Long Nights in Loserville

“It was outside the realm of what happens, so incongruous and out of touch with the way things are meant to be in the world that people would deny and dismiss and discount anything you said because it didn’t fit with normality.” Tom Burgis, Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World

The White House must resemble a funeral parlor these days. Rank and file staffers tiptoe in the corridors, deathly afraid of causing any commotion that might further upset the Big Baby in the Oval Office. Trump has finally stopped throwing himself on the carpet and screaming “Fraud” at the top of his lungs, but he continues to hurl Big Mac’s and French fries from his gilded high-chair. The defeated Orange Menace has kept a low profile of late, with few public appearances, but he’s as active on Twitter as ever, and his camp is working the grift as hard as they can, hectoring supporters for contributions to fight the fraud and thwart the steal. Most of the money raised will go to retiring the campaign’s debts rather than fund doomed-to-fail legal challenges.

Even though the GOP is utterly Trump’s party, he lost while most Republican candidates fared just fine. That must really gall Trump. It’s a flashing example of how much he is disliked by the majority of American voters. But, and this is a question the Democrats need to answer, what do the results in House and Senate races say about the Democratic Party?  

I’m pretty certain that a Biden administration will not spend much time, if any, probing the many misdeeds committed by Trump and his gang of miscreants. Like Obama before him, who declined to go after the criminal bankers who caused the Great Recession, or George W. Bush administration officials who sanctioned torture in the failed War on Terror, it’s not in Biden’s nature. He’ll call America to turn from the past toward the future, and in so doing perpetuate the gangrene that afflicts the American political and economic system: lack of accountability. In case you haven’t noticed, accountability and punishment in America is reserved for the masses, not the elites. The masses are lucky if they get three strikes before the heavy hand of the law lands on them, and far too many people are put away for a single mistake. Trump deserves to swing for all the damage he has inflicted on our fragile democracy, our standing in the world, the environment, government agencies, the federal courts and race relations. And for playing deadly politics with the Covid pandemic, deceiving the American people about the seriousness of the Coronavirus for months on end. Mocking people for wearing masks. Calling it a hoax. Blaming the Chinese.  But it’s not only Trump. His many enablers deserve punishment, too, starting with Chief Ratfucker, Mitch McConnell. Measure orange jumpsuits for Lindsey Graham, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Doug Collins, Kevin McCarthy, Kelly Loeffler, Louis Dejoy, and Stephen Miller. (Add one of those masks like Hannibal Lecter wore in Silence of the Lambs for Miller. He’s a creepy fucker.) The lot should be chained together and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. 

I’m not holding my breath. 

The Cult of Trump may wither for lack of oxygen once the Orange Menace leaves the big stage, but it won’t disappear entirely because the conditions that gave rise to Donald Trump are still present. Cancerous cells don’t disappear of their own accord. The collective anger Trump tapped into in 2016, and spent the last four year stoking, won’t vanish. Millions of Americans are angry, frustrated, scared to death of the future and on the lookout for someone or something to blame. That impulse isn’t going away; it will continue to simmer. The Proud Boys and other groups of that malignant ilk, have enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety, dressing up in their camo gear, lacing up their boots, and dreaming of a country free of people of color.  In their twisted view it can all be made the way it never was -- a white man’s Garden of Eden. They seem to believe that we can return to the time when women stayed in the kitchen and Negroes and Mexicans knew their place, go back to the days when this was a Christian nation, ruled by the good book. Sorry, boys, you cannot unwind the clock. The world’s changed, the colonies look different now, America has competition, our country is already a rainbow, but you refuse to accept it. It messes up your story of victimhood at the hands of women, minorities, and Chinese factory workers. 

I saw a report recently that said that the pandemic has been a boon for billionaires. Since the start of the pandemic, America’s oligarchs have made money hand over fist while millions of working people have struggled to make the rent, buy food, and pay medical expenses. In times good or bad, the wealthy make out fine, but what’s happening now is madness. It’s painfully clear that the economy is completely rigged in favor of the wealthy. Working people are playing with a two-headed coin. The only way the masses win is if the coin lands on its edge, and how often does that happen? It took nearly half a century for the nation to get to this level of wealth inequality. It took gutting the New Deal, easing regulations on big business and putting a boot on the throat of organized labor; it took a reinterpretation of antitrust laws that allowed monopolies to form; it took numerous Supreme Court rulings that benefitted business and weakened the rights of workers, voters, and consumers; and it took massive tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Ever since Richard Nixon loaded the Supreme Court with business-friendly, conservative justices, working people and consumers have lost ground. 

The anger millions of Americans feel, and that Donald Trump skillfully harnessed against illegal immigrants, NAFTA, liberals, and China, is misdirected. That’s not what did us in; the style of capitalism we play is the culprit. Winner-Take-All. Too Big to Fail. No Monopoly Too Powerful. The Wall Street money guys, with help from Democrats and Republicans, killed the American Dream.