Charles Koch, who along with his brother David were the infamous “Koch Brothers” who were “exhibit A” of the corruption of money in the electoral process wrought by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and founded the Americans for Prosperity PAC which poured money into far-right campaigns to destroy labor unions as a reliable source of Democratic votes, its biggest win being aiding in the election of anti-labor Republican Scott Walker governor in Wisconsin, recently proclaimed that how the country was being run today was a “mess,” without naming who was responsible for this.
But it was clear who he did hold responsible for the “mess,” since Koch is a free market and immigration advocate, and neither is a Trump “priority.” Koch, however, apparently represents an “old school” kind of conservatism, and while he and his brother were instrumental in being the money behind extreme-right campaign devices, it seems that they didn’t actually have the real “pulse” of what was brewing beneath the surface. Like the conservative politicians in Germany who thought they could “control” Hitler and use him when he was selected as chancellor, they had no real “power” to control either Trump or the masses that supported him, because Trump and those masses were not motivated by the same business sense as they were.
Instead, what we see is what Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic 1 calls “corruption and self-dealing on a scale that we’ve never seen in American history. And this really puts this administration in a completely different league.” This is a president, she noted, who when the stock market started crashing after (another) tariff announcement in early April, he didn’t consult with Wall Street, or go to Delaware the same weekend to show respect for the four servicemen who died in Lithuania.
Instead he went to Mar-a-Lago, where a Saudi-paid golf tournament was being hosted while sponsors and fans paid for a stay at his club. “His private businesses took precedence over the business of the nation” Applebaum writes. The Saudis clearly hoped to benefit from adding to Trump’s wallet. “Such dealings risk violating the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting ‘gifts, titles or emoluments from foreign governments.’” That must be news to Trump, but then again, who is going to stop him? This is a man who thinks obviously photoshopped images are “real” and goes to frustratingly ridiculous lengths to make you believe it too.
But for most people, it seems, it is just too much corruption going on for them to keep up with or deal with. They can’t stop him, so why even try? Maybe what Trump is doing is illegal or “bad,” but everything is “relative” to, say, like murder—or having committed no crime at, just be accused of anything, even a falsely, as ICE is doing to deport people they are not even looking for (“Not him? That’s OK, you’ll do”).
Why are people kidding themselves? Trump didn’t run for president for a third time because he “wanted” to—but because he needed to, just like Netanyahu in Israel and Orban in Hungary, both men with dictatorial impulses and whose corruption is so intense that they know that when they lose power they will finally face justice for their numerous crimes.
But many people in this country seem to believe that words like “lawlessness,” “unethical,” “corrupt”—or even “felony convictions”—are not really “crimes” because they have been repeated so often that they have lost all meaning. Trump and his henchpersons’ constant lying is so obvious that sensible people are left to throw up their hands in frustration, knowing that not “everyone” can be counted on to be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction. It doesn’t matter that such words have been used so often in regard to the Trump administration’s actions, because the level of lawlessness is not only unprecedented, but is now “expected.”
It seems that the generality just shrugs off Trump just being Trump, and if you can’t stop him, why even try? Of course not everyone is sanguine about the danger posed by Trump's Gestapo thugs, especially law firms who represent "woke" politics, like environmental justice:
Of course the courts can hand down decisions to stand between Trump and the rest of us (even those ignorant of the the fact), but that doesn’t mean illegal deportations or failure to restore funding to health and science research is happening. In the Trump administration, it’s like someone turning on the water faucet and letting it run; that person may be told not to do it again, but such may be taken “literally” to mean not turning on any more faucets (at least not when anyone is watching), instead of actually “obeying” the true meaning of the order, and turning off the one that is still running.
Of course people see what they want to see. In a video of people talking about the economic uncertainty being fostered by Trump playing paddleball with tariffs, one man incomprehensibly spoke of as his principle concern: immigrant workers sending remittances out of the country. Economists keep telling us that mass deportation of immigrant workers will have a detrimental effect on the economy, and naturally there are those who are still convinced after spending their off-time watching Fox News who can only come up with a rationalization to still blame it all on the “illegals”—even when they have nothing to do with the question at hand.
The Orwellian method of redefining “old” facts or history into something that can fit a new approved “reality”—such as when the reduced chocolate ration is proclaimed to actually be an “increase”—is apparent when we observe that the MAGAverse relies on invented “facts” too ridiculous for normal people with common sense to do anything but roll their eyes to, but also knowing there are those who will believe anything they are told by Trump and his henchpersons.
It is implied by the Trump version of Newspeak as communicated by people like Bondi and Leavitt that the masses are stupid because stupid people believe stupid things, so if you think they are stupid for saying them, then you must be. That’s not supposed to make any sense, but that is the country we live in today. We heard Bondi make the ridiculous claim that fentanyl seizures in Trump’s first 100 days saved first 22 million lives, then 119 million lives, and then in a recent press conference boldly stared-down reporters and asserted that 258 million people had been “saved” from death—and she wasn’t “daring” listeners to believe that bullshit, she was daring them not to believe it.
