This is by no means the first occasion when a head of state claimed that in his person, resided the state, beyond question and certainly any criticism. “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”) said Louis XIV, the king of France. He supposedly declared this before the Parlament of Paris in 1655, signifying his absolute power and belief that he was the embodiment of the French state. 

Americans could not have imagined that the country established as “a light upon a hill” believing itself to be the guarantor of democracy would ever ‘fall off the edge’ into totalitarian rule. We are waking morning by morning to a state that mirrors autocratic states in history, and those presently existing. Congress is paralyzed without sufficient collective character, the will to act. Whether the occupant of the Oval Office utilized a legal process to acquire the Presidency, is quite irrelevant when, on behalf of “the American people”, he as made enemies of long term allies. Countries that imagined themselves to be partners in democracy and in trade — recalibrate that assumption. American companies in every sector are buffeted by the scale, extent, and the indecisiveness of the unilateral tariff imposition. For a well written overview of the present state of things I recommend the article by the Washington Post’s Abha Bhattarai, the struggle with uncertainty and chaos in Trump tariffs.

Nietzsche has sharp words about the imperious state, the totalitarian minded Head-Of-State, the bringer of chaos, a death sentence for the people.

Somewhere
there are still peoples and herds,
but not with us,
my brothers: here there are states.

A state? What is that?
Well! open now your ears to me,
for now will I say to you my word
concerning the death of peoples.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters.
Coldly lies it also;
and this lie creeps from its mouth:
“I, the state, am the people.”

It is a lie!
Creators were they who created peoples,
and hung a faith and a love over them:
thus they served life.

Destroyers, are they who lay traps for many,
and call it the state:
they hang a sword
and a hundred cravings over them.

Where there is still a people,
there the state is not understood,
but hated as the evil eye,
and as sin against laws and customs.

…the state lies in all languages of good and evil;
and whatever it says it lies;
and whatever it has it has stolen.

False is everything in it;
with stolen teeth it bites,
the biting one.
False are even its bowels.

Confusion of language of good and evil;
this sign I give to you as the sign of the state.

Truly, the will to death, indicates this sign!
Truly, it beckons to the preachers of death!

Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, The New Idol, No. 11