I don’t think he has some novel autocratic plan for enacting a dictatorship on this one, I think he’s just being stubborn and narcissistic like usual.

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

Chat, are we cooked?

This is literally just him fully exercising the power dynamics available to him without any guardrails. There were never any internal moral or ethical guardrails. He’s gotten rid of the people in leadership positions that served as external guardrails. He now is doing pretty much whatever the fuck he thinks he has a reasonable chance of getting away with (note that that’s not precisely the same as “whatever he wants”, though it’s close). He’s the President, so if anyone or anything comes after him, he can just be like “no, make me” and then order nobody to make him, and that’s that.

That’s what’s happening. There’s no 4d+i chess. This is just “nobody can really stop me from doing this, and I don’t care about the consequences because I can protect myself from them, so fuck you im doing it”. Which is roughly how orangeboi has lived his life writ large, so that tracks perfectly.