Let’s Have a Tea Party, This Time in the Gulf of Mexico

“Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” — Former president Richard Nixon interview with British journalist David Frost, 1977

“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” — President Donald Trump, Truth Social and X, February 15, 2025

Richard Nixon and Donald Trump both argued that the highest office holder in the Executive Branch of the US government cannot be held liable for any action they deem necessary and proper in the enactment of their duties.

While Trump may believe he posted an original statement on his social media platform, his precise quote is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, French general who installed himself as Emperor from 1804-1814 and then again briefly in 1815.

This has come to be known in the United States as the “unitary executive theory,” a controversial Constitutional law theory granting the President of the United States sole authority over the executive branch. It is “an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House.”

Napoleon, as well as Nixon and Trump, used this concept to rationalize their extraordinarily controversial actions that were often well outside legal or ethical norms.

Unfortunately, in the United States, the Supreme Court codified the unitary executive theory in Trump v. United States. The ultra-conservative “justices” ruled in favor of “presidential immunity” in federal cases:

“Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclu­sive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presump­tive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”

Maybe we the people need another “Tea Party” like that of December 16, 1773, against unfair taxation by the British without granting the “colonies” due and just representation. This time we might want to think of organizing a tea dumping in the Gulf of Mexico — yes Donald, “Gulf of Mexico” — in protest of Trump’s unfair and unprecedented takeover of the US government against the interests and wishes of the people and against his apparent immunity from the law. (We don’t have to dump real tea, but, rather, we can symbolically release something like our anger and rage against Trump overboard.)

Previously, federal prosecutors from several districts indicted Trump on numerous counts of felony in his involvement of instigating violent insurrectionists to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in illegally removing official documents, some of which were classified, from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago resort home, and by attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

The ruling by the Supreme Court, however, in addition to his election victory in 2024, effectively sealed him from prosecution and, essentially, indicated that the President of the United States is above the law.

His 34 felony convictions for election fraud in his “hush money” case, though, remain in force. However, Trump did not receive any penalties for his crimes. As stated by Judge Merchan, who specified that the protections shielding Trump from legal liability are afforded to “the office of the President of the United States.”

Donald Trump, throughout his entire adult life, has presented the facade that he is above the law. Banking on his sense of entitlement and believing he is smarter and wiser than everyone around him, he pushes through laws and through people like an enormous heavy snowplow pushes through even the most encrusted snow and ice.

Though he has faced charges and legal penalties from lawsuits in the past – for example, stemming from convictions of racial discrimination in the sales of rentals of his and his father’s properties – he has generally slotted these and others in his mind’s sorting boxes as unfair and politically motivated vengeance against him.

The now iconic images that most epitomize Donald Trump during his first regime are his disgustingly insensitive mocking parody of a disabled journalist who was trying to interview him.

The second occurred on May 25, 2017, at a summit of NATO leaders in Brussels when Trump forcefully pushed the Prime Minister of Montenegro, Dusko Markovic, out of his way so Trump could place himself in front of the pack for a photo op.

Some liken Trump to a wrecking ball targeting our democratic institutions. I like the analogy of the snow plow since it has a wider focus and more detailed destruction range. Possibly Trump embodies both of these devices, plus the force of a fire hose as he is flooding the zone with his broken dam of executive orders and pronouncements to keep us all distracted and exhausted.

We must remain, however, forever alert and forever vigilant.

I have read numerous messages on a variety of social media platforms — from Facebook to Instagram and from Blue Sky to LinkedIn and Threads saying that “Oh, just ignore Trump. He only wants attention,” to others writing, “I’m not listening to him. Just chill and everything will be fine.”

This is exactly the opposite of what we must do because IGNORING is IGNORANT.

The very same words residents of Germany and Italy expressed in the 1920s and 1930s. Everything wasn’t fine.

The same way fascists scapegoated and targeted Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s Witnesses, people of color, communists and socialists, non-Aryan immigrants, is the same way Neo-fascists in the United States and other Western countries are targeting immigrants of color, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, communists, socialists, and all progressives for being the causes of all the evils of their nations.

So, where do you stand? This question brings to mind the civil rights activist Eldridge Cleaver’s call to action:

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

And to Rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902-1988), a Berlin-based rabbi who fled Nazi Germany in 1937:

“The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.”

Today as in the past, no truer words were ever uttered, for in the spectrum from occasional microaggressions to full-blown genocide, there is no such thing as an “innocent bystander.”