Dismantling America brick by brick
The threat of Trump's band of con artists
What remarkable decorum we are seeing from elected officials as unfit Trump nominees are chased through the halls of Congress by the media.
The prevailing attitude seems to be that just because you apply epithets to people across the aisle indicating they have sexual congress with their mothers is no reason not to pretend that you and they share standards of decency and restraint.
As La Rochefoucauld said, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue." Translation: You pay your money and you decide which sort of congress you want.
Trump's choice for ambassador to France is Jared Kushner's father Charles, whom Trump pardoned in 2020. The elder Kushner's prosecution was described by former U.S. Attorney (later New Jersey Governor) Chris Christie: "If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?"
47's clown car dream cabinet is chock full of oligarchs and flimflammers only Vladimir Putin could love.
Julia Davis of The Daily Beast, in fact, in a piece titled "The Kremlin Celebrates Trump's Cabinet Picks," quotes Russian state TV host Vladimir Solovyov saying of Trump's picks, "They will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick. They are so great!"
Several Trump cabinet picks are openly contemptuous of the missions of their agencies and the very concept of expertise. After a few years of this, perhaps we can call the resulting rubble an art installation and auction it off like the notorious banana duct taped to a wall.
Conservatives spent decades laying the groundwork for Trump. Grover Norquist said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
That quip might appear to be about small government, but is fundamentally about making government the enemy. If we cannot agree across party lines on the need for government protection of clean air, clean water, safe building codes, food and drug safety and effectiveness, prevention and prosecution of fraud and abuse, and other measures for the general welfare, we are effectively reverting to feudalism.
The anarchy toward which Trump and his allies are driving us might be survived by plutocrats in walled compounds with private security forces, but not by the rest of us.
The notion that businesses can be relied upon to regulate themselves, which I heard articulated by a comfortable, privileged gay libertarian, is belied by a history that includes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911; bridge and building collapses; e coli outbreaks; birth defects from the cancer medication thalidomide; and other calamities caused by heedlessness and greed. Racial minorities and the poor are disproportionately impacted.
Vivek Ramaswamy's invocation of "government efficiency" to justify indiscriminate slashing of agency budgets is a euphemism for removing impediments to robber barons. It is like performing surgery blindfolded. Dr. Skywalker can rely on The Force if he likes, but not if I am to be the guinea pig.
Conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, Trump's choice to head the FBI, wants to defeat the "Deep State," which is the MAGA term for government workers whose loyalty is to the Constitution rather than to Glorious Leader. Patel wants to downsize the FBI's intelligence unit that has prevented another 9/11 for 23 years.
Mr. Solovyov praised former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the nominee for Director of National Intelligence widely considered a Russian asset.
Every line item in the federal budget represents a collective choice by our elected representatives. Replacing it with the whims of frauds and friends of Vlad (pick one) and expecting improvement is magical thinking. If you believe in Tinker Bell, please clap.
What sets us on a path to disintegration is the absence of shared respect for truth and the rule of law. Clinging to conspiracy theories that support a partisan narrative regardless of the evidence makes a religion out of bearing false witness.
Perhaps when people start losing things they took for granted, they will wake up. By then there will be more beggars than shoppers outside your local grocery.
Trump's principal achievement appears to be assembling an army of con artists. You can bet the federal Bitcoin reserve—as fictional as cryptocurrency itself—that they are not there to serve you.
Sooner or later, the person on the quack's operating table will be someone you love. Break the spell now.
Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at [email protected].
Copyright © 2024 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.