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May 16 - May 18, 2020
The Trump administration is like a reality show featuring villains from every major political scandal of the past forty years—Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 financial collapse—in recurring roles and revivals, despite the widespread desire of the public for the show to be canceled. From Roger Stone to Paul Manafort to William Barr, it is a Celebrity Apprentice of federal felons and disgraced operatives dragged out of the shadows and thrust back into the spotlight—with Donald Trump, yet again, at the helm.
In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity.
American exceptionalism—the widespread belief that America is unique among nations and impervious to autocracy—is the delusion that paved Trump’s path to victory.
For decades, Trump had relied on oligarchs and mobsters from the former USSR for support after Wall Street blacklisted him following his bankruptcies in the 1990s.10 The one bank that agreed to take him on—Deutsche Bank—is notorious for facilitating Russian money-laundering.
Trump is part of a complex illicit network including individuals from Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more—some of whom do not have loyalty to any particular country. Their loyalty is to themselves and their money. Many are criminals without borders who have moved from hijacking businesses to hijacking nations. Some call them fascists; I avoid this term because being a fascist requires an allegiance to the state. To these operatives, the state is just something to sell.
We are trapped in a reality TV autocrat’s funhouse mirror, a blurred continuum of shock and sorrow that exhausts our capacity for clarity of thought.
blanch
exurbs—
goon,
In recent years, both the Trump campaign and the mainstream media have portrayed Trump as a political neophyte or outsider, but nothing could be further from the truth. Trump sought elected office for thirty years. He ran for president in 2000, 2012, and 2016, and he nearly ran in 1988 and 1996.
Trump needs to be a brand because he’s terrified of being a person.
The public’s fate as camera fodder was cast in the 1990s, when news met entertainment, never to part, and the infotainment complex of cable media and reality TV was born.
fledgling
callousness
A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.
The Trump administration is often described as a “kakistocracy,” a word that means rule by the least competent.2 I have never used this word, and prefer the term “kleptocracy,” which describes countries where rulers steal their nation’s resources to enhance their personal wealth.
peddling
Birtherism was never about where Barack Obama came from. It was about where he was allowed to go. Power, for Trump, a wealthy real estate scion, was rooted in birthright, and birthright was inseparable from race.
The bedrock of autocracy is laid with the abdication of vigilance.
The Trump administration is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. The foundation of this edifice was formed not when Trump took office, but decades before, through prolonged engagement with criminal or criminal-adjacent actors linked to hostile regimes, in particular, the Kremlin and its oligarch network.
The nightmares I had been fending off had come home in the form of the Trump administration: a white supremacist kleptocracy linked to a transnational crime syndicate, using digital media to manipulate reality and destroy privacy, led by a sociopathic nuke-fetishist, backed by apocalyptic fanatics preying on the weakest and most vulnerable as feckless and complicit officials fail to protect them.
kook,
By the end of 2017, “Mueller will save us” had become an internet mantra, chanted by legal experts and armies of trolls alike. “Mueller will save us” had replaced “Comey will save us,” and was later supplanted by “Pelosi will save us” and “the 2020 election will save us,” all while the damage of the Trump administration grew more irreparable.
People keep looking for the smoking gun that will end Trump’s corrupt reign. But it has been there the whole time. The gun is in his hand, and it’s still smoking. It’s smoking because he is shooting our country to death. It’s smoking because no one will take away the gun. It’s smoking because the very people tasked with protecting you reload it for him again and again. They will keep firing until all constraints are removed and there is no one left to gaze at the carnage and ask why nothing is being done.
