Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
If you’re in like Flynn in the Trump administration, what’s great is that you can lie to Congress, take money and lavish gifts from the Qataris, obstruct justice as you please, go to work shit-faced drunk, ignore the law on the release of the Epstein files, vote to give Trump $1 billion to fulfill his wet dreams about a White House ballroom, 86 the Voting Rights Act and gerrymander like it’s 1963 in George Wallace’s Alabama, launch undeclared wars with impunity, use the National Guard and goons from ICE as poll watchers, whistle past graveyards filled with the dead of Gaza if not un-vaccinated American children, build a foreign policy around kidnapping and assassination, engage in sanction-busting on behalf of the Russian paymaster and president Vladimir Putin, and threaten the invasion of Greenland and nuclear holocaust against Iran—and walk free. But if you’re a Democrat or a Bush Republican (as is James Comey), you can face a grand jury indictment just for taking a picture of seashells by the seashore and posting the photograph to social media.
So who are the enablers/producers of this bankrupt system? In no particular order:
The Supreme Court. Let’s start with the Court and its chief justice, John Roberts, who seems happy to run his courtroom as if it were a personal injury law firm with Donald Trump as its only client (“…Do you sense the Democrats are winning? Call us at 1-800-BEEN-BAMMED?…”).
Looked at crudely (about the only way to measure its performance), the deal between Trump and the Roberts court is that the justices are free to earn money on the side (by giving $200,000 speeches or by accepting free vacations on private planes and RVs from cronies), so long as they give Trump a hall pass in the form of blanket presidential immunity, which is the the bedrock that underpins the administration’s criminality.
You name the violation of whatever law, and behind the lack of any judicial enforcement, at the end of the day there’s Judge Roberts and his co-conspirator judges saying, “Nothing to see here, folks. Just keep moving on.”
The U.S. Congress. The author and humorist Mark Twain liked to say that the United States “had the best government money can buy,” but I think even Samuel Clemens might be horrified to witness congressional indifference to the plunderings of the Trump gang: the inside trading on Wall Street with the stock manipulations of Trump Media; the black bags filled by crypto bros with the $TRUMP and MELANIA meme coins; the overnight fortunes made by Trump insiders in prediction gambling markets; and the billions gifted to the Trump family by various Middle East petrogopolies who, in exchange, just wanted a special military operation against Iran (which they got).
I have to assume that some kind of financial wind tunnel exists between the Trump billionaires (all that Musk oil) and Republican members of Congress. Why do I think that? Because every member of the Trump administration who is fired ends up on some murky payroll for “The Shield of the Americas,” which I assume is how their silence is bought.
The American Press. If you want a metaphor for how the press largely whitewashes the graft of the Trump administration (of course there are some exceptions), look no further than the ballroom (there’s that word again) of the Washington Hilton.
On the night of the Running Assassin, some 2,000 “journalists” were present to “hear” what the president “had to say,” as if by now it is any mystery that all of Trump’s speeches, midnight posts, and interviews are a variation on the stream of unconsciousness that he delivered to that group of elementary school children who dropped by the Oval Office (along these lines):
TRUMP. [“All dialogue guaranteed verbatim”, and in this case delivered to eight-year-olds]: Then they [the Iranians] get on television, they say how well they’re doing. And they have no Navy, totally wiped out. They have no Air Force, totally wiped out. They have no anti-aircraft capability, totally wiped out, no radar. They have no leaders. The leaders are wiped out, the whole thing. And then I read the papers and they say how well they’re doing. They’re not doing well. That’s why you have no credibility. No credibility. The news, the fake news has no credibility. But the President’s Cup, it’s going to be something and we’re going to have that. We’re going to do very special presentations to Johnny who, as you know, is the commissioner’s fantastic person who runs the soccer. And I don’t know if you know this, but so more tickets have been sold earlier than at any World Cup they’ve ever had and the numbers are more than double.
For the most part, the American press is engaged in a huge exercise of sane-washing Trump. Otherwise, on the front page of the New York Times each morning there would be a published box in which it is stated: “In the judgement of the editorial board and most experts who we have consulted, the current American president is unable to carry out the responsibilities of his high office based on cognitive decline and acute mental impairment, past ethical transgressions (many of a violent sexual nature), and repeated violations of the U.S. Constitution.”
The Epstein 500 (formerly the Fortune 500). This isn’t to say that American CEOs would like to invite Trump—what with his soiled diapers and debased language laced with f-bombs and the word “scumbag”—over to their McMansions or clubs for dinner, but during office hours most large companies or at least their boards of directors are in lockstep with Trump’s kleptocracy.
If you need to name names, have a look at the ballroom donors, which could also be the VIP list at the Aspen Institute or Davos (beginning with Amazon and Apple…).
For the moment, American companies love oil over $100 a barrel, new forever wars in the Middle East (with the defense budget trying to crack $1.5 trillion a year), the gutting of environmental protection laws, and the lack of enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
For that the directors can put up with some smack coming from their children over dinner when the kids complain: “How can you enable such a scuzbucket?”
The Burning Man. Then there is the kabuki theater in which Trump poses as an average aggrieved citizen and sues various media companies for libel—all so that, after a few preliminary hearings at which lawyers get off some quotes about “freedom of the press”, some giant corporation at the top of the food chain can “settle” the lawsuit for $20 or $50 million, all of which ends up in Trump’s pocket. How can it be bribery if it came from a court?
Or, as Mel Brooks said in History of the World, Part I: “It’s good to be the king.”
