That is the current state of American politics: A party competes for power against an association. Just by that short sentence, the reader can venture a guess as to who wins and will win in the next few election cycles, if America will still have political election.

The Democratic Party is nowadays, or probably has been for some time, a non-profit association rather than a party. It has no absolute, meaning focused, power and therefore lacks discipline and control. Its members are free to debate and disagree. Many members, after enjoying and exploiting the support of the party, nonchalantly jump ship to the other side for fame and/or financial gains without any consequences. Many of them ostentatiously declare themselves to be independent as if they were working for a nobler cause. Democrats seem more friendly, gregarious, inclusive, and benign. That probably is the main reason why their party attracts more diverse constituencies and opinions, the root cause of being inefficient and ineffective. The party does not seem to be a party but more like a philosophy or an ideology. After the election losses in 2024, they bickered among themselves to the near death of their party. They are still bickering at the DNC.

The MAGA Republican Party is a completely different political animal, and the contrast can easily be noticed during the last few decades in the real sense of a political party (as in Communist Party): strictly disciplined, top-down orderly. Speaking at the White House on June 24, 2025, the President said “They (the Israelis and the Iranians) don’t know what the fuck they are doing.” A bombshell! But no bickering among MAGA. Only a few hours later, the Vice President showed his middle finger and kept it up there in the air long enough for the world’s cameras to unmistakably record it. That was the teamwork spirit!

The discipline is ruthless, but it focuses and concentrates its energy like a laser. Every statement of any official of the Administration always consists of two indispensable parts: the first part praising the president and the second stressing how idiotic and incompetent the Biden administration (by implication, the Democrats) was. But that is not enough. MAGA blends politics with a twist of modern day’s capitalism, combining politics with financial gains and pursuing it unabashedly, a practice adopted by Vladimir Putin and is now copied by MAGA. It is meant to monopolize political power and win at all costs that includes the destruction of the democratic institutions within which it has existed and thrived for centuries, and Democracy itself. That was how they bulldozed the Democrats like corn stalks in 2024.

The Democrats and many others believe that the vote would cure the malaise suffered by Democracy. They trust that the voters would cast their votes rationally and with their understanding that Democracy is meant for them.

For a long time, MAGA has moved sometimes subtly with some trial balloons but more often decisively and relentlessly to consolidate their power and expand their grip on the country’s federal, state, and local political structures. Their grip permeates all political levels, and like under a communist regime, bullying pressure helps them take control of the voters. MAGA has already run the country like a monarchy with the president acting as a benign king treating his government and Congress like a patriarch treating his family members tolerating even the most incompetent and unruly. In return, he gets their absolute loyalty.

The telling sign is the way MAGA treats its opponents, arresting judges, indicting or openly threatening political opponents with arrest, usurping state power using military forces. Democratic institutions and rules of democratic politics are already out the window.

In totally dominating American politics, MAGA has found the formula to gain absolute power and move the country toward a dictatorship or a monarchy, which is the doctrine of “Us versus Them”. It had been put into practice before by hardline Republican politicians but why it didn’t stick until now? The answer is the white population’s sentiment. Not that their material life has not improved (it has robustly, thanks to China’s production) but the sense that their dominance, and therefore their security, is being threatened, and their control of things getting out of hand. The rise of China whose people were formerly considered by white Americans as no good at anything or even worth owning a little tiny bit of land in America, except for providing inexhaustible coolies, and the influx of immigrants are symptomatic of the changes that they perceived negatively affect their life. That is when they find MAGA’s propaganda not to be rude, coarse, uncivilized, and against human nature or even nature, but making sense.

There lurches the danger, not to MAGA or the Oligarchs or billionaires but to common people.

MAGA has no intention of gaining power just for cleaning up immigration and other social issues they dislike, and going through the democratic election cycles and, if they lose, relinquishing it as dictated by the democratic process. They want permanent power so that they can reshape the country into a white only, simple, and isolated nation, as simple as the old regimes in feudal Europe, more easily governed and controlled: The king and his family on top, coexisting with and supported by the billionaires who will lord over the functionaries such as executives, technicians, government workers including cabinet secretaries. The current U.S. government has already had that makeup with members of Congress and the courts are being treated no differently than subjects of the king’s court and they, willingly or under pressure, remain passive and alarmingly silent.

