Month: January 2025

He’s the smartest broke billionaire in the room

No superlatives are too bigly to describe El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago.

Trump knows competence

“I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country.” It takes a very stable genius to recognize other extraordinary people like RFK Jr. and foreign models.

Reporter: Why did you change your mind on H1B visas?Trump: I didn’t change my mind. I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2025-01-01T02:21:31.702Z

Trump knows social media

Days ago, Trump filed an amicus brief on his desire to rescue TikTok from the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act that will likely ban the app in the U.S. on January 19. Even the Wall Street Journal found Trump’s argument preposterous. He wants the Court to treat him (a private citizen) as though he’s co-president with Joe Biden before being sworn in (Raw Story):

“The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good,” the board said, later adding: “Mr. Trump wants the Court to treat him as if he’s already President before he’s inaugurated.”

Trump for all intents and purposes is a “private citizen” until he’s inaugurated, the board countered. He is also in essence “asking the Justices to let him rewrite a law he doesn’t like,” it added.

Trump, the board said, “instructs the Court that he deserves this power because he won the election and is a wizard on social media. Really, that’s his claim.”

No kidding (from the brief): “President Trump is one of the most powerful, prolific, and influential users of social media in history.” Plus, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns…”

Who can argue with that?

Trump knows who’s boss

“Trump is a little guy, and Musk is a big guy when it actually comes to having money,” historian Timothy Snyder tells The Guardian. “And I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

Trump married his wives for their curb appeal. He married Musk for the money.

“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”

But then, Trump has no friends. Everything in his life is transactional. Now Musk is the biggest transactor in the room.

We’ve all wondered when Trump will die from his fast food diet. Maybe he’ll die from a broken heart when Elon dumps him.

You don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone

People with higher profiles have warned what could happen to this country under Donald Trump if he were reelected to the White House. I did so myself in 2024 here and here and here. Those three posts all referenced Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” his celebration of selfless dedication, essentially, in public service by geeks more interested in mission than in money. Blasphemy!

In a few short weeks, America will embark on a journey into the unknown. Dave Neiwert published “Alt America” in 2017 about the rise of the eliminationist alt-right movement. Trumpism, an expression of that movement, seeks not only to eliminate non-white immigrants but those very civil servants who make the nation you know the nation you know.

Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein consider what it means that Trump 2.0 will be staffed with incompetents and cronies chosen more for their loyalty to one man than to stewardship of the republic that will be 250 years old in 18 months. What Trump and those backing him intend for this country is not new, inventive, or an improvement on popular sovereignty. They intend “an assault on the modern state as we know it” by figures committed to its undoing (New York Times gift link):

Eviscerating modern state institutions almost always clears a path for a different type of political order, one built on personal loyalties and connections to the ruler. The German sociologist Max Weber had a word for this type of regime: patrimonialism, based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as traditional “fathers” of their nations and who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s “extended household.”

Social scientists thought that patrimonialism had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And for good reason: Such regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by the expert civil services that helped make modern societies rich, powerful and relatively secure.

But a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power. The result has been a steep decline in the government’s ability to provide essential services such as health care, education and safety.

My gripe here is with patrimonialism, ten-dollar word for cronyism and/or nepotism.

Trump 2.0 will not actually downsize the alleged “deep state.” They will repurpose departments run by the sort of public servants Lewis met that are the “foundations of both public and private life” and make them serve Dear Leader’s and his billionaire buddies’ bottom lines.

Hanson and Kopstein conclude, “The threat we face is different, and perhaps even more critical: a world in which the rule of law has given way entirely to the rule of men.”

I’ve long described men like Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Koch network, and their ilk as members of the Midas cult. They believe like Midas that everything that might be turned into gold should be. Their bottomless greed, like Midas’s will kill the golden goose that brought them riches and bring them to ruin. But perhaps not before they ruin the rest of us. They will, as Hanson and Kopstein observe, destroy “the predictable enforcement of laws essential to modern capitalism.”

My warning to the kleptocrats and kakistocrats and to American voters who handed them the keys to our government is the timeless lesson of Midas: be careful what you wish for.

Kaecilius: What have you done?
Dr. Stephen Strange: I made a bargain.
Kaecilius: What is this?
Dr. Stephen Strange: Well, it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. Eternal life as part of the One. You’re not gonna like it.
[Kaecilius and his Zealots are sucked into the Dark Dimension]
Dr. Stephen Strange: Yeah, you know, you really should have stolen the whole book because the warnings… The warnings come after the spells.
[Wong laughs]