But then there is the real “math.” Last year 73,000 people died from overdosing on synthetic opioids. Even if we say that all of those deaths were from fentanyl, at that rate it would take 3,500 years to kill 258 million people. Where the planet is headed to these days (especially when governed by people who only care about “today”), we probably shouldn’t worry about anyone being alive by the year 5725 AD. Of course so-called “Christians” think they will be living in some “paradise,” so “what, me worry?” Frankly, if there is a god up there, I don’t know why he/she would “reward” anyone whose immoral and short-sighted policies and beliefs directly or indirectly aided in the deaths of billions of people.
Perhaps it isn’t difficult to understand how we reached this point when there are people like this who are suddenly “in control”:
Geoffrey Kabaservice who in 2020 was the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center and author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party—or at least as we used to know it—when he authored a commentary in the Washington Post entitled “The forever grievance: Conservatives have traded periodic revolts for a permanent revolution.” Kabaservice notes that since at least the Eisenhower administration, far-right “movements” have “periodically” emerged, eventually ran out of steam and seemingly “disappeared,” only to emerge again under a different moniker.
A more recent iteration of far-right extremist activism was the Tea Party Movement. Remember them? Its creation just “happened” to coincide with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, which despite its claims to the contrary, provided it with the suggestion of racist undercurrents. It reached its apparent “peak” in 2010 with the mid-term elections (people were that “unhappy” about the Affordable Care Act?), and then seemingly withered away with the nomination of a “moderate” Republican candidate in 2012, Mitt Romney—just as John McCain, George Bush and Bob Dole were before him.
But of course there were “outsiders” willing to go along with some of the Tea Party’s more fringe beliefs that “establishment” Republicans didn’t necessarily want to be associated with. “Birtherism” for example, and it would be a man many thought of as more a joke and shameless self-promoter, Donald Trump, to take-up that cause and breath new “life” into the movement, except that it wouldn’t be called the Tea Party anymore. All but a fringe of fringe knew that the claim that Obama was born in Kenya was hokum, but Trump seemed to actually believe it, and it came to pass that it didn’t really matter if it was true or not: it was sufficient to just be someone who upset the status quo, and playing “dumb” was not seen as being dumb.
We saw that in the interview with Terry Moran, and not just in Trump’s totally head-scratching “interpretation” of the Declaration of Independence, but in how psychopathic he is about actually believing something that (most) of the rest of us can see is obviously fake (that “MS13” lettering), and trying desperately to convince Moran that he is “right” and that Moran was the “ignorant” one in the room.
People try to “explain” Trump by means that make him appear to be “normal,” but that only means that being abnormal has been accepted as the new “normal.” Trump is clearly the poster boy for “pathological liar”; even Hillary Clinton can’t compete with him, because we can assume she knows her lies were lies, and Trump’s mind is clearly controlled by the need to oppose the world of matter (truth) and antimatter (falsity) because he must always “right” when most people tell him he is in fact “wrong” on most issues.
Trump of course defends his lies by claiming, with his usual self-deceiving superlatives that he won the 2024 (and 2020) election with a “tremendous mandate,” yet the reason he barely won is that he only told part of what he planned on doing. What is so “great” and “tremendous” about the Trump administration’s slashing and burning of science, health, educational and arts funding which is falsely claimed (even in the “mainstream” media) to be about “budget cutting,” when we should for once believe Trump and his fascist henchpersons when they say it is about “priorities”?
And what the hell are those “priorities”? Is it just the “military” and the “border”? What does making America dumber and less compassionate have to do to with making America “greater”? Tell me again how much “sense” there is in that? Oh, OK, if people are naturally “smarter,” defunding education and scientific research will “motivate” them to “overcome” Trump-imposed inhibitions? That is not what we are being told; researchers and post-graduate students who find grant money gone to continue research in this country may take their expertise to another country.
But then again we know Trump is neither a “genius” nor is he “stable.” Bullying is the resort of the stupid, as is its underlying cowardice that seeks retribution against those he knows are more “legitimate” than he can ever claim to be. The truth is that if Trump had started with nothing, he would certainly be a “loser” like most of the people he heaps contempt on.
I have no illusions about the world we live in—but especially the antimatter universe that Trump is creating that defies logic and is dependent on the support of those also corrupt of mind. For example, I am no fan of “woke” politics, but then again, it depends on who is fighting it. If it is white nationalist-types who are motivated by bigotry and racism (as everyone in the Trump administration appears to be), I don’t want them to “win.” As Ross Barker in New York Magazine wrote concerning the intellectual bankruptcy of the “anti-woke” MAGA and Project 2025 movements,
Yes, you might be right on the merits about the woke left, but so what in 2025? Who gets served? Either you like that Trump is laying waste to the federal bureaucracy, violating court orders, and undercutting the First Amendment, or you don’t. Those are the terms of engagement. It’s absurd to pretend otherwise.
