Make no mistake, Donald and Company are preparing to loot the Treasury. They have no interest in governing, they only want to grab all the money they can. Grifters all.
My bet is soon we are going to see that long rumored Trump hotel property in Moscow. Given the age of our soon to be CinC it might be Don Jr. or Eric running the show but The Trump Organization will doing business with one V. Putin.
Trump is a New York gangster. Always was and always will be. He tried all kinds of scams and some were winners but most of them were losers.
Then Trump discovered politics. The biggest and best scam ever. People just send you money. PACs, super PACs, billionaires, foreign governments, dark money people and the common man. And he just lies to them and gives them word salad explanations. And the money keeps rolling in without any rules, regulations or ethical challenges.
Trump is a New York gangster who was groomed by his dad to work with the Russian mob. The biggest mobster of all is sitting in Russia and using his asset Trump to take over the US and destroy it. That is along with Xi. So much for MAGA being anti China. They are supporting China taking over the USA, unless the DOD is having none of it.
Oddly, on behalf of gangsters who have to make their bones with physical, personal acts of violence, T***p is a cheesy gangster wanna-be. He hasn't got the stones (marbles, mouse balls) to be a real gangster.
"Thank you" is pretty bland, considering the importance of the link you furnished. I just finished Snyder's (2015! terribly prescient) "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning," and the L.A. Public Library just emailed me that it has delivered a copy of Snyder's new "On Freedom" to my local branch.
Lawrence, I have a copy of Black Earth at home in the US. I just bought a copy of On Freedom, luckily I got a copy in English in my local German bookstore. The last one on the shelf. We can compare notes as we read it.
You're in Germany, reading the new Snyder book about freedom, as I'm reading it in the United States? "From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent." --H.P. Lovecraft
Nov 16·edited Nov 16Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Not so far, Lawrence, but he's about to try putting the U.S. judicial and prison systems to work on that. The boss's hands are always clean, even when the fingers are stubby.
Speaking of short fingers (not). You can find on YouTube the audio-only but truly wonderful recording of Rachmaninov playing his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (1934, Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra). Mentioned only because Rachmaninov was known to be able to straddle a 13th. Massive hands, antidote to Donnie's digits. But now we're getting into Arnold-Palmer-in-the-shower territory. Cosmic lesson, sometimes more can be more, but in our present miasma, less is certainly less.
Sounds like an excellent weekend project. I want to stay away from news channels then anyway, a weekend habit I hope to maintain. i'd certainly prefer to visualize Rachmaninov's handspan. Poor Arnold Palmer. What did he ever do to deserve Donald Trump?
Oy. News channels on weekends? Guys (and now gals) being paid to fill the silence with blather. Another YouTube: Voices of Music, SF-based early music group, search for (I know, not *that* again) its Four Seasons. Earphones so you can hear wondrous, tiny embellshments/ornamentations Alana Youssefian adds to all the Spring melodies you know by heart.
The trail of how we got here is long, dark and ugly. You can start with Brown v. Board decision, the political fallout, Nixon, Lee Atwater just to start with.
Oh, go back to 1877, when the Republican Party sold out 11 years of Federal Emancipation to get the White House for Hayes, then amble through Teapot Dome/Elk Hills (when bribing Republicans at the Cabinet level still consisted of delivering paper currency in leather satchels), and pause at 1934, when a media smear (socialism today, commies tomorrow) campaign kept Sinclair from being elected governor, then Nixon becoming Nixon pointing at commies, just as Truman was desegrating the armed services, and then, and then, and then...
Well yes, of course but I’m not Heather Cox Richardson. The trail is even longer and goes beyond the founding. I once read that the US was a Gemini country-twins. One good and one not so much. I used to think it silly but in retrospect, probably not so much.
I was an editor at New West during its first three years, and I must have (might have) written some pieces for it. I got written up by the magazine because I was the editor of Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade," which ran simultaneously in New West and New York (but was the cover only of New York, for reasons that are only of interest to someone writing a master's or doctoral thesis on print magazines). Oh, after I was canned, I wrote in his voice PTSD-paralyzed Grover Lewis's account of being at the assassination attempt on Larry Flynt, and, oh, yeah, a piece called "Love in Escrow" that was optioned (gloriou$) by a studio, but never scripted. Swimming in my memory is knowing, back then, the screenwriting team of Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood. Matthew was, and apparently still is? married...ahem.
Second, I wish massive grift were the only thing the Trump mob has planned. The fleecing of the American taxpayers and a whole lot of unsuspecting investors aside, that would actually be less bad than all the destroy-democracy stuff they say they want to do.
