Don Colossus and the Court of Chaos

How Trump’s second term replaced governance with spectacle, loyalty tests, and the slow disciplining of elections

Good morning! World leaders arriving in the United States for this year’s G20 summit will be greeted by a 22-foot golden statue of Donald Trump. Commissioned by cryptocurrency investors promoting a memecoin called $PATRIOT and installed at Trump National Doral, the monument, cheerfully dubbed “Don Colossus,” will loom over the summit like a gilded warning label. The artist says he was instructed to slim the president down and remove signs of aging, because even autocracy prefers its mythology airbrushed. The effect is unmistakable: less Washington Monument, more North Korea gift shop. When the host of a global summit erects his own statue at the gates of international diplomacy, it stops being kitsch and starts being a governing caricature rendered in bronze.

That caricature was on full display yesterday at the White House, where the signing of the Consolidated Appropriations Act was swallowed whole by a campaign rally, a grievance monologue, and several unrelated conspiracy theories. The bill itself, which reopened the federal government and funds most agencies through the rest of the fiscal year, made a brief cameo before being aggressively upstaged by a rambling victory lap that treated reality as an optional suggestion rather than a governing constraint.

The president hailed the measure as a triumph over a “bloated omnibus monstrosity,” despite the minor inconvenience that it is, in fact, an omnibus. He bragged about cutting foreign aid, defunding NPR and PBS (because nothing scares authoritarian instincts quite like public broadcasting), slashing IRS funding after personally surviving what he described as historic persecution, and fully funding the military while announcing, without irony, that crime in Washington, D.C. has now fallen so low it has apparently slipped into the metaphysical realm. Depending on the sentence, murders are down 80 percent, 97 percent, or on track to reach “practically nothing,” which is impressive given that murders are generally expected to be zero already.

The event opened with a prolonged roll call of Republican lawmakers that felt less like gratitude and more like hostage confirmation, complete with the warning that anyone left out should “just raise your hand and let’s have it.” The recitation was interrupted by an uncomfortable detour into grief, “He had a good marriage. Good marriage is better than a bad marriage,” an observation offered to a newly widowed lawmaker with the casual confidence of a man who believes this is comforting.

From there, the president pivoted seamlessly from GDP figures no economist recognizes, lamenting that a shutdown cost him “a point and a half” and insisting the economy could have hit “seven GDP… nobody ever heard of a seven GDP,” to announcing that the United States has now surpassed Japan in steel production. “For the first time in over 30 years… we did more steel than Japan,” he declared, pausing to admire his own talking point: “Think of that.”

The claim is narrowly true in the most technical sense: recent annual crude steel output shows the U.S. edging past Japan after decades, less because of a roaring American steel renaissance than because Japan’s production has been steadily declining amid weak domestic demand. China, meanwhile, remains so far ahead it doesn’t bother entering this conversation. Still, the president delivered the statistic with the serene confidence of a man who has never met a spreadsheet, and, judging by the GDP math, does not plan to start now.

Among the bill’s “highlights” was the sudden appearance of a federally funded program called the Melania Trump Foster Youth to Independence Initiative, complete with a glowing review of the first lady’s documentary career and repeated assurances that she “loves children” and “wants to make them better,” phrasing that raised more questions than it answered. Crime is down everywhere, sometimes 77%, sometimes 97%, sometimes “almost zero,” and apparently will reach negative numbers by next month. Drug prices, meanwhile, are allegedly about to drop anywhere from 75 to 900 percent thanks to “most favored nation” pricing, a policy explanation that leaned heavily on vibes, threats, and tariff mythology rather than anything resembling math.

Once questions began, the budget vanished entirely. In its place came calls to federalize elections because states “can’t be trusted,” renewed denial of the 2020 election, declarations that the border has been so sealed that nobody is crossing it, except the criminals who already did, and the claim that national crime is now at its lowest level since 1900, a statistic that appears to have been sourced directly from the collective imagination.

