elections” who had “done a terrible job” as president while bilking Uncle Sam by playing his predecessor Joe Biden ‘like a fiddle.”
As the Ukrainian President asked Trump, “caught in a web of disinformation” from Russia to have “more truth,” POTUS doubled down saying, “Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”
Trump also suggested that the future security of Ukraine would not be an American problem. “This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us,” he wrote on Truth Social. “We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation.”
Meanwhile, back in Trumpiana, even before his mock coronation, Trump posted a single sentence rationalising his punitive actions testing
the limits of his presidential powers while pushing at legal and constitutional boundaries. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump wrote in a variation of a quote sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, although its origin is unclear.
Trump also told Fox News in a joint interview with Elon Musk that his smart first buddy — had to settle on this guy as he couldn’t find somebody smarter than him — has a major role in implementing his “beautiful executive” orders.
“He’s got some very brilliant young people working for him that dress much worse than him, actually,” Trump joked. “They dress in just t-shirts. You wouldn’t know they have 180 IQ. But he gets it done. He’s a leader. He gets it done.”
Musk himself dismissed the idea that his DOGE cost cuts could cause harm. In a social media post on X, he compared the government to a broken computer. “Have you tried turning the government off and on again?”
Musk’s team also found out that the now gutted USAID was going to spend US taxpayer dollars to the tune of $21 million for voter turnout in India. This led Trump to mischievously suggest, “Why do we need to spend $21 million on voter turnout in India? I guess they were trying to get somebody else elected” — and stir a big political storm in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cup of chai.
In a few signs of resistance, thousands of protesters took to the streets across the United States on President’s Day last Monday, accusing Trump of acting like a “king,” with calls to “Dethrone Trump. Deport Musk.”
Braving freezing temperatures, demonstrators led by by the 50501 movement, gathered in major cities shouting, “No kings on President’s Day.” Instead of deterring Trump, it only spurred him to proclaim his ‘coronation’ on Truth Social followed by an official White House tweet.
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As if on cue, Kash Patel, who had back in 2022 spun a fantasy for kids about “The Plot Against the King” to elect Sleepy Joe instead of King Donald on Choosing Day, took charge of FBI as its first desi director. He came armed with an “enemies list” of “Deep State” members from his book of “Government Gangsters.”
A top Trump aide greeted nation’s newly anointed top cop with a popular Bollywood song meme featuring Patel in a grand warrior-style entrance dancing to the tune of a triumphant ‘Malhari’ (victory celebration) with an ominous warning — ‘Dushman ki dekho jo waat laavli’ (Look at the enemy running scared).