OPINION: A question: Did you vote for this?

Did you really vote for a lawless presidency?

Some weeks ago, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, I wrote: “The ultimate collapse attendant to our enormous mistake (Trump’s election) will appear to come slowly, but then it will immediately be all around us. It is as predictable as his corruption and his revenge and his hate. And we did it to ourselves.”

Turns out the ultimate collapse took about two weeks.

Writing in the Washington Post this week, Ruth Marcus, a measured commentator generally not given to hyperbole, said: “The country survived Trump 1. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.”

The completely unprecedented specter of the world’s richest man acting as a one-man government is truly the stuff of dystopian fiction. Except this is America right now, and it is happening in real time.

Elon Musk, a billionaire elected by no one but with vast interest in his own and his competitors’ federal contracts and with no accountability, is wandering the halls of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, issuing orders, firing federal workers, putting post-teens in charge of paying the government’s obligations, canceling federal agencies, accessing your Social Security number and much more.

For decades, Republican politicians have railed against violations of personal and private information by the government. The late Idaho Congressman George Hansen made a career of battling federal intrusion into his constituents’ lives and his own shady dealings. Hansen once accused the feds of pursuing a vendetta against him over “my opposition to federal intrusion into all our lives.”

Big George ended his career a crook, but one wonders what he would make of Elon Musk.

Perhaps you’ve been concerned about the total collapse of American democracy and the nation’s engaged, principled leadership in the world. Or perhaps you just don’t care. But this is how democracy dies — no rules, no laws, no accountability, no sense of proportion or moderation.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, told the Post.

Since the Musk coup is playing out primarily on social media, it is appropriate that Wired magazine has the scoops about the Musketeers rummaging through your personal business, having given a handful of tech bros administrative access to government computer systems.

As Wired noted this week: “Typically, those admin privileges could give someone the power to log in to servers through secure shell access, navigate the entire file system, change user permissions, and delete or modify critical files. That could allow someone to bypass the security measures of, and potentially cause irreversible changes to, the very systems they have access to.

“ ‘You could do anything with these privileges,’ says one source with knowledge of the system, who adds that they cannot conceive of a reason that anyone would need them for purposes of simply hunting down fraudulent payments or analyzing disbursement flow.”

Or as Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic: “Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.”

Is that what you intended when you voted in November?

And then came Gaza — oh, and tariffs that came and went like a blast of cold Canadian air.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said on Tuesday, while everyone in the world save Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Wait. What?” The president who would end endless wars initially would not rule out the use of American soldiers to enforce a Gaza takeover and the forced deportation of 2.2 million Palestinians.

“As far as Gaza is concerned, we’ll do what is necessary,” the Developer-in-Chief huffed. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that. We’re going to take over that piece that we’re going to develop it.”

Gaz-a-Lago, here we come. You vote for that? Never mind. It was all “walked back” the next day.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans who see no evil, hear even less evil and speak glowingly of evil watch as Washington, D.C., burns.

Sen. James Risch, the alleged chairperson of the Foreign Relations Committee, declined to comment on the Gaza plan, according to Forbes. Initially Risch said he hadn’t heard Trump’s comments, which really meant he’d been blindsided. In Rischworld, if you can’t bring yourself to play the sycophant when all about you has descended into crazy, at least have “no comment.”

But no matter. In this authoritarian government, Congress is just a collection of cable news-ready useful idiots. Article I powers to appropriate and investigate? Not a chance of using that authority so hand it over to the White House just as the Constitution prohibits. Musk is in charge, after all. Sit down and be quiet, and that goes for you, too, “Chairperson” Risch.

Bet you didn’t vote for bird flu, either. Yet “the Trump administration has intervened in the release of important studies on the bird flu, as an outbreak escalates across the United States,” as KFF Health News put it. All scientific work on the growing flu epidemic was suspended on Day 1 by the guy who was only going to be a dictator for that one day.

Farmworkers and livestock veterinarians are at particular risk of bird flu infection — at least 67 people have tested positive in the U.S. to date — and information contained in the studies being withheld could both protect people and help head off a widespread bird flu pandemic.

Maybe King Donald just doesn’t care. Do you?

I’m pretty sure who is enjoying all this. One has an office in the Kremlin, another in Beijing.

Johnson, of Manzanita, Ore., served as chief of staff to the late former Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus. His new book on the U.S. Senate in the 1960s — “Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate” — has been published by the University of Oklahoma Press.