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Yoon's Fate Should Be a Key Lesson for Trump
By Tom Kagy | 10 Jun, 2025
Trump's deployment of National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles against Newsom's wishes suggests he enjoys autocratic rule too much to heed Constitutional limits of power.
As an A-student of western constitutional democracy, S. Korea has recently offered a spectacular lesson in how to deal quickly and decisively with a would-be tyrant. Trump would be wise to heed that lesson but, of course, he's neither wise nor law-abiding.
On December 3, 2024 then Korean president Yoon Seok Yeol, a hardliner leaning toward the US, declared martial law and ordered troops to bar lawmakers from entering the National Assembly. By December 14 Yoon was impeached, with 12 members of his own party supporting the motion, resulting in Yoon being suspended from office.
On April 4, 2025, 111 days after his impeachment, the Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment by a vote of 8-0, permanently removing Yoon from office and subjecting him to criminal charges arising from his various abuses of power.
On June 4 Lee Jae-myung from the Democratic Party won the snap election to replace Yoon. Lee was elected in a landslide over his conservative rival with 77.8% of the electorate voting. That's a far higher percentage than the 63.9% of Americans who turned out to vote in the 2024 election. And the turnout reflected a deep conviction among Koreans that the conservative party represents a threat to the young but proud democracy, ensuring that Yoon's PPP is unlikely to regain power for the forseeable future.
The abuses of power that have characterized Trump's presidency are, in many respects, far grosser that Yoon's rather short-lived attempt to grant himself autocratic power. Since day one Trump has done everything to agglomerate absolute control over all governmental powers. While he hasn't actually declared martial law, in effect, he is currently exercising a level of authority rare even among third-world tyrants.
The problem isn't that Trump has a political agenda and is bent on advancing them. All leaders seek to do that. The problem is that Trump either doesn't understand or care that what he's doing isn't political but totalitarian.
He has gone far beyond enforcing laws and is now replacing laws, including Constitutional provisions, with his personal fiat. And that fiat doesn't appear to be bounded by ethical or even rational concerns.
Suddenly invoking an imaginary trade emergency to replace the elaborate system of carefully measured tariffs approved by Congress with unilateral, extreme and arbitrary on-again-off-again tariffs on all trading partners isn't merely disruptive of the economy; it destroys the stable global order under which the US and the majority of the world have been thriving over the past 80 years.
His justification for destroying that order is illusory, namely, using tariffs as negotiating leverage to level the economic playing field. In reality, the playing field has already been "leveled" to extreme US advantage thanks to the trust most of the world has been reposing in the US as a good and honest broker. Trump has shattered that trust, forcing the world's other economic powers to collude secretly to undermine the centrality the US has enjoyed by dragging their collective feet in arriving at tariff deals. In essence, Trump has abused his powers only to destroy the greatest advantage the US has ever enjoyed in its history.
The totalitarian nature of Trump's quest for absolute power is most evident in his efforts to quash all dissent.
He is currently doing his level best to destroy Harvard, one of our greatest institutions and a national treasure in terms of its importance to the nation's intellectual and technical prowess. His stated reason is nonsensical: that Harvard has anti-semitic policies. In reality what Trump fears is that Harvard has become a symbol of liberal, open-minded thought around the world, one that disagrees with MAGA's vision for taking the United States back to an insular, omnipotent past that never actually existed.
The concept of free speech is meaningless to Donald Trump. He has been threatening media and private citizens against exercising that most fundamental of American rights guaranteed by the Constitution. He feels completely justified in seeking to crush any form of protest with threats of deportation or by calling out the National Guard and even the Marines in the utter absence of a request by the local governor, the legal prerequisite for such extreme action.
He is making the federal government's Office of Personnel Management require civil service applicants to swear allegiance not to the Constitution but to Donald Trump personally. This is the kind of absurdist nonsense that one would have trouble finding in even the grossest of political satires.
Trump has forced law firms that provided representation to his perceived enemies to provide billions of dollars in free legal services or face exclusion from all government-related work and even access to government facilities.
He has created Trump-family crypto interests like World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins to allow donors to make generous contributions for the privilege of dining with him at the White House and transacting business. The Constitution's emoluments clause expressly prohibits elected officials from using their office to seek financial gain.
Eager to flex his power over the military, he is sending in Marines and National Guard into Los Angeles unbidden by its governor or mayor, in direct violations of laws designed to prevent precisely the kind of abuses to which Trump seems irresistibly drawn.
S. Koreans acted to rid themselves of the threat of this type of tyranny within hours of detecting such dangerous tendencies in its elected leader. Americans must either awaken to the danger posed by Trump or find ourselves growing accustomed to living in a very different kind of nation.
The problem is that Trump either doesn't understand or care that what he's doing isn't political but totalitarian.
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