One of the more revealing moments came when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked about Epstein survivors who say justice remains elusive. The president did not answer. Instead, he went straight for character assassination, snapping “You are the worst reporter” and adding, “No wonder CNN has no ratings,” as if audience metrics were a substitute for accountability. He then personalized the attack, mocking her tone, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” and branding her “very dishonest,” before signaling the subject itself should be dropped: “I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else.”

None of this is random. As The New York Times argued this week in its analysis of what scholars are calling “neoroyalism,” Trump’s governing style increasingly resembles dynastic rule rather than democratic administration. Power flows through loyalty, grievance, and court politics, not institutions, law, or consent. Policy is personal, and favor is currency. In such a system, elections are not the source of legitimacy; they are conditional rituals, tolerated only when outcomes flatter the ruler. When they don’t, they become “corrupt,” “rigged,” or candidates for federal takeover.

That framework explains why courts are now being forced into the role of last restraint. In Oregon, a federal judge sharply restricted the use of tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flash-bangs by federal officers at Portland’s ICE facility, finding a recurring pattern of excessive force against nonviolent protesters and journalists and warning that such tactics chill First Amendment rights. The judge did not mince words, contrasting constitutional democracy with authoritarian regimes and making clear which side federal agencies were drifting toward.

In Minnesota, where more than 3,000 federal immigration agents were dumped into the Twin Cities under “Operation Metro Surge,” outnumbering local police five to one, the administration is now retreating. Border “czar” Tom Homan announced that 700 agents are being withdrawn, with the stated goal of a “complete drawdown,” after the killing of two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ignited national outrage. The shift comes after weeks of incoherent messaging: DHS officials rushing to label Pretti a “domestic terrorist” before any investigation, Trump briefly muttering about de-escalation, then reversing himself under pressure from the hard right. The withdrawal reads less like accountability than damage control after intimidation tactics became impossible to disguise.

Behind the scenes, the deportation machine itself is coming apart. The Atlantic reports that the Department of Homeland Security has devolved into open factional warfare, with Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Corey Lewandowski, and rival “czars” battling for dominance, attention, and proximity to the president. Chains of command blur while authority shifts by tweet, and enforcement becomes performance art. Institutional figures warn that social-media trolling and quota-driven raids are turning Trump’s strongest polling issue into a liability, while Miller pushes for ever more arrests to satisfy the court. The bullies are fighting among themselves, but the consequences are being borne by cities, communities, and civilians.

This same logic is now being applied to elections. Trump’s renewed calls to “nationalize” voting and override state control aren’t idle talk. In Georgia, Fulton County is fighting to recover election records seized by the FBI, ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls taken without proper inventory, warning that the chain of custody has been compromised just months before the midterms. County officials say that even if the records are returned, the damage is done: trust has been broken, transparency violated, and the door opened to exactly the kind of chaos Trump claims to fear.

At the state level, Stephen Miller arose from his coffin this morning, bloodless, to move the project forward, once again embracing his role as the administration’s favorite nocturnal enforcer. In Tennessee, lawmakers are testing a model that would deputize state and local officials into immigration enforcement, criminalize disclosure of enforcement activity, challenge long-settled Supreme Court precedent on education, and starve noncompliant cities of funding. It is an explicit stress test of constitutional limits, premised on the belief that courts will either bend, or just be ignored.

As the signing event crawled toward the exit, Trump delivered the self-mythologizing cherry on top. He returned to the familiar refrain that investigators “found nothing,” declared himself “very innocent,” bragged about winning “in a landslide,” and capped it with: “My second term is blowing my first term away.” When Lindsey Graham enthusiastically supplied the review blurb, “Reagan plus,” the president accepted the upgrade without hesitation. In this administration, history isn’t something you learn from; it’s something you try to bully into flattering you.

For the time being, the lights are back on, and the budget is signed, but only after being buried under hours of ego, grievance, merch promotion, and numbers that will never survive peer review. The gold statue is rising like an enormous paintball target in the sky. Courts are pushing back, and the elections are being framed as optional.