Also, why isn't anyone explaining what Biden can do with *his* near total immunity until Jan. 20, and what we all can do beyond helplessly waving protest signs, to actually slow down or stop these f**kers? Is it because the people who actually have workable fascist-disabler strategies need to get them all lined up and ready to go in total secrecy, and then launch them into action at a time that will prevent the tRumpettes from neutering them?
Nov 15·edited Nov 15Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
Trump's cabinet members "will serve the interests of the American people only so far as they don't get in the way of the interests of Trump Inc."
That's incorrect. The cabinet members will never serve the interests of the American people. Wrecking the economy and wrecking the environment and subverting the criminal justice system are not in the interests of the American people. Nor is bringing back polio and other diseases for which we have vaccines, as well as tooth decay.
They will not serve the interests of the American people because they are unqualified and will have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. Or are serving outside interests in addition to their own personal interests.
Nov 15·edited Nov 16Liked by Lucian K. Truscott IV
I was beginning to come out of my Treasonous trump Funk. Then I read this.....There must be a way to counteract it. The opinion that "protects" the felon is in place now. Doesn't it also apply to the any presidential acts of Pres. Biden? There have to be some actions that can be taken to soften the blows.
Ah.....but the alternative - a healthy, not quite sane, easily bought, lying, misogynistic fool who is young. I feel he is also such a chameleon that those who think they have bought him, may be in for a huge surprise. But again, he doesn't have an honest bone in his body and has the morals of - a can't think of anything low enough.
The job of governing is hard work, most of it handled by experienced bureaucrats. I don't know a lot about the other departments, but the Attorney General has a myriad of tasks, many required by laws. When I settled an injury case for a postal employee we had to deal with the subrogation (i.e. wages, medical bills, etc,) paid to him by the postal department. The Attorney General's office was required to review and approve the reimbursement and release of their lien, which took over six months. My partner just settled a class action case, which requires that notice go to the AG where objections can be considered and made. Matt Gaetz, an attorney with only a couple of years experience as an associate in a general practice law firm will have no clue nor any interest as to how the day to day business of the office should be handled, and he will fire all the experienced lawyers (i.e. the Deep State) to be replaced by Maga toadies. I assume the other departments which Trump also proposes total novices lead will be in a similar position. Good luck getting anything accomplished in government while these clowns cosplay as government officials.
But WHY - to what end is there to destroy the entire American government....besides one man's ego and his quest to prove that he is not a stupid ignorant failure....??
I don't see Trump doing anything as complicated as insider trading. He'll rely on the Mafia model, every purchase the government makes will now include a gratuity from the supplier that will be kicked right up to the Capo-in-Chief. In addition to immunity the S.Ct. ruled last term that as long as you call it a "gratuity" and not a bribe, politicians can be compensated for steering business directly to friendly suppliers. Trump will just scale up what small time mayors are now doing, it's like a finders fee on steroids.
"Oy vey" is the wrong language. Oh, nein! Or in tribute to T***p's BFF, O, nyet. T***p's ancestral countryman, Adolf, made a considerable, and continuing to 1945, fortune, by requiring that all official photgraphic likelinesses of him required a royalty payment to the holder of the copyright on those images, held by Hitler and his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. That included royalty on his image on official postage stamps. Speaking of money and T***p, how soon will there be a betting pool on the date Palm Beach International AIrport will be renamed in his (its) honor? How soon do you think the airport will be renamed?
I’m curious as to how all this will affect his popularity. Trump thrived as a populist insurgent unfairly maligned by corrupt politicians. He can be a populist or a plutocrat but not both. When his economic promises don’t create an economic miracle, his followers might just relay their disenchantment to their representatives who might very well treat him like the Roman Senate treated Cesar.
Make no mistake, Donald and Company are preparing to loot the Treasury. They have no interest in governing, they only want to grab all the money they can. Grifters all.
It is Putin who will be getting the grift as far as I understand it.
My bet is soon we are going to see that long rumored Trump hotel property in Moscow. Given the age of our soon to be CinC it might be Don Jr. or Eric running the show but The Trump Organization will doing business with one V. Putin.
With no constraints at all, I wouldn't be surprised if Trump & Co. decided citizens' holdings
had to tithe. To him.
Trump is a New York gangster. Always was and always will be. He tried all kinds of scams and some were winners but most of them were losers.
Then Trump discovered politics. The biggest and best scam ever. People just send you money. PACs, super PACs, billionaires, foreign governments, dark money people and the common man. And he just lies to them and gives them word salad explanations. And the money keeps rolling in without any rules, regulations or ethical challenges.
How did we get here?
