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Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy. The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to buy Greenland; and the firing of thousands of probationary employees at the National …
