It’s a free country. If people want to believe they’ve been born again, who are we to judge? But this business of having a third of the country acting, day after day, like they were born yesterday, is really starting to take a toll.
Common sense would seem to tell us that the base of support for the current regime is bound to collapse at some point. Paradoxically, the regime itself seems bent on hastening that process by showing that it’s not to be trusted.
As the fortnight was getting under way, Don Junior—why does writing that name give us the feeling that we’re trapped in some post-modern remix of “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos”?—proudly announced that he’s selling memberships to The Executive Branch for half a million simoleons a pop. He was not, let us be clear, offering government positions for a fee. Even the President’s first-born knows that would be illegal. At least, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that point.
No, he’s just boasting that he’s opening, according to Politico, “the highest-end private club that Washington has ever had, [to] cater to the business and tech moguls who are looking to nurture their relationships with the Trump administration.”
Membership is by invitation only. The entrance fee is $500,000. “The referral requirements and prohibitive pricing,” Politico obligingly informs us, “is meant to ensure the C-suite crowd can mingle with Trump advisers and cabinet members without the prying eyes of the press and wanna-be insiders. The price tag won’t be a problem for Trump’s cabinet—given it’s by far the wealthiest in history.”
Following a brief initial spasm of sputtering disbelief, the story sank beneath the surface of the fetid pool of scandal spewed from the President’s Bannon-branded Firehose of Bullshit™. According to anonymous sources in what’s left of the U.S. Geological Survey, that odiferous swamp of filth now rivals in size the Gulf formerly known as Mexico.
Speaking of that expansive oceanic basin, on Cinco de Mayo—a fake American holiday ginned up by marketers for beer and tequila, to give American college students yet another superfluous excuse for getting hammered—Members of Congress showcased their own cultural insensitivity by holding a hearing on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s H.R.276—the Gulf of America Act. It subsequently passed, of course.
All of this is just penny ante grifting and showboating, though. Comparatively speaking, it’s the equivalent of the dozens of gold-painted bits of plastic Home Depot “décor” Don Senior had plastered onto the walls of the Oval Office. It’s shabby, it’s grotesque, it’s stupid, and it’s embarrassing to everyone but the guy behind it, whose personal inability to experience shame appears to be the driving force behind current events.
More substantially, Qatar recently said it would give President Trump a $400 million airborne pimp palace to call his own. Such a story would have come as no surprise had it appeared in The Onion, or the late, lamented Weekly World News. Alas, it did not.
This would obviously be a blatant violation of the personal emolument clause of the Constitution—were it not for the fact that Attorney General Pam Bondi, a former lobbyist for Qatar, signed a memo saying no, it was not. Widespread outrage ensued, because of course it did. After all, the sun came up.
“Why wouldn’t I accept a gift?”, countered the man who is prohibited from doing so by the oath he swore in January.
We would list the reasons, but we have neither the time nor the space. Instead let’s return to that fateful day. As Justice Roberts—who had already issued him a “Get Out of Jail free” card—was administering the oath, the First Lady stood by the president’s side, her eyes hidden under a black hat that would have upstaged Darth Vader. She held not one Bible, but two—neither one of which he touched. Oversight? Taunt? Or the magical, “fingers crossed” thinking of an overgrown five-year old? But enough with whatever twisted gyrations go on beneath that noxious cloud of cotton candy he calls hair.
Let’s return to the Main Event: Grand Theft America.
Recent reporting has made it clear: even that gold-plated Boeing is but a bauble next to the $2.9 billion America’s First Family of Crime has hauled in over the past few months through an array of crypto-shenanigans.
Oops. We take that back. Whatever the various Trumpkins and their hangers-on have been up to, it must have been legal. Why? Because Justice Department’s cryptocurrency crime unit was disbanded more than a month ago. After all, if some redneck with a pickup yanks an ATM out of a backwoods branch bank, and no one’s there to pinch him, how could a crime have been committed?
Trump warned us all throughout the campaign: if we don’t do as he says, we won’t have a country anymore. A majority knuckled under, and yet here we are anyway.