It was grim in the extreme to watch President Donald Trump gloat, bawl, taunt, rave, rant and make disruptive pronouncements from the podium of the Capitol Rotunda at his inauguration ceremony. Even though he had once called himself a “madman”, it was disconcerting to see one of the most powerful persons in the world issue threats to almost everybody, bar his supporters and supplicants.

One of the millions of viewers worldwide who had tuned in on Monday, January 20, 2025, to watch the ceremony called up a political scientist in the United States from Kathmandu to check if the man from Mar-a-Lago entering the White House for the second time was as crazy as he sounded. The thoughtful scholar’s response was unnerving.

Apparently, President Trump appeals to a sufficiently large section of the American electorate that wants him to get on with his disruptive far-right agenda. His hurried executive orders and outlandish promises—deport immigrants, deny climate change, impose higher tariffs, delegitimise birthright citizenship and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), derecognise the multiplicity of gender choices, downsize the federal workforce, rethink foreign aid, seize Panama Canal, buy Greenland and annexe Canada—may not stand constitutional scrutiny, but for now, they have become soothing pacifiers for his puerile supporters.

President Trump is as American as a man on horseback from the Wild West but also as crafty as a used car salesperson of the 1970s in making sweet deals. He knows how to push the envelope to the limits and then appear to make meaningless concessions to ingratiate himself with the customer.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, was asked whether it was going to be a republic or a monarchy. His response was apprehensively firm: “A republic, if you can keep it”. President Trump’s disdainful dismissal of disagreement as disloyalty reeks of imperial haughtiness.

The imperiousness of President Trump doesn’t just come from his considerable net worth—estimated to have been $3.6 billion at the end of 2024—alone but the very design of the US presidency. Way back in 1896, a daily newspaper had ruefully observed, “Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king.”

The authority of the American presidency can be used for good, as President Barack Obama did when he “sought to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation by issuing an executive order allowing them legally to remain in the United States”. It can also be exercised for the mass expulsion of migrants in military cargo planes that was backed with the threat of punitive tariffs should the source country seek dignified treatment for deportees.

The prospect of a “ a racist, misogynist, twice-impeached convicted felon hawking hatred and retribution”—that’s how the venerable Guardian newspaper had described President Trump in an editorial—being the most powerful elected monarchy is terrifying for the world, but Americans will probably be the first to bear the brunt of their elective choice.

Definitional dilemma

The nature of the American presidency has long confounded critics. Despite its claims of being a republic, which is a system of government based on the idea that every citizen has equal status, the US has a long history of institutionalised discrimination. After over two centuries of relentless struggle, political equality was promised with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but civic equality continues to elude many minorities.

Presidential authority was perhaps enlarged to ensure an epistocrcay through executive orders and nominations so that political power is related to competence rather than popularity. The result has been mixed at best. Aberrations such as distributing official posts to loyalists, funders, cousins and cronies have become the norm.

By alluding to the personality of media tycoon and the three-time prime minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi (1938-1923), columnist Beppe Severgnini has indicated the emergence of an American Kakistocracy. With some of the world’s wealthiest individuals like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg getting front-row seats at President Trump’s swearing-in, the characterisation of his regime as America’s new plutocracy appears apt.

The sociological law of oligarchy undermines democratic ideals, but the possibility of a meritocratic elite emerging through political competition remains intact. An oligarchy of billionaires with a concentration of “extreme wealth, power and influence” that President Joe Biden hinted at in his farewell address threatens the very essence of democracy. Its mutation into a broligarchy of multi-billionaires may prove to be much more dangerous for equity and justice.

A mobocracy under the Republic of Trumpistan espousing racist, populist, demagogic, xenophobic and jingoistic slogans is likely to warm the hearts of Putinistas in Europe, Modiots in India, Trumpistas in Latin America and Trumptards—defined as the ones that eschew facts, evidence, logic, reason and critical thinking in favour of fabrications, unfounded allegations, conflations and wilful ignorance such as Nepal’s Oliars—all over the world, but is it possible to name the freshest mutation of neoliberalism? Perhaps a neologism needs to be minted to capture the attitude of the “moral fools”—the ones that think ethics aren’t necessarily good and are convinced that the moral perspective isn’t always positive—that will control the reigns of power in the days to come.

Narcissistic politics

When executive orders began to fly off the presidential table at the speed of a bullet from the White House, it was amusing to find that all that some media persons in Kathmandu wanted to know was how it would affect Nepal! In his first term, President Trump couldn’t locate the country on a wall-size map and seriously thought that “Button and Nipple”—no prizes for guessing which countries’ names he mispronounced—belonged to India.

In his second term, President Trump has bigger fishes to fry such as try to create a rift between Russia and China to tame them both, enforce “manifest destiny” not just in America but right out in the space, ‘clean out the whole thing’ in Gaza and make European, Korean and Japanese allies pay more for the US security umbrella. He has little time and even less interest in what he once labelled as “shithole countries”.

Even the aid freeze pending “America First” review is unlikely to have as devastating impact on Nepal as it is made out to be by the intelligentsia and the media in Kathmandu. Some bilateral programmes may suffer, but funds that flow through private foundations or non-governmental behemoths will remain unaffected. In any case, almost all Khas-Arya-dominated political parties agreed to hitch Nepal’s geopolitical wagon to the Jinping juggernaut cruising on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2017 and its geoeconomic consequences must be faced with characteristic Gorkhali bravery.

The ideology of amorality with its three supreme values—might is right, the wealthiest are always right and ethnonational majoritarianism is the spirit of republicanism—is sweeping the world. In the changed context, “saved by God” egotists and “non-biological” demagogues will rule in the name of democracy. Let’s name the beast—amoralocrcay or nirnaitikbad in Nepali—that is destined to roam free until the next global upheaval.