Follow the Money

 

“Democracies survive when all major players respect the ground rules. They crumble when significant players start to flout those rules -- and get away with it.” Sasha Abramsky, The Nation

Trump’s up, Biden’s down, Trump’s down, Biden’s up. The election will be a nail biter. It will be a blowout, a landslide for Biden because the overwhelming majority of the American people reject Donald J. Trump and the Trumpism Project. Trump is desperate for a close contest so he can challenge the results and possibly kick the final decision on the outcome to the Supreme Court. This partly explains why Trump is hellbent on ramming another product of The Federalist Society through the Senate confirmation process and onto the court, pronto.  Even though conservatives enjoy a clear majority on the Court, Trump’s not willing to gamble. Maybe that majority isn’t as solidly pro-Trump as we are led to believe. How many times has the most despicable bottom feeder turned and snapped at the hand that once elevated and supported it? 

Have you ever wondered what Putin and Trump spoke about when they met behind closed doors with only their translators present? I assume both sides have recordings. In Helsinki they met for a couple of hours, before emerging so Trump could tell the world that when it came to Russian interference in the 2016 election, he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies. That should have spelled the end of Trump, right then and there. It would have ended the run of every other president since 1960. It was one of the first significant shocks of the Trump reign, an admission totally against the grain, but I don’t remember many ex-generals and Secretaries of State or Defense, former FBI and NSA and CIA Directors, losing their shit when Trump sucked up to Putin before the entire world. The spectacle was written off as Trump refusing to follow the norms of his office and the advice of people who know fifty times more than he does. 

Does Putin call the president, Donald? Do they have a secret handshake shared by grifters the world over? Is Trump in love with Putin? Is a desperate longing for the embrace of another man what lies at the center of Trump’s sociopathy?

Trump doesn’t let pesky details get in his way; he’s a “big picture” guy. 

As far as I know, Putin doesn’t play golf and Donald J. Trump doesn’t ride horses. (Frankly, the visual of Donald J. Trump attempting to climb, or be lifted by crane, onto a horse’s back is priceless.) So, what did these two men talk about in Helsinki, why has nothing been reported about it, and what have Putin and Trump talked about since? Does Putin call the president, Donald? Do they have a secret handshake shared by grifters the world over? Is Trump in love with Putin? Is a desperate longing for the embrace of another man what lies at the center of Trump’s sociopathy? Is he a self-loathing homosexual? Does that explain why an obese, weak, ignorant and cowardly old man goes overboard on displays of masculinity and menace? Or why he’s always threatening women who don’t stand for his bullshit? Pundits frequently tell us that Trump is projecting who he is on the rest of us. Why does Trump always pose before mammoth trucks, hold rallies using Air Force One as a backdrop, salute the military even though every active duty military member knows what Trump thinks about them? (Suckers. Losers.) Is Trump’s need for big toys, glittering women, and endless adulation all because he had a shattering, unrequited homosexual love affair at the New York Military Academy? Is reliving that experience -- those fleeting moments in the communal showers after lights’ out, when for the only time in his entire existence did Trump feel the stirrings of love and connection with another person -- the reason he’s up at all hours whining and bitching and spreading lies on Twitter? Because he lost his one chance at happiness? Because the one time his penis and his brain gave him diametrically opposed messages both happened to be true? That neither penis or brain were untruthful, was, and is, the torment. Trump’s brain screamed, “These feelings can’t be real!” while his erect penis answered back, “No, Donald, they are very real.” Donald buried the experience deep, under glitz and glitter and self-aggrandizing behavior, and it rarely surfaced until now, when the entire Donald J. Trump Show looks like being cancelled due to ridiculous storylines, bad writing, cardboard characters, incompetent directing and low approval ratings. Trump never bought the idea that truth, about anything, but in particular about himself, would free him. No, Trump believes a real man buries his deepest fears, regrets, lost opportunities, missed chances, failures, missteps, and feelings in the footings of a skyscraper. 

