The golden age our president promised us has arrived.
Never in the long history of our country have we seen a period of such innovation, boldness, and growth in any area of our economic, social, or political lives.
Today, Trump’s name will take its place alongside others that history will never forget.
It is an achievement that is almost impossible to comprehend. That is due in part to the fact that what is now happening was supposed to be impossible. Obstacle after obstacle stood in the way. For centuries, other men have sought to achieve what Trump has accomplished—and yet, he has outshone them all.
Indeed, I am reminded of the famous Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, in which he tells an apocryphal tale he asserts occurred when he was a young boy.
Cellini, a famed Renaissance-era goldsmith and sculptor, wrote that he witnessed a small lizard run into his family’s hearth, directly into the fire, and then emerge unscathed. Immediately afterward, his father slapped him across the face and explained that he did so so his son would always remember what he had just seen.
Consider yourself slapped across the face.
Consider that your country has run into the fire. Thanks to Trump, however, it seems unlikely it will emerge unscathed. Indeed, it is unclear whether it will survive the ordeal at all.
No work of Cellini or any other artist or craftsman matches the genius of what Trump is achieving in the area of his greatest gifts.
When it comes to corruption, Donald Trump is Michelangelo and da Vinci plus Bach and Mozart combined. He is a genius. He is creative in ways that make past generations of American grifters, robber barons, and mafia bosses seem like pikers.
Day in and day out, he has been robbing our country blind, in plain sight, and in ways no one else would dare to attempt.
Indeed, it is fair to suggest that if you took every other corrupt figure who stole from our public coffers from the first days of the republic until now and multiplied their larceny times that of every Gambino family capo di tutti capi, they still would not match the billions Trump has absconded with.
Monday’s news that somehow Trump and his family had reached a “deal” with the U.S. Department of Justice that follows his commands like a dutiful beagle to take $1.776 billion in tax dollars out of the U.S. Treasury and give it to his supporters and friends and co-conspirators and indeed, perhaps—because we do not have any information to the contrary—to his family and himself, is only his most recent achievement in criming, though certainly one of the most stunning.
With this bold stroke, Trump may well use taxpayer dollars—your money and mine, precious dollars from government accounts too depleted to allow us to pay for the care of our most needy citizens—to pay off members of the mob of thugs that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
That’s right, Trump may well have found a way, with the help of Todd Blanche and other DOJ officials—who all ought to swiftly be disbarred—to arrange what almost certainly is the first taxpayer-funded domestic coup attempt in the history of the United States. (In the interest of fairness, we need to acknowledge that we have conducted many taxpayer-underwritten foreign coup attempts throughout our history.)
The move is eye-wateringly audacious. Had Trump walked into Fort Knox with a shopping cart and walked out with it filled with gold bullion, the theft would not be more obvious or outrageous.
Yet Trump—and here is what is certainly part of his genius—has orchestrated a chorus of acceptance, support, and enabling from many of America’s most powerful leaders.
The hijacking of the DOJ to serve his personal interests would not have been possible without the six right-wing activist members of the Supreme Court, three of whom he appointed personally. The GOP “leadership” in Congress has remained supine, while the Republican Party nationwide has stood up and sought to be counted as his accomplices in this extraordinary heist.
Further, what makes the achievement of our grandmaster of malfeasance so exceptional is that it is just a single act in a comprehensive, sweeping, complex, stunningly lucrative campaign of corruption that started when he first took office and has turned the White House into a toll booth collecting cash and prizes for Trump enterprises.
Just days ago, we learned that the president has, throughout his time in office, engaged in thousands upon thousands of stock trades that appear to cash in on unique knowledge he had as president or of actions he intended to take. His sons run companies doing multimillion-dollar deals with the Pentagon and with governments worldwide seeking Trump’s favor.
Trump has accepted aircraft, donations to projects designed to glorify him, golden statues, bitcoins, and cash from suckers eager to buy up Trump swag. Trump phones, Trump watches, and the branding rights to Trump Airport in West Palm Beach are part of his scheme. It looks like the “Trump Presidential Library” may well include a hotel where people can pay to honor Trump in the way that means the most to him: with cash that ends up in his bank account.
Where is the money that the U.S. made from selling oil we stole from Venezuela? Who controls the billions that have been allocated from the U.S. Treasury and governments worldwide to the Board of Peace for Gaza? How many times has Trump sold pardons or lifted regulations or prosecuted or persecuted the innocent in exchange for campaign contributions?
Estimates suggest that Trump and his family have made billions as a direct result of actions he has taken since he returned to the White House. And of course, we live in the world of crypto and dark money accounts, where transactions can take place and we will likely never know their sources, nor will we know in whose pocket the ill-gotten gains finally ended up.
Yes, this is it. This is the golden age of corruption. And Trump is the Einstein of the science of scamming, grabbing, grifting, snatching, hijacking, purloining, and plundering our national assets, selling government services to the highest bidder, selling out the country, and helping his family and friends to do the same.
Who’s the s--thole country now, folks?
Our patrimony is being sold off—natural resources, fundamental freedoms, national security, our children’s futures, and the futures of generations of Americans to come—all to line the pockets of a bunch of immoral gangsters who, let’s be honest, do not even need the money in the first place.
Why are they destroying democracy? Because it is the only way to both keep their criminal enterprises alive and to stay out of jail at the same time.
We have lived through robber barons and the Teapot Dome and Tammany Hall and a country run to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of everyone else. Hell, we invented vulture capitalism and the “greed is good” of Gordon Gekkoism.
But to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, Donald Trump has taken us someplace new. He has worked every day since he resumed the presidency to lead a different kind of American revolution.
He has achieved his goal of becoming a world historical figure by becoming the founding father of a new kind of American nation, created of, by, and for him and his buddies and their bank accounts. Thanks to Trump, his family, MAGA, the GOP, the Federalist Society, and decades of rigging our systems in favor of the richest Americans, we are no longer a shining city on the hill.
We are instead a stinking cesspool of corruption, a republic for the rapacious. And the time we have to put an end to the stealing and to reclaim our nation for the benefit of its people is running out.
Tick tock, brothers and sisters. How much longer will we allow this crime spree to continue?
