Key money

I listened to Trump’s Davos rant so you don’t have to

So, the late news out of Davos is that Trump threatened Greenland, then he backed down on using force, then he backed down again on the tariffs against eight European nations.

Don’t believe it for even one second.

The speech itself was a masterclass in what he calls the “weave,” and what I call “they shot him up with something that was not vitamin B.” Joe Biden should be suing him for a portion of everything he’s got, Biden’s name takes up so much of Trump’s speeches, his mind, his day, his Truth Social mania, his toilet musings, hell, every bloody moment the man hasn’t been drugged to sleep by whomever is in charge of his injection schedule. Between his press conference yesterday and his Davos speech today, the mentions of Biden were easily in the dozens. When Melania finally plants him next to his first wife in the wood line at his Bedminster golf course, his headstone should be inscribed, “Better than Biden.” That is clearly the way he measures himself. If I was Joe Biden on this first anniversary of Trump’s second term, I’d have a shit-eating grin on my face so huge, I’d have to take a muscle relaxant to get to sleep at night.

Lies, lies, more lies…you end up asking yourself, does he know he hasn’t been wheeled out in front of a high-school auditorium filled with JD Vance’s alleged tobaccy-chawin’ South Ohio relatives? Looking out at his audience in Davos, he was probably asking himself, where are all the red hats?

He bragged about how many bureaucrats he’d fired, then claimed, “They started off hating me when we fired them, and now they love me.” He was talking to an audience of corporate executives and politicians who know something about firing people, and he tried that line on them? Every suit in that room knew what it is to be hated, and hated with a passion by those they laid off to tack another few million on their salaries or cut taxes on their billionaire pals.

He prattled on about making fictional demand of Macron that he double or triple the price of some drug that France exports, “I said, Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30.” Then he starts mocking Macron’s accent, “No, no, no, Donald I won’t do that.” Embarrassing and pathetic doesn’t adequately capture that disgusting moment, and never will.

He told the crowd that a year ago when he took office, he promised to cancel 10 regulations for every new one imposed by his government, “But so far it’s averaging out to 129, if you can believe it.” He pulled “129” directly out of his ass, just like he pulled “no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime,” and everybody knew it. He was throwing the same old red meat to an audience with a taste for foie gras and truffles, and the lines landed as if he had just ordered a well-done burger at a three star Michelin restaurant.

He told them that “every major oil company is coming in with us” to Venezuela three days after headlines all over the world featured the CEO of Exxon-Mobil calling Venezuela “un-investible,” as if the Davos crowd can’t read.

Then he went after Europe’s energy policy, claiming that Germany is producing “22 percent less electricity than they did in 2017.” Two percent less electricity would be causing blackouts all over Germany. His Fox News addled speech writer probably saw some Aqua-net sprayed half-wit talking about a twenty-something reduction in fossil-fuel energy production in Germany.

You had to be listening to the speech live to get the full effect of his rant about windmills – killing “all the birds,” the usual nonsense. He claimed that every time the windmill “goes around, you’re losing $1,000. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money.” Then he came up with a new whopper, that China makes all the windmills, “and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that?”

Well, actually, no, you gibbering, fading fool.

He finally got around to Greenland, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the room. A thousand European machers had been losing sleep for a month wondering if World War III was around the corner, and he whines and tells lies about the history of Greenland, how “we” owned it after the war, and “we gave it back,” and still the room is utterly silent. Then he somehow starts in with his standard load of lies about the “rigged election” that “I won by a landslide.” How he sandwiched that into his Greenland rant you will have to imagine for yourselves, and how Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he had been president, because, you know, he and Putin are such close pals, and all he would have had to do is tell Vlad, “hands off.”

He throws in a couple of paeons to his almighty battleships: “I thought maybe we could take them out of mothballs. They said, no, sir. These ships are 100, think of that, 100 times more powerful than those big, big, magnificent pieces of art that you saw so many times ago that you still see on television.” Because everyone at Davos stays up at night in their bedrooms thumbing stupid shit on their phones and watching World War II movies on TV. Then he starts babbling about Ukraine again and talking about how many people are dying every month, and this word-salad comes out of his mouth. Remember “word salad,” from those relatively innocent days when we called his spew of invective and hate and lies and fascist crap a “word salad?” Well, listen to what he said today at Davos:

“I’m dealing with President Putin and he wants to make a deal. I believe I’m dealing with President Zelenskyy, and I think he wants to make a deal. I’m meeting him today. He might be in the audience right now, but they got to get that war stopped because too many people are dying needlessly. Dying. Too many souls are being lost. That’s the only reason I’m interested in doing it. But in doing it, I’m helping Europe, I’m helping NATO, and until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy right last time. Very smart man said he’s our daddy. He’s running it. I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being. But now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.”

Fu-u-u-u-u-ck.

I wish the cameras had panned the audience so we could see their faces like we saw the faces of the generals in Quantico when he was spewing lies and hate to that crowd. A half-dozen or more times, he confused Iceland with Greenland, and all those suits are sitting there, and you know what’s going through their minds. He’s fucking losing it, and he’s building up to give me what I want or I’m going to start bombing.