Trump is a New York gangster who was groomed by his dad to work with the Russian mob. The biggest mobster of all is sitting in Russia and using his asset Trump to take over the US and destroy it. That is along with Xi. So much for MAGA being anti China. They are supporting China taking over the USA, unless the DOD is having none of it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/decapitation-strike?r=f0qfn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Oddly, on behalf of gangsters who have to make their bones with physical, personal acts of violence, T***p is a cheesy gangster wanna-be. He hasn't got the stones (marbles, mouse balls) to be a real gangster.
However Putin does and that is who Trump reports to.
Snyder, explains the relationships in this piece The Submission Chain.
https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/the-submission-chain?r=f0qfn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"Thank you" is pretty bland, considering the importance of the link you furnished. I just finished Snyder's (2015! terribly prescient) "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning," and the L.A. Public Library just emailed me that it has delivered a copy of Snyder's new "On Freedom" to my local branch.
Lawrence, I have a copy of Black Earth at home in the US. I just bought a copy of On Freedom, luckily I got a copy in English in my local German bookstore. The last one on the shelf. We can compare notes as we read it.
You're in Germany, reading the new Snyder book about freedom, as I'm reading it in the United States? "From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent." --H.P. Lovecraft
Not so far, Lawrence, but he's about to try putting the U.S. judicial and prison systems to work on that. The boss's hands are always clean, even when the fingers are stubby.
Speaking of short fingers (not). You can find on YouTube the audio-only but truly wonderful recording of Rachmaninov playing his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (1934, Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra). Mentioned only because Rachmaninov was known to be able to straddle a 13th. Massive hands, antidote to Donnie's digits. But now we're getting into Arnold-Palmer-in-the-shower territory. Cosmic lesson, sometimes more can be more, but in our present miasma, less is certainly less.
Sounds like an excellent weekend project. I want to stay away from news channels then anyway, a weekend habit I hope to maintain. i'd certainly prefer to visualize Rachmaninov's handspan. Poor Arnold Palmer. What did he ever do to deserve Donald Trump?
Oy. News channels on weekends? Guys (and now gals) being paid to fill the silence with blather. Another YouTube: Voices of Music, SF-based early music group, search for (I know, not *that* again) its Four Seasons. Earphones so you can hear wondrous, tiny embellshments/ornamentations Alana Youssefian adds to all the Spring melodies you know by heart.
The trail of how we got here is long, dark and ugly. You can start with Brown v. Board decision, the political fallout, Nixon, Lee Atwater just to start with.
Oh, go back to 1877, when the Republican Party sold out 11 years of Federal Emancipation to get the White House for Hayes, then amble through Teapot Dome/Elk Hills (when bribing Republicans at the Cabinet level still consisted of delivering paper currency in leather satchels), and pause at 1934, when a media smear (socialism today, commies tomorrow) campaign kept Sinclair from being elected governor, then Nixon becoming Nixon pointing at commies, just as Truman was desegrating the armed services, and then, and then, and then...
Well yes, of course but I’m not Heather Cox Richardson. The trail is even longer and goes beyond the founding. I once read that the US was a Gemini country-twins. One good and one not so much. I used to think it silly but in retrospect, probably not so much.
Yes. Don't want to wade in the waters of original sin.
On a totally different topic, did you used to write for New West?
I was an editor at New West during its first three years, and I must have (might have) written some pieces for it. I got written up by the magazine because I was the editor of Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade," which ran simultaneously in New West and New York (but was the cover only of New York, for reasons that are only of interest to someone writing a master's or doctoral thesis on print magazines). Oh, after I was canned, I wrote in his voice PTSD-paralyzed Grover Lewis's account of being at the assassination attempt on Larry Flynt, and, oh, yeah, a piece called "Love in Escrow" that was optioned (gloriou$) by a studio, but never scripted. Swimming in my memory is knowing, back then, the screenwriting team of Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood. Matthew was, and apparently still is? married...ahem.
You can decide with the US decision to embrace racism at its start, with slavery.
100% this
First all the indigenous had to be driven way or murdered.
Co-original sins!
Yes genocide and slavery. And we’ve never had a reckoning as a country about what happened.
then go directly to murdering Native Americans and forced mass deportation from their homelands to desert. White men speak with forked tongue---Tonto
He's always acted as if the US government's money was his!
signing the checks....
( now it kinda is)
its been a long strange trip
The poor United States. Soon to be in the little hands of someone who doesn't care about it.
I'd put adulation #2 on your list " money, golf, power, and adulation" Great but depressing column.
First, if you haven't read Masha Gessen's column in today's NY Times, please read it. It's very depressing, but feels deeply accurate. Gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/opinion/donald-trump-orban-putin.html?unlocked_article_code=1.aE4._0Bt.Jf66vV9zrbWQ&smid=url-share
Second, I wish massive grift were the only thing the Trump mob has planned. The fleecing of the American taxpayers and a whole lot of unsuspecting investors aside, that would actually be less bad than all the destroy-democracy stuff they say they want to do.
