Who Is Running the Country? Asking for the USA, for Latin America, and Yes—Trinidad and Tobago

Grace Notes • Not asserting. Witnessing.

Who Is Running the Country?

Asking for the USA, for Latin America, and Yes—Trinidad and Tobago

A Grace Notes Witness from the Plebian Periphery

I write not as a constitutional scholar or a geopolitical tactician,
but as an ordinary onlooker—one of the many categorized as less adjudicated,
less powerful, less billionaire, less American—trying to make sense of what I am watching unfold.

Because there is no way, in mental jurisprudence, that the articulation of Donald Trump can stand unexamined as the headstone of American governance— not without leaving a gaping rupture where legitimacy once lived.

This is not disbelief born of ideology.
It is disorientation born of observation.

What I feel first is fracture:
a widening distance between the story America tells itself
and the machinery now operating in its name.

Since the January 2025 inauguration, I have listened carefully—not just to headlines, but to the public square. And what I have heard is not silence, nor hysteria, but accumulation.

From economists to historians, journalists to legislators, mayors to municipal leaders, the warnings have been persistent, public, and cumulative.

Economist Robert Reich has repeatedly returned to a single concern: that extreme concentration of wealth metastasizes into political dominance, hollowing democracy from the inside. Again and again, he asks whether a system can still call itself representative when outcomes increasingly reflect the priorities of billionaires rather than the needs of the governed.¹

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing daily in Letters from an American, has offered something quieter but no less unsettling: historical memory. She reminds readers that democratic erosion rarely announces itself as crisis. More often, it arrives as normalization—through executive habit, administrative speed, and public fatigue.²

Journalist Rachel Maddow has focused less on personality than on pattern, tracing how norms are tested, then stretched, then quietly abandoned. Her work returns insistently to one question: when does precedent stop restraining power and start excusing it?³

Political commentator Joy Reid, in some of her most widely circulated recent remarks, has framed the present not as a warning of what might come, but as a reckoning with what is already here. Democracy, she suggests, does not always collapse—it can be administratively overridden while citizens are told nothing extraordinary is happening.⁴

On the legislative front, Bernie Sanders has carried his critique beyond Senate hearings and into public space, naming what he sees as a growing oligarchic imbalance. His repeated question—posed not rhetorically but insistently—is whether political freedom can survive when wealth is allowed to dominate governance unchecked.⁵

In the House, Jasmine Crockett has emerged as part of a younger congressional cohort refusing to treat oversight as ceremonial. Her public statements emphasize that hearings, investigations, and transparency are not partisan irritants, but democratic obligations—especially when executive power accelerates faster than accountability.⁶

Even at the municipal level, concern has surfaced. Brandon Johnson, Mayor of Chicago, has spoken openly about federal overreach and militarization, arguing that local democratic governance must not be reduced to collateral damage in national power struggles. His interventions remind me that anxiety about unchecked authority is not abstract—it is felt first in cities, in neighborhoods, in daily governance.⁷

I do not cite these voices as arbiters of truth.
I cite them as fellow witnesses.

Different disciplines.
Different platforms.
A converging unease.

I look outward—to Venezuela—where a leader long accused of brutal afflictions against his people is removed and prosecuted under the banner of justice. I am told this is law. I am told this is accountability.

Yet my mind widens the frame.

If the United States asserts jurisdiction to remove and prosecute a foreign president on the grounds of criminal association—without visible congressional authorization— how should we understand that authority when, in a different moment, the same presidency extended pardon and protection to another foreign head of state already convicted under U.S. courts? By what principle does criminality justify intervention in one case and absolution in another?

I look to Gaza.
To the scale of devastation visited upon Palestinian life.
To a world where annihilation unfolds in public view while accountability remains asymmetrical.

And I ask—not rhetorically, but sincerely:
who decides when sovereignty ends, and who remains shielded from that same logic?

I am not collapsing distinctions.
I am interrogating selectivity.

If law matters, must it not matter everywhere?
If civilians matter, must they not matter always?

Then I look inward—at the United States itself.

I watched a President treat the Constitution as a playground rather than a covenant. I watched public statements—recorded, archived, replayed—about elections already “won” through digital canvassing, about outcomes known in advance, about states flipping red as if fate were preprogrammed.

I do not claim proof.
I claim unease.

This is a witness account—an observation of patterns and impacts, not a legal finding or judicial conclusion.

I watched as a billionaire benefactor stood not beside power, but inside it—as agencies were rebranded, files removed, government offices disrupted under the banner of “efficiency.” I watched civil servants—people who gave decades to public service—unearthed from their livelihoods overnight. Rules bent. Then rewritten. Then normalized.

And what stunned me most was not the action, but the absence of resistance.

No sustained interruption.
No unified opposition.
No decisive intervention from the highest court.

The undoing of constitutional governance was not theatrical—it was administrative. It arrived daily. Hourly. As headlines. As policy tweaks. As enforcement expansions.

I watched the pardons.
I watched the attacks on state leaders.
I watched the redrawing of districts.
I watched the National Guard enter cities.
I watched immigration enforcement mutate into bounty-driven aggression.

I listened as pundits, scholars, pastors, and representatives sounded alarms—from studios, pulpits, and street corners—while the machinery continued to move forward, uninterrupted.

And then I heard of abuses so brutal that even pregnancy could not shield life.

I am told these are excesses.
I am told these are anomalies.
I am told this is law and order.