The caste system has worked beautifully for thousands of years in India. Even though it has constitutionally been outlawed, it is still alive and well in its society. Why not adopting a thing that has worked successfully for so long, MAGA asked themselves, and in a moment of Eureka, gleefully applied the system to the American society after modifying it to show a veneer of humaneness: Immigrants, the modern-day Shudras, cannot be citizens but only be guest workers. The esteemed Arabs have perfected their guest worker system that allows the “guests” to work for minimum wage without ever being naturalized or given basic human rights let alone the right to vote.  It is a solid and desirable system to keep the social order with the billionaires being the Brahmins.

The common men, regardless of their skin color, will realize, hopefully not too late, that they are being swallowed into the system like the submarine being swallowed by Karl Stromberg’s humongous tanker Liparus. If they don’t make their choice with their votes carefully now, they would all be Shudras with no right to their name and no power over their lives and their children and grandchildren’s lives. They would have no say except moaning “we are sorry”.

In a Democracy, one party fights another party as an adversary or opposition, but they cooperate and even consult each other in governing. They always treat each other with respect. So far, MAGA has treated the Democrats like pariahs calling them “idiotic” or deliberately smirking, disdainfully calling him “Jose Padilla” because U.S. Senator ALEX Padilla is a Mexican American, (JOSE Padilla is a convicted terrorist still serving time in federal prison). The fact that they can be petty, obscene, and laughing about it in public give them a pervert satisfaction that they are powerful and untouchable.

It is not just a strategy to sideline the Democrats to get an advantage for the next election cycle. It is an assault on an opposite party, the democratic institutions, and the very foundation of Democracy. MAGA treats the Democrats with outright disdain, the ENEMIES to be eradicated. It puts down or threatens the Democrats whatever way it can, relentlessly, ceaselessly, never stops even when national tragedies happen.

The case in point was its reaction to the assassination of a Minnesotan Democratic state representative and her husband, and an assassination attempt on a state senator. Don’t let off, don’t apologize, don’t sympathize, criticize the Democrats even if it’s a lie, is their motto. The president at first rightfully condemned the assassination. But he changed his tune a few days later as if he had got an earful from MAGA. Many other MAGA figures started loudly and in coordination accusing and criticizing ad nauseam the Democrats even though there is evidence that the shooter is a MAGA supporter.

Such MO is consistent with MAGA’s plan to clear the political landscape so that in three and a half years, America won’t have an inauguration of a new president but the coronation of a king. With a quick and steady pace as we have seen, four years would be long enough for MAGA to find ways to intimidate the courts and Congress to bend to its will to amend or even abolish the Constitution. The next step would be the establishing of a monarchy, or an oligarchy depending on who among MAGA would then have the upper hand.

If Democracy were lost, the common men would lose big. The Democratic legacy fought hard and sacrificed dearly for centuries by the people who had suffered under monarchs and dictators, would be gone. And then, the common men would have to fight and sacrifice again for the freedom and the rights they have possessed up to this point, if they would still remember how these rights, freedom, and happiness were intertwined.

It sounds dramatic, but not farfetched if the common men are distracted by other factors and fail to protect the most precious things they have ever possessed: their Freedom and their Rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t your children, grandchildren, and descendants deserve the same things?

JOHN P. LE PHONG

(This article is posted on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)

Billionaire Elon Musk was riding high: the richest man in the world and confirmed First Buddy of the President of the United States. But most importantly for an immigrant from South Africa, he was included in the inner circle that makes decisions on the most important issues of America, and the world – a circle of two, himself and Donald J. Trump, he believed.

His exceptional antennae may have picked up some signal, before the super nova exploded in the White House, that things did not seem to be as he thought or anticipated. But the super nova confirmed his suspicion. In front of staff members, a cabinet secretary who is supposed to fawn all over him – First Buddy holds the same status as the One he is buddy with – shouted to his face “fuck you” – not once, not twice but three times. He was awakened to the stark-naked fact that he had never been accepted. He was a foreigner. Worse, he has never belonged to the Trump orbit, let alone the Circle-of-Two.

He feels he has been played, used. For a man who single-handedly and ACCURATELY sent rockets and space crafts into space, a feat not even the venerable Boeing can do, a man who looked down on everyone including the president of the United States, his ego is torn big time. Maybe he is angry at himself, too. The genius engineer suddenly becomes aware that he is, politically, a novice.

That, figuratively speaking, kills him, not Tesla losing subsidies or the disgusting abomination Big Beautiful Bill.

