Deconstructing Trump

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank on Trump’s fantasyland. "...What does [Trump] do now that he is in a job that is so hard, running a government that is so big? He pretends. He has developed an elaborate fantasyland in which everything goes according to plan." While Trump is fooling himself is he also fooling us? Or is he just making us look like fools?

From CNN: What if Hillary were a fraction as corrupt as Donald Trump? What if she funneled millions in taxpayer dollars into her own pocket via resorts she owned? Trump's corruptions are hard to count, there are so many and so massive Americans seem unable to process what is happening. ...but Hillary's emails.

Brexit was a rehearsal for what happened here. A big part of the coup there and here was achieved by a big data company owned by the Mercer family who, like the Russians, found a useful stooge in Trump. From The Guardian.

Golf writer James Dodson accepted a golf invitation from Trump and son. From WBUR.

“As we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.’"

The Palmer Report is out on the far leading edge of the reporting on this, so its content is sometimes short on substantiation. But this is a very interesting post from the other day, drawing a set of connections between Trump and Betsy DeVos’s money machine, a Russian server located in Trump Tower, and the possible hacking of thousands of voting machines in swing states. It will be interesting to see if this story emerges in more substantiated form in the NYTimes and Washington Post.

The Atlantic, a far more reliable journal (believe me, I’ve undergone the Atlantic’s rigorous fact-checking on a story) gives a summary of the unfolding Kremlingate treason (calling it a mere scandal doesn’t indicate its scope and significance) with individual segments about the persons involved.

Also from The Atlantic: Trump has been spinning his wheels for 100 days, but the House passing the repeal of ObamaCare may indicate that he’s finally getting traction. Repealing not just a fairer healthcare system but repealing the centuries-old principle of America as a nation that cares about its people, where the people give a damn about each other. The rise of TV evangelism marked the rise of a new kind of pseudo-Christianity, one that preached wealth as proof of godliness, and poverty as a sign of sinfulness. As if Jesus preferred rich people and damned the poor to Hell.

The Ghetto Idea Is Enjoying A Renaissance

I came across a disturbing story on NPR today. It describes how the poor can be conveniently put in a box and forgotten.

By divvying people into rich (good people) and poor (bad people) conservatives can justify their greed and their habit of looking at people’s vulnerabilities as business opportunities.

But outside of nailing them to make their profits, the rich conservatives would rather pretend poor people don’t exist. They’ve been lucky and they seek to insulate themselves from the unlucky people.

Many of the less fortunate have gotten that way after encountering the sharp edge of rich people’s business schemes or political policies. But it’s hard to blame the rich. They can’t help themselves. Maximum profit and minimum responsibility is their religion.

The rich conservatives would like to avoid all responsibility for other people. Other people are there to profit from but never to be helped or looked out for. They’d rather put them on an ice floe and send them out to sea.

This selfishness has penetrated down into the working middle classes, whose margin of financial security has gotten thin. People in the striving middle classes are taught to emulate the rich in order to achieve financial security. Join the club by rejecting the poor.

We’ve become a selfish, uncaring society. Recent policies make poverty inevitable, inescapable and perpetual. These policies have mostly emerged from conservative and libertarian circles.

They put it more gently, but the philosophy is basically this: “I’ve got mine, fuck you.”

Oh, and "Praise Jesus."