It has now been one full month since The Troika took over the U.S. government.
One might argue that we’re being sloppy here, using the phrase “the government” in this way; technically, Trump and Musk, and their mascaraed sidekick Vance, only have control over the Executive Branch. Allow us to retort.*
Far from representing a reliable bulwark against tyranny, the Judicial branch of our government has, for decades now, taken extraordinary measures to welcome it. First it opened the great sluicegates channeling the wealth of billionaires into a vast reservoir of political power. Then it declared that whoever is put in place by that power, to run the Executive branch on its behalf—no matter how ignorant, insane, or felonious he or she might be—is beyond the reach of the law.
As for the remaining branch, the Congress, well, what can we say… without running afoul of the laws pertaining to slander and libel? The nation has lost far too many news organizations as it is. It would be tragic if its oldest were extinguished because some invertebrate creature took offense at its own truthful portrayal.
The rest of the formerly-vaunted Fourth Estate, facing an existential demand to conform with the norms of the all-powerful Free Market, is naturally reluctant to accurately label our new form of government.
Perhaps we can help. On January 20th, the aforesaid Free Market scored a hat trick. A herd of billionaires,† whose net worth is more than $1.3 trillion, gathered in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol to witness the exaltation of their latest acquisition. One of their own is now on the throne of what can only be called our new oligarchy.
One can surely call our present arrangement an unholy trinity. This would surely aggravate the tender feelings of Christian Nationalists, but there is a limit to the self-censorship we’re willing to exercise. Wake us up when they succeed in passing an amendment incorporating the Old Testament into the U.S. Code. Despite the incessant lip service they give to scripture, it’s easy to see by their behavior that they have yet to absorb much, if anything, from the New Testament.
While we’re on the topic of books, good or otherwise, we find it curious that this bunch has such difficulty in doing things “by the book.” The concept is pretty cut and dried, for most people, and therefore easy to grasp. Yet, for our new corporate overlords—whom, let us be perfectly clear, we explicitly do not welcome—it seems quite slippery. Odd, when one considers their common tendency to have sticky fingers.
They profess to revere “The Good Book,” but they violate its Commandments all the time. A similar state of confusion surrounds Project 2025, the operating manual written for them by the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Vought.
The titular head of the Troika ran on its “principles,” if the threats contained therein can be so described. Yet, once elected on November 5th,‡ he disavowed all knowledge of it. Ordinarily, when this former television personality claims to know nothing about anything, we’re inclined to believe him. In this case, though, every one of the executive actions spewing from the White House’s Firehose of Bullshit appears to have been taken verbatim from that document.
In fact, they seem to have gone beyond their 2025 script, and purloined a few pages from “London Has Fallen,” a critically-derided Gerard Butler extravaganza in which Islamic hordes blow up Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the Chelsea Bridge in rapid succession.
Taking the place of foreign landmarks, though, are such frivolities as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the agency that monitors the safety of our nuclear weapons arsenal, the cadre of health service professionals who track and fight infectious diseases, and the air traffic control system.
As if to make clear to we, the peonage, who is in charge and what he has in store for us, Vought finagled for himself the directorship of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB]. Unique among Federal institutions, over the 14 years of its existence the CFPB has returned $21 billion to the taxpayers that had been swindled from them by corporations—about triple what it cost to run. Like a cat with a mouse, Vought has not shut it down quite yet. Why dispatch your prey summarily, when you can savor the joy of torturing it until you lose interest?
The class war is under way. The aggressors have the upper hand—so far. But they may have forgotten, as have so many aggressors before them, the old military adage, “the enemy has a vote.”
* We allude, of course, to the book, Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, by the formidable writer and former litigator Elie Mystal—whom we hereby nominate for U.S. Attorney General.
† For the record, according to Daniel E. Meyers, at Miami University in Ohio, the collective noun for parasites is “herd.”
‡ On which day bomb threats were received in more than 200 polling places in heavily Democratic areas, nearly all of them traced to Russia.
Schizophrenic word salad.