As we celebrate (is that even remotely the right word?) our country’s birthday, let’s pause to consider that according to experts, “never before in American history has there been anything like Donald J. Trump, a president who in his first year back in office has collected about $1.4 billion in new revenues from cryptocurrency businesses that directly benefited from his actions as president.”
Yes, the guy who famously pledged to drain the swamp is so overtly corrupt that one has to assume his plan is indulge in massive amounts of grift so “people will not think anything about it is weird.”
Trust me — it’s weird. Also criminal.
In the quaint past, “presidents worked assiduously to show they were not connected to anything that could in any way compromise their decision making or leverage their public virtue.” But in this golden age of MAGA morality, the entire Trump family “has been unapologetic about its aggressive pursuit of profits,” causing historians, political scientists, and anyone who doesn’t watch Fox News to marvel at “the openness, the flagrant nature” of their blatant corruption, which they undertake “almost with pride — cashing in on the office itself” almost daily.
Unless one is delusional or oblivious, it has become “increasingly obvious that the obscene wealth and power of a select few, at the expense of the many, is a feature, not a bug for the Trump years.”
Those who are in on the scam — and that doesn’t include you and me — are “swimming like Scrooge McDuck in a sea of self-dealing and greed that is unprecedented in American history.”
All those pardons for donors, contracts for flunkies, and misuse of inside information are not “a disconnected series of scandals” but a well-coordinated system of depravity.
Yes, our avarice-prone chief executive is fantastically obsessed with money and power (also windmills, for some bizarre reason). But there is more to it. There is a dark psychological neediness.
You see, the drooling, shuffling occupant of the Oval Office “wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf.” We’re talking about a guy who insists he is a genius (a very stable one) even as the US economy teeters and he loses a war against a much smaller nation led by religious zealots. He proclaims himself to be an unparallelled mastermind, the mighty leader who “knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it” despite the overwhelming evidence of his incompetence and his “relentlessly oafish output.”
As others have noted, “the reflecting pool fiasco, in which Trump created the idea there was an emergency, ignored experts, bypassed normal procedures to give a wildly inflated contract to a crony, bragged about his success, ignored the problems, claimed his enemies had sabotaged him, and finally stationed troops around the landmark he had turned into a swamp, represents the Trump administration perfectly.”
That’s the real symbol of America today.
Happy goddamn birthday.
