Who Is Donald Trump Responsible To? by Jamelle Bouie

[elleng]

'To be an elected official is to be responsible to two publics.

The first is the one that put you in power, the staffers, donors, volunteers and voters that helped to pave the path from mere candidate to winner, and wielder, of state power.

But this partisan public is no more than a subset of the broad public you are obligated to lead and represent. You owe your voters, yes, but you also owe the whole people of your county, or city or district or state. You have to consider their interests — not just those of your fellow partisans. The government works for the whole people and so you, too, must work for the whole people.

Or at least, that’s the idea. That is the theory. . .

Like too many Americans, Trump sees the binary color scheme of our quadrennial Electoral College maps and thinks that it corresponds to reality. He seems unaware that he has equally passionate supporters in the “blue” state of California and in the “red" states of the Deep South.

This week we’ve seen both him and his White House speak and act in ways that demonstrate their contempt for those Americans who opposed his 2024 campaign for the Oval Office. . .

With his threats to cut their funds and occupy their cities with armed forces, Trump seems to see Democratic-led states — and the people in them — less as constituents to which he has a set of larger obligations and more as enemies to be pacified and defeated. For Trump, there is no whole people of the United States. There are only his people and his states.

This narrow and exclusionary view of the country is a betrayal of the president’s oath to the Constitution. It’s also dangerous. The integrity of the American union depends, in part, on a relationship of equality and fairness among the states and between the states, their people and the federal government. To begin to treat Americans and their leaders as outside the national community because of whom they voted for — to tie the rights of American citizenship to partisan loyalty — is to begin to strain the bonds of union.

If President Trump were, in other words, trying to instigate some kind of national divorce, it is hard to imagine what he would be doing differently than this.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/opinion/trump-responsible-president-job-military.html

[Martin Eden]

1. Oligarchs and demagogues need the common folk to be at each other's throats

Lest they wake up to the fact that they have much in common -- and a common enemy that is ripping them off while pitting them against each other.