The Madness of King Gorge
Currently starved of his delusion that he is still adored and respected by the masses and still impervious to legislative and judicial control, Donald Trump — fearful and, as always, angry — has been gorging himself on the only sustenance that remains: His executive powers.
It’s been an abattoir of awfulness and pettiness and spite, in ways large and small — killing suspected drug traffickers without due process, imprisoning and deporting civilians, ordering that the Coast Guard downgrade swastikas and nooses from hate speech to something less, banning sign language interpreters from his press conferences, humiliating trans people at U.S. customs desks. But nothing that Trump has done so far has seemed so close to the textbook madman tyranny as his recent toilet-seat tweets about killing his political rivals.
You’ve seen them. Trump says that the six respected Democratic politicians who made a commercial telling those in the military that they can and legally must refuse to carry out illegal orders — should be tried for treason and executed. It can be debated whether Trump was actually intending to pursue this, or was just being typically unhinged, or meant it as a dog-whistle suggestion to any of his like-minded vigilante supporters, but what cannot be debated is that the president of the United States entertained, and then voiced, this dangerously uncivil thought. It has never happened before.
Targeting political rivals for death, and using a corrupted or intimidated judicial system to achieve it, is terrible — but hardly without precedent elsewhere. Here are some folks from modern history who have done it. See what you think of them.
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Josef Stalin was a big proponent of show trials, ludicrous affairs where his political enemies were tortured and their families’ lives were threatened, in return for their giving phony, state-scripted testimony against themselves. In the end, many were executed. Perhaps Stalin’s most sickening judicial murder didn’t even happen in The Soviet Union. It happened in 1950, in Czechoslovakia.
A principled Czech legislator named Milada Horakova, a staunch opponent of her country’s new, Soviet-puppet autocratic communist regime, was put on trial on trumped-up charges of conspiring to overthrow the state. She was tormented into a confession, but, at trial, in front of international cameras, she went off script time and again to effectively make it obvious that her testimony had been coerced.
On the day of Horakova’s hanging, a Stalinist court official ordered the executioner to shorten the drop in order to “suffocate the bitch..” He did. It took 13 minutes.
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Six days after seizing power in Iraq in July 1979, Saddam Hussein called a meeting of the leaders of his ruling Ba’ath party. In an auditorium, he told the large group that he’d learned of a conspiracy against him, and then read out the names of 68 supposed conspirators. One by one, as their names were mentioned, they were frog-marched from the room.
The aim was to consolidate Saddam’s power by eliminating those who might challenge it.
There actually was a trial of sorts — like many despots, Saddam sought a patina of legitimacy, however threadbare and corrupt the process was — but the trial was perfunctory, hostile, and empty of facts. All the men, lawyerless, were tried together, accused of having participated in some nonexistent plot with Syria.
Twenty-two were executed. Some of those whose lives were spared were ordered to prove their loyalty by personally killing the condemned. This was to sow fear and compel future obedience. It worked for a quarter century more, until Hussein, despised by his countrymen, was hanged for crimes against humanity.
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Vladimir Putin wanted Alexei Navalny, his nettlesome political nemesis and relentless critic, dead. Putin wanted him dead so badly that he twice tried to have him murdered by poison. Neither attempt succeeded. So Putin resorted to the more conventional method in the despot’s playbook — the show trial. This worked. In 2022, after a trial that Amnesty International declared a “sham,”Navalny was found guilty of embezzlement and contempt of court. His sentence was not death — the charges didn’t warrant that. He got nine years in prison. But that was apparently only a technically, easily circumvented.
In 2024 Navalny died in prison, suddenly, without warning. A Russian state autopsy declared that the dissident had succumbed to a blood clot. The Kremlin refused to allow an independent postmortem. His widow said she’d had biological tests done on his remains, and it showed poison.
Putin’s Kremlin said nyet. Case closed. Blood clot.
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In 1984, in Libya, Muammar Gadhafi decided he did not like a 30-year-old college student named Sadiq Hamed Al-Shuwehdy, who had organized and participated in protests against Gadhafi’s brutal, despotic regime. Gadhafi ordered a show trial, where a handcuffed Al-Shuwehdy was made to sit, crosslegged, alone at center court in a basketball stadum. A crowd of high school and college students, rounded up and bused in by the government, jeered as instructed and cursed at the prisoner. Pathetically, rocking back and forth, Al-Shuwehdy wept and confessed to a bogus charge that he was a part of a cabal of “stray dogs” who had plotted to kill Gadhafi.
Convicted by the mob, he was hanged right there, on the spot. As he kicked and writhed on the gallows, a young Gadhafi loyalist, a woman named Huda Ben Amer, ran out of the crowd to personally finish the job by yanking down hard on his body. This wasn’t an act of mercy; it was an act of savage vengeance. She later bragged of this.
Gadhafi loved her spunk and loyalty and ruthlessness. He gave her a government position and she was rapidly promoted. Twice she became the mayor of Benghazi, and one of Libya’s wealthiest women.
And Gadhafi? After being deposed in the Libyan Civil War, he was forced out of the sewer pipe in which he was hiding, hauled onto the back of a pickup truck, beaten, sodomized by a bayonet, and shot in the head.
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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:
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