Excerpt:
"All of a sudden (or so it seems) there are “presidents” everywhere – as if all of them were elected administrators subject to regular popular referendums – i.e., elections. Like the “president” of Ukraine, for instance. He is in fact an autocrat, a jefe – as they call them in Latin America – who has selected himself to remain “president” of a country that he rules over by decree.

Probably eternally.

We used to call such anything but “presidents” because there was a time when honest language was still valued because a sufficiency of people understood that dishonest language devalues discussion – and things more important than just that.
...
Nonetheless, we are expected to speak of these Maximum Leaders and Dear Leaders and jefes using the honorific, president – as if they were deserving of it. This includes the “presidents” of this country. They are nominally still subject to periodic public referendums, but once selected – typically, by a minority of the public by the way and so much for “democracy” – they act as autocrats and jefes, ruling by decrees they like to call “executive orders.”

As if that change of verbiage changed the meaning of rule-by-decree.

But they are no longer executives, in the constitutional sense that presidents of the United States for the most part once tried to be or at least pretended to try to be. That sense being an administrator of the laws passed by Congress. Of course, Congress has passed along its sole legal power (under the Constitution, at any rate) to pass laws over to the permanent bureaucracy, which issues what are styled “regulations” that have the force and effect of laws but are much harder to repeal or even amend."