Give the President the Emilio Molina Vargas Sanity Test

On August 18th, 2025, the news dawned with a presidential decree that driving election fraud from our system requires us to junk all our voting machines, forbid mail-in ballots and rely more heavily on hand counts. These steps, of course, would also junk our mechanisms that have been driving election fraud from our system and making it ever harder to rig our elections for years.

So, once again, I spent part of my morning trying to understand how a decree made sense.

I’ve come up empty.

As of the day before (201 days into his term) the president had already signed 191 similar executive orders, 47 memoranda, and 79 proclamations. Many of the head-scratchers are among the executive orders. Most of the ones that can charitably be called “counter-intuitive” have been among the administration’s neural firings and mis-firings in doing daily presidential business.  

• I’m talking here about how slashing support for hospitals and clinics and keeping out the people who need them is making America healthier.

• To insure food safety, we have fired food safety experts.

• We will now heal the wounds of natural disasters by hobbling the weather service that warns us about them and abolishing FEMA, which helps clean up after them.

• Coming soon: the benefits to vaccine science gained by exiling vaccine scientists,

• cutting tax revenue urgently needed to moderate federal deficits and debt by giving people steep tax discounts,

• manage climate change by accelerating the carbon emissions that cause it

• and, not least, make the economy boom by not telling anyone how it’s actually doing.

A lot of people attribute viewing such things even as “counter-intuitive” to my ignorance and something like treason and liberal venality. I’m willing to agree to the liberal part. (My mother accused me of being “too idealistic.”)

And still other critics attribute opposition to how closely the president’s behavior resembles patients with morbid narcissistic personality disorders as defined in DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and ICD-10/11 insurance codes. *

I’ll leave all that to you. But I’m thinking all of that misses the point, which is that he’s insane.

The Emilio test. My morning jaw-dropping public policy shocks often remind me of “Bananas,” a 1971 movie by the then-wonderful and now-cringy Woody Allen. In it, a dashing revolutionary leads his rag-tag guerilla army to overthrow the cruel dictator of a Latin American country called San Marcos. The people are ecstatic. The triumphant Emilio Molina Vargas is excitedly called to address his celebratory citizens as they launch their much dreamed-of new era. Molina Vargas steps to the challenge and decrees that the official language of the Spanish-speaking country would be Swedish. What’s more, residents would henceforth have to wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes.

The kindly people of San Marcos soon have enough of such insanity and gently take their unstable new leader to a nice place with locked doors where he could get the care he needed.

It’s unlikely that crazy dictators could get off that easily in a brutalized country like ours.

History is full of dire alternatives to house arrest, of course. Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot once predicted that “men would never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Even without risking global collapse by empowering the forces that degrade environments or yanking food and health care support for domestic and foreign unfortunates or grinding international trade to a halt, American autocrats are in a country where a lot of smart, aggressive people, some with power.

They don’t cotton to insulting all the hundreds of thousands of people who have died to preserve and extend American civil liberties, the opportunities to redress grievances, operate in free markets or, as what really does made America great, attempt to fix our world in small and quite ambitious ways. Generous ways. Brilliant ways.

So American autocrats might reasonably think they’ll avoid the gruesome endings like autocrats in other countries meet.

For example, there’s Pol Pot who took power in a Cambodia destabilized by the wars in Southeast Asia in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

The fellow burst out like a supernova in 1975 with some crazy things. He forcibly deported millions from the country’s cities to its countryside, abolished money, forbid education, destroyed calendars and renamed 1975 “Year Zero.” Creating a better Cambodia soon required executing some 1.5-to-two million intellectuals, professionals and experts, ethnic minorities, religious leaders and other who (literally) looked suspiciously educated because they wore glasses. It took four years, but somewhat less bonkers friends deposed him and took him away to house arrest in the country’s jungles in 1979. He reportedly committed suicide to avoid being handed over to international courts on charges of crimes against humanity.

As we’ve established, I’ve been wrong before. Firing suspiciously educated people who wear glasses here may not lead directly to the gallows.

But I’ve got to wonder if the current crew around the White House might have at least a little anxiety about what could happen to them should they lose power. Pete Hegseth has doubled the security force that travels with him. JD Vance gets booed in New England. Elise Stefanik gets booed in New York. Republicans have been advised to stop holding their frequently disruptive town halls, where they often can’t get a word in edgewise..

One way to avoid all that, I’d imagine, would be to make it easier to rig elections.

*  I have Parkinsons Disease and, to clinically untrained me, the president looks like he might as well.