Follow the money. Follow the money. Follow the money. The key to who Trump is and what he does resides in his income tax returns, and that’s why he has battled for years to keep them away from public scrutiny. Recent reporting by the New York Times points to what a number of smart people, including the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who for years opined that Donald Trump is a tax evader, a tax fraud, and a business failure who isn’t anywhere near as wealthy as he claims. According to reporting by the Times, Trump is hundreds of million of dollars in debt.  He’s not a business wizard. He’s just a common white collar criminal. 

Trump will attack the New York Times, call for whoever leaked his tax information to be executed, and demand William Barr make the whole mess disappear down the memory hole. He’ll whine about being treated unfairly. We’ve seen this show many times, and it gets no better with repetition. 

Roaming Like a Three-Legged Buffalo

“We are in the hands of greedy businessmen and weak politicians. Such people will see to it that poverty grows every day.” Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

This week I will roam between topics, like a three-legged buffalo in search of the herd that has left him for lost. I couldn’t bear to watch the State of the Union speech, and, from what I’ve read, and the few clips I’ve seen, I didn’t miss much; it was long and dreary, filled with insipid political platitudes, and Trump looked idiotic while he clapped for himself. The Republicans in the chamber cheered and applauded like fawning morons, but that’s hardly a surprise; Trump remains useful to the GOP and the party’s donor base. The finance, energy and defense sectors still find it useful to back Trump since he’s basically handing them their wish list. We all should know by now that the modern State of the Union address is a piece of political theater that usually bears little resemblance to reality. It has been a long time since an American president told the truth in a State of the Union speech, as long ago as Gerald Ford in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, when sugar-coating the real deal wasn’t an option.

I’m reading a book titled Jumping at Shadows by Sasha Abramsky which details how an epidemic of Fear has taken hold in America. Not a new idea by any means. Hunter S. Thompson put out Kingdom of Fear back in 2002 or so, after the nation lost its sanity over the 9/11 attacks and we began trading our civil liberties for a false sense of security. I’ve written about the many political uses of fear on this page, but Jumping at Shadows probes much deeper into the phenomenon. Immigrants, radical Muslims, insect-borne diseases, extreme weather, mass shootings, train wrecks, and on and on. Right after I began reading Jumping at Shadows I happened to catch a few minutes of ABC World News Tonight with David Muir. On the one hand Muir’s breathless delivery was hilarious, and on the other it supported Abramsky’s argument that the television news media is our primary source of fear. Every story Muir introduced was of danger, tragedy or mayhem, a steady drumbeat of things for people to worry about, right up to the end of the broadcast when Muir reported a feel good story.  And of course, Donald J. Trump stoked our fears in his overly long, dull speech, equating immigrants from south of our border to savage MS-13 gang members. Trump likes to paint with the broadest brush he can get his tiny hands on; he’s obviously clueless that MS-13’s origins were a result of US policy in Central America in the 1980’s and 90’s, or that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native born.  

From time to time I turn to the work of Anton Chekhov for solace. I was reading the short story, “Gooseberries” and came across this passage, which, though written about Russia in the 19th century, reminded me of contemporary America: “Just look at this life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, impossible poverty all around us, overcrowding, degeneracy, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lies…” The staggering income and wealth inequality present in the US in 2018 has turned millions of Americans into virtual serfs, with insecure low-wage employment, no access to healthcare, limited educational opportunities, heavy debts. American oligarchs, like Russian aristocrats, want to own and control everything so they can squeeze the people for profits. As I’ve written more times than I care to remember, capitalism not only puts the biosphere in peril, it also grinds human beings down, causing all manner of social ills, anxiety, depression, homelessness and hunger, and at the same time rendering anything that can’t be commodified and sold irrelevant. This is crystal clear where Donald J. Trump is concerned: the only thing Trump has ever loved is money, and I don’t think the Donald can fathom why everyone doesn’t feel the same. Funny thing though, for all his purported wealth, Trump appears to be a very unhappy man, miserable even, hated by millions the world over. It must gall Trump to no end that he will never be as popular as his African-American predecessor.

On the flap created by the release of the Nunes memo, all I can say is that it’s amusing to see the hypocrisy of Republicans and Democrats, who consistently vote to expand the surveillance powers of the national security state, and have no problem allowing intelligence agencies to spy on American citizens, but become outraged when their own malfeasance or conflicts of interest are uncovered by one of those agencies. Another sign of the corruption in our government.