Also, why isn't anyone explaining what Biden can do with *his* near total immunity until Jan. 20, and what we all can do beyond helplessly waving protest signs, to actually slow down or stop these f**kers? Is it because the people who actually have workable fascist-disabler strategies need to get them all lined up and ready to go in total secrecy, and then launch them into action at a time that will prevent the tRumpettes from neutering them?
Trump's cabinet members "will serve the interests of the American people only so far as they don't get in the way of the interests of Trump Inc."
That's incorrect. The cabinet members will never serve the interests of the American people. Wrecking the economy and wrecking the environment and subverting the criminal justice system are not in the interests of the American people. Nor is bringing back polio and other diseases for which we have vaccines, as well as tooth decay.
They will not serve the interests of the American people because they are unqualified and will have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. Or are serving outside interests in addition to their own personal interests.
He has bankrupted numerous businesses. An entire country is just a bigger challenge.
Like reading a horror story only it’s real life in the United States.
If all this comes to pass, Putin will have achieved his goal to discredit the mighty United States, and democratic governments in general.
I was beginning to come out of my Treasonous trump Funk. Then I read this.....There must be a way to counteract it. The opinion that "protects" the felon is in place now. Doesn't it also apply to the any presidential acts of Pres. Biden? There have to be some actions that can be taken to soften the blows.
I hope every day for a massive hemorrhagic stroke (not for me)
Ah.....but the alternative - a healthy, not quite sane, easily bought, lying, misogynistic fool who is young. I feel he is also such a chameleon that those who think they have bought him, may be in for a huge surprise. But again, he doesn't have an honest bone in his body and has the morals of - a can't think of anything low enough.
The job of governing is hard work, most of it handled by experienced bureaucrats. I don't know a lot about the other departments, but the Attorney General has a myriad of tasks, many required by laws. When I settled an injury case for a postal employee we had to deal with the subrogation (i.e. wages, medical bills, etc,) paid to him by the postal department. The Attorney General's office was required to review and approve the reimbursement and release of their lien, which took over six months. My partner just settled a class action case, which requires that notice go to the AG where objections can be considered and made. Matt Gaetz, an attorney with only a couple of years experience as an associate in a general practice law firm will have no clue nor any interest as to how the day to day business of the office should be handled, and he will fire all the experienced lawyers (i.e. the Deep State) to be replaced by Maga toadies. I assume the other departments which Trump also proposes total novices lead will be in a similar position. Good luck getting anything accomplished in government while these clowns cosplay as government officials.
But WHY - to what end is there to destroy the entire American government....besides one man's ego and his quest to prove that he is not a stupid ignorant failure....??
And this is what America voted into office. This is the man 1/2 of America worshipped.
I don't see Trump doing anything as complicated as insider trading. He'll rely on the Mafia model, every purchase the government makes will now include a gratuity from the supplier that will be kicked right up to the Capo-in-Chief. In addition to immunity the S.Ct. ruled last term that as long as you call it a "gratuity" and not a bribe, politicians can be compensated for steering business directly to friendly suppliers. Trump will just scale up what small time mayors are now doing, it's like a finders fee on steroids.
"Oy vey" is the wrong language. Oh, nein! Or in tribute to T***p's BFF, O, nyet. T***p's ancestral countryman, Adolf, made a considerable, and continuing to 1945, fortune, by requiring that all official photgraphic likelinesses of him required a royalty payment to the holder of the copyright on those images, held by Hitler and his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. That included royalty on his image on official postage stamps. Speaking of money and T***p, how soon will there be a betting pool on the date Palm Beach International AIrport will be renamed in his (its) honor? How soon do you think the airport will be renamed?
I’m curious as to how all this will affect his popularity. Trump thrived as a populist insurgent unfairly maligned by corrupt politicians. He can be a populist or a plutocrat but not both. When his economic promises don’t create an economic miracle, his followers might just relay their disenchantment to their representatives who might very well treat him like the Roman Senate treated Cesar.
They'll find a way to blame it on the Democrats, and the yahoos will buy it.
His cult Loves it! Libtards are already in tears!
America as the old Jerry Springer Show! Soon Cspan will release tapes of congressmen wrestling on the House floor---maybe even a gunfight!
Mud wrestling with Hulk Hogan and a 17-year old.
We can only hope.
He's just creating his very own personal deep state!
Capos tend to end up bleeding out into a plate of Veal Parmesan. It's up to us to make this happen. This shit is going to get ugly.
Thanks for filling in the details about Trump's Age of Grift. It's likely there will be more that none of us poor serfs can even imagine.
I like that, The Grifted Age instead of gilded.