He must have been feeling that he had joined a political Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch in a wild chaotic journey, a slow-motion traverse into darkness that he willingly and wholeheartedly devoted a huge portion of his fortune and his invaluable personal time in order to be a part of its mission to restore the White Supremacy that he knew as a young boy in South Africa. Presumably, the admission of White South African immigrants into the U.S. had something to do with Mr. Musk. If in fact it was, at the end of June 2025, a grand total of 68 White South Africans having been admitted is undoubtedly a great insult to the man who was used to huge numbers.

That was the root cause of his recent outbursts.

One should never take anything said, or done, by a man of Mr. Musk’s caliber

(in terms of brain power as well as fortune) lightly. As the owner of a social media outlet and hi-tech companies which routinely collect data, and leader of DOGE, his ability to gather information is immense and deep. The posts by Mr. Musk about the Epstein File and that “without me Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would be 51/49 in the Senate” is eerie as the 51/49 is so particular.

It may not be a rant. What did he do, and how, to help Mr. Trump and the Republicans to win the races beside contribution of money to MAGA’s PACs? What facts does he have to support his allegation of the potential losses of TWO Republican Senators to the Democrats without his help? Was his assertion that the president was in the Epstein file true? How does he know that?

Different but related questions: Does the president’s warning to Mr. Musk not to “defect” to the DP carry any real threat to the billionaire and how such threat can be carried out? If so, does it aim at nipping in the bud any attempt to reveal any hidden secrets?

The Trump era has introduced into in American politics and society all kinds of anomaly, but this must be a first that a former employee (albeit temporary) of the President of the United States seemingly publicly blackmails him. But considering his emotional state, his outburst was most likely not blackmailing but shooting from the hip, a Pike Bishop charging into a courtyard in Mexico blazing guns for revenge, in blind rage, unthinking.

What is the next move for Mr. Musk? The president has inadvertently given him ideas. He warns Mr.  Musk not to defect to the other side, meaning the Democratic Party. That actually is not a bad choice. The Republic has stood on two legs and maintained its stability since its founding with that reliable makeup. Presently, one leg is crippled and the other is like the proverbial bull in a China (cups and dishes) shop. Repairing and propping the crippled one up is a crucial undertaking, worthy of the talent of someone like Mr. Musk. Switching his help to the Democratic Party is not only recommended and commendable but could turn out to be one of the best achievements coming from his genius brain and fortune.

The government must pay close attention to the extent of Mr. Musk’s control and fielding of space technology before making threats of consequences against him or his companies. SpaceX is the only American company currently providing America with space ability while waiting for the old traditional money guzzling space companies to figure out how to shoot a rocket into space without burning it up in mid air or flying a spacecraft to the space station and returning it back to earth without fatal leaking fuel.

Since President Trump was voted back into power, unpredictability seems to have followed him into the White House, and the country has not had a dull moment during the 140 days into his four-year presidency.

There may be too much excitement for the good health of the country.

JOHN P. LE PHONG                                                                                (This article appears on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)

When Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet Union led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, a young Russian harbored a resentment of what he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. He seethed with deep anger and was determined to restore the power and prestige of the old Soviet Union. It is not farfetched to imagine that he would, shirtless and shoeless, ride a saddle-less horse all the way to Ukraine to plant the Russian flag in Kyiv. It does not seem easy to soothe his psyche until Ukraine will again become a Russian vassal.

Undoubtedly, President Trump is the one American politician that Mr. Putin feels friendly and comfortable enough to talk to without requiring him to seat at the other end of a 100-foot-long table. Political hyperbole aside, any thinking that Mr. Putin will be persuaded to stop the war soon and let even half of Ukraine join the Western alliance is imprudent, especially if the thinking comes from the European Union and NATO.

Since the end of WWII, Europe has behaved like a second child in a family of Western Civilized Democracy, enjoying life to the fullest but doing almost nothing in terms of defending the territory. All responsibility rests on the shoulder of Big Sam – a brother living afar on the other side of an ocean. For all those years protected by Big Sam, the European Union has built a few, very few defense, industrial, or hardware companies, but several billion-dollar fashion and fast-fashion companies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the American’s detachment are a wake-up call for Europe to take their destiny back into their own hands.

The European Union and NATO were not created so that Europeans could enjoy, and now is enjoying, 35 hour-work week, 14 holidays a year, and 11 official work months a year. In reality, they work fewer than 11 months a year if you count their 25 paid vacation days.