But when anomalies accumulate, they become architecture.

What troubles me most is not that the President acts.
It is that he appears unbound.

And so I ask the question that refuses to leave me:

What gives this office such license?

Is it emergency language stretched thin enough to cover everything?
Is it money—already appropriated, quietly redirected, flowing where questions are discouraged?
Is it the delegation of power so diffuse that responsibility evaporates?

Or is it something more unsettling still?

That the President himself is not the power—but the performance.

Because what I am beginning to feel—what my intuition insists upon—is that we are witnessing the hypocrisy of a figurehead. A man presented as omnipotent, while the real gravity sits elsewhere.

If we were to follow the money—truly follow it—with journalistic craftsmanship rather than partisan shouting, I suspect we would find that the power of Trump is a façade being engineered and underwritten by a billionaire network. A lattice of interests that profits from chaos, deregulation, privatization, and fear.

This does not require conspiracy.
It requires incentive.

Power does not need to be brilliant when it is financed.

Then I turn inward—to the United States itself.

I have watched a presidency behave less like stewardship and more like occupancy.
I have watched constitutional language stretched thin enough to cover anything.
I have watched agencies reorganized, civil servants removed, and enforcement expanded—often under banners of efficiency that concealed displacement.

What unsettles me most is not action, but velocity without resistance.

Courts deliberate.
Legislatures fracture.
Opposition speaks.

And governance proceeds.

I return often to an image I wrote about before—the White House ballroom.
The gilded meeting.
The optics of wealth convening inside the architecture of democracy.

I ask myself what decisions are framed as inevitable because the money has already aligned.

I do not need conspiracy to sense concentration.

Wealth does not need to hide when it structures access.
It does not need secrecy when it underwrites continuity.

So I ask—carefully, deliberately—about the coffers behind the presidency.

Who funds the transitions?
Who profits from deregulation disguised as reform?
Who benefits when chaos displaces deliberation?

And most unsettling of all:
is the President the architect—or the emblem?

I have traced this pattern across multiple essays, including my examination of the machinery behind the “Art of the Deal” and its displacement of democratic norms; my close reading of the December 17 presidential speech and its absence of ownership or constitutional grounding; and my reflections on how spectacle, pardon, and selective enforcement converge into what feels less like policy than performance.

For readers seeking fuller context, these threads are explored here:
– The Trump Machinery Is Not the Art of the Deal (Grace Notes) ⁹
– The Trump Speech of December 17, 2025 ¹⁰
– What Is Shocking America Reveals ¹¹
– A Jeweled Nugget of Truth: Asylum ¹²

Because what I am beginning to feel—more than conclude—is that we are watching a figurehead absorb attention while the real gravity sits elsewhere. A performance of dominance in public, paired with consolidation of wealth and influence in private.

And still, I try to discipline my own thinking—to understand how an entire American population, and by extension the countries most affected, appear to move through this moment with a strange inertia. Social media erupts with fast and furious response; pundits insist that Congress, or Democratic leadership, should have convened, litigated, asserted constitutional eminence against the impunity of this administration’s actions.

And yet, even as those debates churn, another headline slips quietly into view: reported claims that no elections would be held for thirty days, and that Stephen Miller may be positioned to oversee Venezuelan affairs under the authority of Donald Trump— including control over oil reserves [reported].⁸ If this is so, then I am compelled to ask: who is truly in charge? Is governance now decided beneath chandeliers, in gilded rooms where power rearranges nations while the public argues process after the fact? And at what point do We the People recognize that distraction itself has become the mechanism—delaying the moment when the course must finally be changed? This matters beyond U.S. borders.

I have watched my place of birth home —Trinidad and Tobago—become quietly entangled.
Not through spectacle, but through facilitation.
Airspace.
Transit permissions.
Strategic silence.

This is how small nations are folded into larger agendas—not by invasion, but by administration.

I did not consent to this.
Neither did many others.

So I write—not to render verdicts, but to bear witness.

Emotion is not the opposite of reason.
It is often the first signal that reason has been betrayed.

If asking who is really running the country unsettles, then perhaps it should.

For the United States.
For Latin America.
And yes—for Trinidad and Tobago.

—

Grace Notes

Not asserting. Witnessing.

Endnotes & References

1. Robert Reich — official commentary hub. robertreich.substack.com
2. Heather Cox Richardson — Letters from an American. heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
3. Rachel Maddow — program hub. msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show
4. Joy Reid — program/public output hub. msnbc.com/joy-reid
5. Bernie Sanders — official Senate site. sanders.senate.gov
6. Jasmine Crockett — official House site. crockett.house.gov
7. Brandon Johnson — City of Chicago Mayor’s Office. chicago.gov/city/en/mayor.html
8. “No elections for 30 days”; Donald Trump to pick Stephen Miller to oversee Venezuela, says report—What we know so far (reported). livemint.com
9. Grace Notes archive: “The Trump Machinery Is Not the Art of the Deal.” gracelyn2.blogspot.com
10. Grace Notes archive: “The Trump Speech of December 17, 2025.” gracelyn2.blogspot.com
11. Grace Notes archive: “What Is Shocking America Reveals.” gracelyn2.blogspot.com
12. Grace Notes archive: “A Jeweled Nugget of Truth: Asylum.” gracelyn2.blogspot.com

Note: References are provided to guide readers to primary public sources and contextual writing. This essay advances questions and observations, not judicial findings.