The unfortunate reality is that many people either don’t care about or are defending those “terms of engagement” when it comes to deportation of anyone and everyone who isn’t “one of us.” Isn’t it odd that no one in this country ever heard of the Tren de Aragua gang until someone (probably Miller) decided it was useful as a rationalization to return Venezuelan TPS recipients back to—wait, not back to Venezuela? The gang is, according to independent evaluations by the FBI and DHS, a small and weak presence in the U.S., well overshadowed by other gangs both in numbers and criminal activity.
Yet to listen to the Orwellian newspeak of Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt, it is the most dangerous and violent “terrorist” organization the country has ever seen—and despite the fact that experts in gangs say that tattoos are not used as “identifiers” by TdA, they continue to baldy lie that these tattoos of crowns over the names of a man’s mother and father are “evidence” of TdA gang affiliation:
These tattoos belong to Andry José Hernández Romero, who DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin once more on her X account attempts to torture us with bald lies…
…by claiming this gay hairdresser really is a “violent” TdA gang member based not just on those “deeply disturbing” tattoos, but on “social media posts” such as was all CBS News could uncover that “proved” gang affiliation:
I mean really, does this guy look like a violent gang member? Or is just this racist need to fulfill this country’s version of the “Final Solution”? Interestingly, on its “100 days of fighting fake news” post on the DHS.gov website, there was no effort to present this “evidence” to defend itself in the deportation of this man to the CECOT concentration camp where it is bragged that inmates will “never” leave the place “alive.” If there is a real “terrorist gang” in this country, it is the Trump administration. Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz; personally, I wouldn’t mind if these evil characters visited the island, just for “fun” checking to see what it was like being a prisoner in a locked cell, and then left behind “accidentally” by the tour group:
Back to Kabaservice’s article about how the Tea Party movement didn’t just “disappear,” but was merely “transformed”—presumably into the MAGA movement,
I viewed the movement as the latest iteration of a basically cyclical populist phenomenon. It would push American politics to the right, I thought at the time, but eventually its impact would dissipate. The country would then swing back toward the center for a number of years until the next conservative counter-reaction. But the tea party never really faded away. It mutated. It became the Trump movement, which is likely to dominate the Republican Party and have a major impact on politics for years to come.
There was a time when most Republican “hotheads” eventually became more “pragmatic” once forced to act as responsible governing lawmakers (John Boehner an example), but
The tea party, though, was something new. It departed from the cyclical pattern of previous conservative movements. The 87 Republicans swept into the House by the tea party wave in 2010 mostly came from gerrymandered conservative districts, so they had no need to moderate to win over Democratic and independent voters; their only threat to reelection was being outflanked from the right in a GOP primary.
Thus Tea party candidates were not politicians and many were simply not good at “governing.” There were only there to “fuck shit up,” like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene. For example, the
House Freedom Caucus in 2015. The caucus was not much more ideologically conservative than other GOP factions, but it was distinctive for its determination to destroy bipartisan cooperation, deny Obama any legislative achievements or real legitimacy, and dethrone Boehner, who appeared too willing to cut deals with the Democrats.
Whether the Tea Party was more “radical” or not wasn’t the point; it largely represented a growing faction of voters who just wanted to “fuck shit up” without concern about the consequences:
Unlike previous iterations of the conservative movement, the tea party’s opposition to governing and its own party’s establishment was an enduring feature. Its House caucus was defunct by 2012, when most grass-roots tea party activism had also sputtered out. But the tea party ideal lived on — mostly online and out of public view — through the continuing radicalization of its remaining followers...Thus the tea party never really died; its energies were reactivated with the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Kabaservice was writing this in 2020; he could not know that his claim that “Trump in 2016 articulated grievances that were based on the real problems of non-college-educated Americans in rural regions and postindustrial towns, communities that have been destroyed by job losses, family dysfunction, and epidemics of drug and alcohol addiction” was more rhetoric than actual “concern” for the working class, as all of his actions to date reveal the opposite intention. Even bringing back “manufacturing” to this country is mostly a fantasy, but a fantasy that excites people like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose vision of the future is to be one of the “lords” who oversees the recreation of a plantation society in which the labor “class” exists in a modern day serfdom.
What remains true, according to Kabaservice, is that Trump is engaged in a “permanent revolution that has no fixed principles other than smashing a nebulous ‘deep state,’ forcing all institutions of society to bend to its will, and waging never-ending war against Democrats, independents and non-Trump Republicans. It has become a perpetual grievance machine unwilling (and unable) to address those grievances through governance or the legislative process.”
Trump has upended the idea of what “governance” is, unleashing 140 executive orders in his first 100 days—with Republicans in Congress merely there to help him “pay” for it. Those living in the “matter” universe may see in Trump’s antimatter world the seeds of destruction if not stopped, but on the other side, destruction is what is desired with only absurd “superlatives” to convince the stupid that it means anything “positive.”
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