Saturday, February 15, 2025

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I WITNESS: Hail to the cheats

Let us be crystal clear: At this very moment, Trump and the oligarchs, kleptocrats, and grifters who have assembled around him like iron filings around a magnet are in the process of picking your pocket.

I will admit that I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump had fired 18 inspectors general in his slash-and-burn return to the presidency. Frankly, I did not think there were many ways left in which President Trump’s behavior could surprise me. I have learned over the course of the past 10 years that when it comes to Trump and the Republican legislators who so blithely enable him, there is absolutely no bottom. Really. None.

The term “Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse” no longer applies. Most of us recognize, at last, that it can—and will—get worse. Much worse.

I expected Trump to continue to be the sorriest and scariest excuse for a chief executive that this nation has ever seen, since his previous term in office amounted to the worst presidency in the history of the United States. While this assessment comes courtesy of the most respected historians in the country, it certainly accords with my own view of Trump’s lack of fitness for office. Yet in terms of utter amorality, Trump’s first administration appears to have already been eclipsed by the first two weeks of his second.

According to Wikipedia, there are currently 15 executive branch departments that are overseen by the Office of the Inspector General (IG). The Office of the IG employs approximately 74 inspectors. The sole function of the IG is to monitor those departments for waste, fraud, and abuse. When there are allegations of government corruption, the inspectors general are charged with investigating the allegations and reporting their findings. Although our government is not always completely transparent, the office of the IG does provide at least a glimmer of visibility into the misbehaviors of our public servants. The 18 IGs dismissed in Trump’s most recent Friday Night Massacre were assigned to provide oversight at each of the executive branch departments.

As of this writing, it is not yet clear whether Mr. Trump intends to replace any of the individuals he fired, or if he intends to replace them with sycophants who will decline to investigate any government malfeasance whatsoever, or, conversely, investigate only those individuals and departments who are featured on his “enemies list.”

It seems likely that the new Trump presidency will represent a continuation of the self-enrichment bacchanal of the past. President Trump and his progeny did particularly well the last time around. His personal revenue stream included pay-to-play accommodations at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. that he leased and remodeled right before his presidency and then sold for a profit immediately after, to say nothing of increasing the membership at his many uber-exclusive country clubs as those seeking presidential access climbed all over each other to kiss his… ring.

And let us not forget that every time he flew to Mar-a-Lago to play golf (almost every weekend for four long years) the middle-class citizens who actually pay taxes in this country footed the inflated bill he charged to feed and house his extensive entourage. The wealthy cronies to whom he caters do not pay income taxes—only schmucks like us do that.

We should also consider the case of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who managed to squeeze $2 billion out of Saudi Prince Mohamed Bin Salman to fund a hedge fund that Kushner had no idea how to run. Four years later, the fund has produced not a single dividend, and the body politic has become so inured to the Trump family’s brazen corruption that no one expects the fund to turn a profit ever.

Currently, Donald Trump and his subservient sons are hard at work exploiting every foreign leader for personal profit. It will not be long before there is a Trump Tower in Saudi Arabia, a Trump Tower in Gaza, and Trump Towers in who-knows-what other places where heads of state are interested in soliciting favors from President Quid Pro Quo.

President Trump, once staunchly anti-TikTok and anti-crypto currency, appears to have completely reversed his previous positions because it suddenly dawned on him that limiting government oversight of those enterprises could create an opportunity for further self-enrichment. In order to ensure that those opportunities will not be impeded by ethical considerations, he has stuffed his administration with rapacious billionaires who could not care less about the effect of their behavior on ordinary Americans.

The federal government should not function as a piggy bank for the wealthy donor class, for elected officials, for career public servants, for the members of the Supreme Court, for the president’s cronies, or for the president and his family. Knee-capping the Office of the Inspector General seems designed to ensure that they will all be free to loot and pillage at will, with complete impunity.

So let us be crystal clear: At this very moment, Trump and the oligarchs, kleptocrats, and grifters who have assembled around him like iron filings around a magnet are in the process of picking your pocket. In order to pick your pocket without impediment, they are dismantling every agency that might shine even the feeblest light on their criminality.

Now, with the castration of the agency meant to prevent a nest of malevolent, morally bankrupt thieves from turning our government into a criminal enterprise, we may need to eliminate the “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, one”) motto from the presidential seal and replace it, more accurately, with “Te ipsum serva” (“Help yourself”).

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