In 1990, the U.S.’s GDP was $6 Trillion versus EU.’s $6.2T. In 2000, the U.S. surpassed the RU $10.3T v. $8.7T. But in 2010, the EU’s GDP was again bigger than the U.S.’s, $16.3T v. $15T. But in 2024, the U.S. surged ahead with $28T versus $19T for the EU.

It was possible that Brother Sam told them not to play with guns, so they poured their energy and enthusiasm into fashion. But these numbers tell them that if they wanted, they could be as strong as the Americans.

Now is the time to do so.

The Russians have been smirking at the EU. Without the U.S. nuclear bombs threatening to rain down on Russian cities from above, the EU to them is a paper tiger. Now the U.S. cannot make any clearer that the EU is on its own, Russia has no reason not to swallow Ukraine and threaten other EU’s members such as the Baltic countries and Poland. Only a powerful nuclear-capable EU could deter such scenario from happening. During WWII, just one European country, Germany, could shake the Soviet Union empire in its boots. The EU is many times bigger than Germany and many times more resourceful.

One great concern is the European tradition of bickering among themselves and their habit of getting into a military duel easily, triggered by relatively unimportant events such as the death of an Archduke.

Political leaders and heads of states of the EU have paid tribute to Washington. They show respect but also the need for the support of America. Such tribute also serves to prove the maturity of European leaders overcoming their customary pride, especially the Germanic pride, one of the causes triggering the catastrophic WWII.  They obviously want the American participation in their foreign affairs.

But they must resist the American Republican MAGA’s insidious effort to mess with their internal affairs. The good news is the Democracy Defenders in Europe are still strong and have the upper hand over the racists and extremists such as the follower s of AfD and Die Heimat in Germany, and the Rassemblement National in France.

Europe, England and France in particular, is the cradle of Democracy and has a long history defending it. It should not let the power of a dictatorship or the illusion of the renewal of a bygone monarchy force it to stray from the path of Democracy. It must develop its own defense forces to stay independent from foreign powers and to protect its democratic institutions and traditions. The world has admired and wholeheartedly adopted its ideals. It seems like the world needs it again to steer it through a time dominated by reactionary, selfish, and sadistic Jungian Shadow.

America Democratic force for the time being has gone underground, preferring incognito for fear of MAGA’s punishment. MAGA has for years studied and learned a few tactics to punish its opponents. They don’t kill you – too crude. They just threaten you with nightmares or in fact create nightmares for you and family.

The thought that waking up one day finding himself walking down the step of a truck into the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador is enough to sweat a Democrat into clamming shut his mouth. Or ICE swoops on campuses to arrest an alleged “illegal” who is not illegal. Oops, we make a mistake but a life as their parents have worked hard and hoped for is gone – forever. A hint of pulling the purse string literally (grants) or figuratively (strict regulations) could force a university to kowtow or persuade billionaire CEOs clasping their hands in front of their crotch meekly getting in line to be granted an audience with the king.

Thus, Europe, which has the bravery in the face of fierce and violent onslaught by the racists and extremists, and the power to marginalize the French Zealots and classify the AfD German right-sing extremists in spite of the American government’s open support for AfD.

It’s not easy to understand the Russian psychology, wanting the whole planet earth but unable to digest what they have got. They occupy one third of the landmass of Asia and Europe combined but have always been in fear of being unsecured and unsafe against its little neighbors. They need to liberate themselves by reading more of the works of Neo-Freudian psychoanalysts.

In only four years, the German Nazi built a formidable fighting machine not just enough to defend itself but so strong that it swept through Europe and reached Moscow to the East. It is not unreasonable to expect that Modern Europe does not need four years but probably two to build a defense credible enough for Moscow to think twice before moving their tanks across the border of any of its neighbors in Eastern Europe like they did in Ukraine.

After WWII, it has taken the Americans a long time to get over the thought that giving the Germans the nuclear bomb is like giving Al Capone a bazooka. But the way Putin stares at Europe from the East licking his lips, it is about time to change that. Even the Poles want the bomb too.

Time has changed. Europe must change too. It should invest less in sex, fashion lady bags, and gourmet food, and more in defense hardware to protect itself and probably the world.

JOHN P. LE PHONG

(This article can be read on Facebook, X, and thelephongjournal.com)