We were at a memorial for a friend of a friend yesterday. It was held in a west Austin country club right on Lake Austin with a great lap pool and work out facilities. It had survived the long freeze well. Gene Anne, the woman who had passed, was married to John the Oncologist.

So as you might imagine, there were a lot of Doctors there including my partner. It was a Civil affair, not a Priest or a robe in site. Doctors, lots of Doctors.

We were talking to David, one of my favorites because he actually was on the basketball team at UCLA in the late sixties during those glory days. Coach Wooten told him to get a good education and he did. As we chatted, we talked about retirement, but he couldn't imagine it, not right now, not while we have this dictator in our country.

Yes, there you have it. If a aging Doctor in a swanky West Austin Tennis Club knows, I guess most of us know it. Like David, We probably try to avoid thinking about it.

This North Carolina professor knows it too.

Donald the First: Trump the dictator has arrived

We have launched a war against Venezuela — apparently because we can. We have provided no justification, no rationale, no candor. Their oil, we claim, is now ours. We’ll sell it and, Donald Trump explains, the “money will be controlled” by him. If the Venezuelans don’t bend quickly enough to our command, we’ll kill more of them. It’s like a video game to us. You know, like blowing up the boats. The U.S. military has proven its mastery — in an illegal and blatantly unconstitutional and brutal cause.

Next, Trump explains, “we’re going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.” If we “don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” Cuba and Mexico are, perhaps, after that. As Stephen Miller oozes — who is going to stop us? It’s a real world out there. “You can talk about international niceties, but we live in a world governed by strength, by force, by power,” Miller says. The strong, apparently, take what they want and the weak, in turn, bear what they must. (I think the ancient Greeks said that.) The Western Hemisphere is reportedly ours. So is any other nation that has anything we want. The only limit is Trump’s moral compass. Imagine, if you can.

ICE continues to terrorize Democratic cities — killing a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, because, in this new era, that’s how you look manly, lethal. (a ICU nurse would follow her) We advertise for agents on TV. Give ‘em signing bonuses. Le mercenaire.

The president of the United States extorts like Al Capone.

Universities, law firms, corporations, media folks, researchers, artists, nonprofits, cities (Democratic ones), states (blue ones) and countries (weak ones). If you don’t do what he wants, he’ll bring bombers and gunships to your shore to see if that changes your mind. Maybe he’ll take the money, or maybe he’ll give it to his family.

The corruption is so outlandish, we’ve quit keeping track. A surpassingly gutless House and Senate bless the effort. Their only apparent actual oath is to Donald J. Trump. A supine Supreme Court utters immunity. There is, literally, nothing beyond his power. And if there was, he could hire goons to do it and then pardon them.

We have fretted, as a nation, over whether Trump would become a dictator.

He has.

Donald The First.

Anyone who thinks he and his crew will surrender power is three shades past delusional. At least the mystery is gone. The only question is whether he will be cabined, suppressed, rejected — legally — by the constitutional democracy he seeks to undo. That will require an actual Congress, resolute state governments, faithful and independent federal courts, but, most of all, a massively engaged, courageous and patriotic citizenry. It’s not yet clear whether we can manage to deliver these undoubted and foundational requisites. I wish I knew the answer. I do know it’s the most important question we face.

Maybe that we’ll ever face.

Surveying my home — a state that I love and that counts for the nation — the North Carolina Republican Party must now denounce President Trump. If they don’t, all Tar Heels, citizens and officeholders, must abandon the party. This day.

There could be no stronger proof that an institution is unfit to govern than the continued embrace of Donald Trump — the gravest single threat to constitutional democracy in American history. No patriot can support dictatorship. And no honest human can any longer pretend that’s not what is happening here.

* Gene Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Last night at dinner, we talked about it. We talked about the horrible movie made for Il Duce's wife. We talked about how the Europeans don't like us anymore. We talked about how screwed up we are with Canada and Mexico. I said we now have a dictator and everyone just simply agreed and we went on about our holidays.

The Atlantic says:

President Drumph prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.

So, a question: What do you call this form of government? Authoritarian? Kleptocratic? Totalitarian? Fascist?

A Dictatorship

Read it from the man who lived it.

“The definition of fascism is the marriage of corporation and state ” Il Duce said.

It is the core concept of

corporatism, where the state and large private entities form a symbiotic partnership to control the economy and society.

And the best of us demonstrate against it.

But we are like indoor cats chasing a laser beam

that came from space to change our elections.

And we eat our canned gourmet meals.

And play on our high rise kitty condos.

And crap in our self cleaning internet connected sandbox.