And then he did it. He said, “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay, now everyone saying, oh good. That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”

By that time, I was walking Ruby, listening to the speech on NPR on my phone, and with a 7-degree wind in my face, slipping on the ice and silently begging Ruby to get her business done so we could get back inside, I could hear the exhalation of relief in the room, the biggest sigh the world has heard for 75 years, as they realized some of the money guys in New York had gotten to him and told him that their net worth fell by 10 or 20 percent when the market crashed worrying about whether he would attack Greenland. And Donald Trump, like the good wealth-poodle that he is, caved.

He had an explanation for why he was caving. He couldn’t admit that the money guys got to him. He couldn’t admit that Europe getting together and forming their own Mini-Euro-NATO had gotten to him. He couldn’t back down in front of Putin and Xi. He couldn’t look, for God’s sake, weak.

So, what did he do? He reverted to who he is, who he always was, who he’ll always be: A real estate guy, who sees the world not in terms of war and peace and the almighty “deals” that he’s always talking about, because all they are is a piece of paper, and everybody knows that real estate guys don’t deal in pieces of paper, they deal in property. Listen to this, and then I’ll tell you where it comes from:

“All we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Number one, legally, it’s not defensible that way. Totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?”

There it is. Yesterday, he told the press he didn’t want us to be “a nation of renters.” In the world of Donald Trump, there is nothing lower than a renter. If you pay rent, like the poor people he used to collect from in Brooklyn and Queens for his father, you’re a sucker, you’re a loser.

That is really what he was talking about when he turned to his chief of staff John Kelly, who had retired as a four-star general in the Marines, and asked of the dead in Arlington Cemetery, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He knew that the graves he was looking at held the bodies of young people who had died never having owned a home, a piece of land with their name on it. So what did they die for, really?

A piece of paper. An oath. An idea that the Constitution was worth defending with their lives.

Trump didn’t understand that any more than he understood why people were such suckers that they would pay rent. What do you get from paying rent? Nothing. It’s not an investment. Rent has no real value. It’s just money you give to someone smarter than you, someone who owns the crappy apartment you’re paying rent for.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to rent Greenland, any more than he would want to rent his apartment in Trump Tower or his home/resort/hotel/gilded hellhole, Mar a Lago. It bothers Trump so much that he doesn’t own the White House that he has set about remaking the place in his own image, doing more than putting his stamp on it with gold leaf and marble. He tore part of the place down. That’s something a real estate guy from New York understands, because that’s the first thing you do in New York when you buy land that you’re going to build on: You tear down the stuff built by little people, the shops and bars and little apartments little people live in, and then you build something spectacular…

Like a zillion square foot ballroom that is bigger than the White House that you can put your name on that will be there long after you have gone. That’s what his stupid arch on the mall is about. He’ll put his name on that, too, like he did on the Kennedy Center. If he can’t own it, he’s going to pretend to own it by slapping his name and…I can’t believe I’m going to write this…marble arm rests on the seats.

Can you imagine how small, how tiny, how infinitesimal is the mind that sees the world in terms exclusively of whether you own it or not? It’s a way of perpetual unhappiness. You walk down a street in New York City, and you can’t look a building and say to yourself, gee, that’s a beautiful plaza they’ve done for the entrance, that’s some outstanding architecture there. You can’t see the world around you and appreciate it, because you don’t own it. If you own it, and you’re Trump, it’s the biggest. It’s the best. It’s the tallest. It’s the most expensive. It’s got the most gold. It’s got the most expensive marble.

It’s got gold bathroom fixtures.

That’s what it comes down to for him. A better toilet than the other guy’s, a golf course that’s greener and better groomed, a lobby that’s got bloody gold escalators. That’s what a woman is for him. She’s not beautiful unless he can own her by grabbing her pussy or raping her in a dressing room in a department store, for crying out loud.

In New York when I first moved there in 1970, there was, and had been for decades, a thing called “key money.” This was money that a new tenant paid to the tenant occupying an apartment or loft you had just rented to compensate them for improvements they had done while they lived there. You were paying to get the apartment’s or loft’s keys. It was completely “under the counter,” not acknowledged by the landlord, who owned the building and the apartment. It was an informal way for someone who had lived in an apartment and had invested some money in it to get their investment back, without having owned it.

To Donald Trump, of course, key money was sucker money, because the ultimate beneficiary was the landlord, who would reap the benefit of the improvements made by tenants by raising the rent because the place was better than it had been when he rented it to the old tenant.

That’s part of the basis for Trump’s rant about not wanting to defend a “license agreement or a lease.” My god, that’s not real estate! That’s not land! That’s not property! It’s a piece of paper! It’s why contracts are quite literally not worth the paper they’re written on. For Trump, you don’t have to pay that contractor you contracted with a piece of paper for his work, because he doesn’t own the bathroom he just put a new sink in. You own it! All he’s got to show is his labor. God, can you imagine depending on your labor to make a living?

Late today, Axios reported that the deal that Trump came to with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte includes an agreement that anything new established by the United States in Greenland, like new “Gold Dome” bases and new deep ports, will be considered part of the United States. We won’t be renting. It will be U.S. territory.

It is obvious that Trump does not know that the United States already has U.S. territory in foreign lands around the world. The cemeteries where our war dead are buried, yes, including the ones he refused to visit in Europe, are little pieces of the United States.