Ruining America as a Business

Interesting: on Tuesday, “The Grey Lady” caught up with us.
Ever since we snuck into Lord Kenneth of Fleet’s stable of newspapers and rode away on The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,™ we’ve been sounding the same barbaric yawp. Our more recently established colleagues went on reporting as if governance was proceeding more or less along the lines laid out centuries earlier on parchment. In contrast, our assumption, from the start of our stewardship, has been that journalism, as it was being practiced, mostly served a prop to hold up the façade of a Potemkin reality.
The opinion section of The New York Times for September 1st said a new series, “The New World Disorder,” would “be exploring in the coming weeks the disintegration of the postwar international system and how countries are adjusting as America steps aside.” Tuesday’s piece in that series was by Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian and academic: “A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready.”
“Those of us who live in relatively stable and well-ordered societies would like to believe, like Voltaire’s absurd Dr. Pangloss, who stumbles from one disaster to another, that ‘all is for the best.’ … we don’t expect our world to be turned upside down.
“We would do better to heed the warning of another French writer. In Albert Camus’s postwar novel The Plague, when dead rats appear on the streets of the Algerian city of Oran, and people fall ill with a mysterious disease, the local government and most of the citizens ignore the signs until it is too late. ‘There have been as many plagues as wars in history,’ Camus’s narrator says, ‘yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.’”
We don’t mean to argue with Camus, but some of us are less surprised than others.
Now that rules are optional, and anyone can do whatever he* wants, let’s start by ditching the worn-out fiction that the Executive Branch of the U.S. government is anything other than a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization. Love it or loathe it, Donald J. Trump is the defective and de facto CEO of the U.S.A. It’s enough to make an atheist say with feeling, “God, help us.”
According to widely published reporting, the Big Boss Man’s net worth went up by $2.4 billion last year. Of that amount, $636 million came from a phenomenon known as “$Trump coin.” To the extent that it exists at all in the real world, $Trump coin consists of changeable electrical charges stored on electronic devices. Everything else is hype, PR, and the Barnum Principle: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
It is either one of America’s great tragedies, or a great mercy, that Mark Twain, who had a very fine eye for flim-flam, snake oil, and bunko, was not alive on January 17th, 2025. Four years and ten days after the failure of his attempt to extend his lease on the Oval Office through mob violence, the once and future President celebrated his pending inaugural by launching $Trump at a “Crypto-Ball.”
For a brief, shady moment, his holdings were “worth” from $20 billion to $60 billion. Opinions vary. What are the odds the man we are currently trusting with the nuclear launch codes will be paying taxes on any of that? Meanwhile, according to analysts, a year and a half later “…988,905 wallets [that is, individual sucker accounts, have] lost a total of $3.81 billion.”
Speaking of odds, his big boy, Don Jr., owns big stakes in each of the companies that constitute the predictions market. Want to place a bet on whether the President will send the Marines to invade Country X? Take your pick: two online gambling venues, no waiting. Just don’t expect to beat the house. But why quibble over such petty, arms-length corruption? The President sells special access to his Trump Social feed for the modest fee of $100,000 a month.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik kicked off the fortnight by sparking a trade war with Canada, our second-largest trading partner. In doing so, the second Trump administration ripped up the trade agreement written by the first Trump administration, after it ripped up NAFTA.
Along with the new trade war we so desperately needed, this fortnight brought us 300,000 metric tons of imported mystery meat, and an Indy car race on the streets of Washington. That last item almost hit the spot. A demolition derby would have been right on the money.
Politicians on the right have howled for years: “the federal government ought to be run more like a business.” Many in that crowd also claim that this is, or should be, a Christian nation. Jesus says, in Luke 14:13, “… when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed.” At Chic-fil-A, it’s pay up or beat it.
People say war is how Americans learn geography. Maybe Trump can teach us something about economics. We’re unlikely to get anything else of value out of this administration.
* We intentionally use this gendered, exclusionary pronoun to reflect the fact that sexism and misogyny continue to flourish under our present, semi-anarchic regime.