At one time or another, you or someone you know has probably joked, “When I am dictator…,” and then invoked a totally capricious pet cause you would order your underlings to enforce: prohibit the farming and consumption of asparagus; have Prince Harry and Megan Markle publicly thrown into a vat of human waste; make “Whole Lotta Love” the national anthem, or some similarly rash edict. It’s funny because of course none of us will ever be in the position to impose such decrees. But when someone really is in the position to impose them, and that someone is US President Donald Trump, it’s not funny at all.

As expected, Trump’s first few weeks in office have seen a diarrhetic explosion of executive orders. Some of these we could anticipate: the pardoning of the January 6 Capitol Hill rioters; the rolling back of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs; the banning of transgender athletes from sports competitions. Others, like his vague plans to turn Canada, Greenland, or the Gaza Strip into American territory, to rename the Gulf of Mexico, and to outlaw recyclable drinking straws, have come out of the deep nowhere within Trump’s mind. But they all have two qualities in common.

One, obviously, is that the orders are bypassing the standard processes of democratic legislation. Even the elected members of Trump’s Republican party, who would no doubt faithfully pass any bills that further his personal agenda, have been sidelined from their function as one of the three branches of government. Whatever their constituents voted them in to do, they aren’t doing it. Trump did not invent the so-called imperial presidency – whereby national policies are set by the individual in the Oval Office rather than the Senators and Representatives in Congress – but it seems to be the only form of presidency he comprehends. Even with a majority of popularly installed lawmakers on his side, Trump wants to govern like a monarch.

The other common quality of Trump’s dictats is their impulsiveness. Some plans, of course, he openly touted during the 2024 election campaign (e.g., to unilaterally overturn any program deemed “woke”), yet even those arise out of his private, unfathomable psychology rather than from considered consensus – the crotchety, and-another-thing-that-bugs-me reasoning of any seventy-eight-year-old man drifting further and further away from contemporary social realities, and from the capacity for coherent thought. Whereas the colleagues and family members of anybody else might explain away these vindictive whims with an embarrassed “Dad gets a little confused sometimes” or “He’s having one of his moods,” Trump’s lackeys scramble to implement his senior moments into federal statute, and his online cultists fall over themselves affirming how they’re in fact eminently sensible, constructive proposals which experts have always advocated. Yeah, who hasn’t read all those sober, statistic-backed editorials and think-tank papers arguing for the US occupation of Gaza and Canada’s admission as the 51st state?

Whether they realize it or not (probably not), Trump’s apologists draw on the same defence apocryphally cited by admirers of Italy’s Benito Mussolini in the 1920s and 30s: “He made the trains run on time.” Their man may be an unaccountable dictator, in other words, but he’s sorted out the country’s day-to-day problems and restored national pride. But, leaving aside the facts that Mussolini allied himself with Adolf Hitler and was eventually executed and strung up like a dead animal by his own people, the Italian was a former journalist, and a political thinker whose leadership – disastrous though it was – was based on a logical, internally consistent ideology. The faux-front real estate mogul and B-level celebrity Donald Trump, in contrast, lacks the brains and the humility to have a cause larger than his own short-term gratification; as we’ve seen, being twenty years older than the Duce of 1941, he also lacks the mental focus. Nor has he achieved the postindustrial equivalent of getting the American trains to run on time. It’s a historic catastrophe, but you still have to feel a little sorry for the MAGA minions, whose ideal of a wise, take-charge strong man doesn’t even rise to the intellectual stature of Benito Mussolini.