As expected, it took a fortnight for the general tone of the second term of the Dunning-Kruger administration to reveal itself.
This is not to say there have been no surprises. Who knew Donald Trump was a Maoist? “There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.”
We certainly did not expect to hear, on National Polite Radio, such a devastatingly accurate assessment of the President’s declaration, on Tuesday, of Nakba II.
“I understood this as the meeting between a convicted felon, in the White House, and an indicted war criminal, in Benjamin Netanyahu,” Yousef Munayyer told Steve Inskeep. “So the expectation was, there was going to be a conspiracy to commit further crimes, once these two gentlemen got together.”
Munayyer’s expectation manifested itself as a proposed final solution to the problem of Palestinians living in Gaza. It starts with driving out the ones who haven’t yet been killed. For all we know, it will wrap up with the unveiling, atop a garish building, of five huge, gold-plated letters, spelling out the name of you know who.
The Current Occupant of the White House, who campaigned on a platform of opposing foreign entanglements, did not rule out the possibility of using U.S. troops to bring golf to Gaza. This seeming contradition can be easily dismissed. Though Canada and Greenland are in line ahead of it, surely Gaza can become our 53rd state.
It is, of course, impossible to know whether the conspirators Munayyer cited actually intend to carry out this bizarre scheme. We are well into the 21st century. Thanks to the internet, we have access to an untold wealth of information. And, thanks to theories and practices originally promulgated by Kremlin allies, imported and perfected by presidential advisor and sartorial trend-setter Steve Bannon, it is exceedingly difficult to know anything at all.
So, “Trump Gaza” may be an actual plan, or it may be just another elaborate hoax, the latest cloud of dust kicked up by the elevator-shoe shod man whose unfortunately unforgettable advent was staged on a gilded escalator, before a crowd of stooges who attended only because they were promised a check.*
Think of it as a heist movie, turned up to 11—or maybe 112: a gang blows up a building to distract the cops, then they rob a bank on the other side of town.
If Gaza is the distraction, where is the heist? Well, the U.S. Treasury building is conveniently located right next door to the White House, and last week newly-confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the keys to the department’s multi-trillion dollar payment system to Elon Musk.
That’s quite a vote of confidence in a guy whose “use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine,” according to the Wall Street Journal, is “worrying leaders at Tesla and SpaceX.” President Trump, though, who for years has bragged that he is too rich to be bribed, seems to be taking the Alfred E. Neuman approach: “What, me worry?”
Bessent, a hedge fund manager, is worth about $700 million. He said at his confirmation hearing that he is not worried about the $7.25 federal mimumum wage—or the high cost of housing, or child care, or health care. His No. 1 priority, he told senators,† was to extend Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires—and, presumably, aspiring billionaires like himself.
Musk can be trusted with the nation’s checkbook because he’s already the richest person in the world. Besides, Attorney General Pam Bondi—who, as Florida’s top cop, declined to prosecute Trump University for fraud after receiving a totally unrelated $25,000 campaign donation from Donald Trump—is right there to take the appropriate steps if it looked like there was anything amiss here. ‡
Since Musk can be trusted with the U.S. Treasury, there’s no need to worry about what these people might get up to with the proposed sovereign wealth fund or the strategic bitcoin reserve, either.
So, we can just relax and ignore trade wars, airplanes falling out of the sky, the civil service reverting back into the corrupt spoils system we discarded 140 years ago, and the deportation of the farmworkers who pick our veggies. We won’t need them anyway; the veggies won’t be growing because Trump, cosplaying as a firefighter, sent their irrigation water into Tulare Lake to evaporate.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that tragedy plus time equals comedy. We joke two thousand years later about Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Today our emperor is fiddling with fictitious money. It’s too early to find it funny, though. It’s not just Rome—the whole world is burning.
* Their checks may still be “in the mail.” Conveniently, the signer can shift the blame to Louis DeJoy, the man he hired to destroy the U.S. Postal Service, and whom the feckless Joe Biden failed to dislodge.
† New Hampshire’s Democratic Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan both voted to confirm Bessent.
‡ Speaking of things amiss, astrophysicists at Harvard recently thought they’d found a new asteroid, possibly capable of colliding with Earth. It turned out to be a used car, i.e., Elon Musk’s own 2010 Tesla Roadster, launched into a solar orbit in 2018.