If this were another country we were viewing from afar, the hypocritical and crooked antics of Donald Trump would be comic, but it’s not a joke. Alas, they are almost business as usual.
Trump ran on not being a politician but on being a billionaire businessman who would drain the Washington swamp, drive out corruption, and improve the lives of the majority of people against whom the game is rigged.
Obviously this was a fraudulent sales pitch like those he employed to con real estate customers, Trump University students, and a succession of lenders who soon regretted falling for the hype and the falsified balance sheets.
Surely a fraction of the bilked electorate must by now be having buyer’s remorse, but the Bunco Squad knows the marks are often loath to admit they fell for a con.Swindlers have a long American pedigree appearing in classic works by Twain and Melville, and including real life fellows from P.T Barnum and Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff and now, a president.
The crooked businessman and the purchasable pol have a long history of symbiosis — one dirty hand washing another. The Ukraine scandal is nothing new. Quid pro quo is just a fancy way of describing the art of the deal. Trump gets dirt on a rival and theoretically his suppliers get American aid, taxpayer-funded. Of course, Trump being Trump,things don’t always go as promised, his henchmen get arrested at the airport making their getaway.
They too were businessmen who were trying to get in on the ground floor of the marijuana business and were funding their investments by funnelling illegal foreign campaign cash to politicians who would express their gratitude by easing their path to profits.
The swamp is not the police on the beat, except to a criminal like Trump who has plenty to fear from the CIA, the FBI, the FEC, the SEC, the IRS, and prosecutors without number. The real swamp is the quid pro quo world of lobbyists and elected representatives buying and selling legislation favorable to those who can afford to write their own ticket.
Energy Secretary Rick Perry has served as the tool of the fossil fuel industry as have former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and his less flamboyantly corrupt successor Andrew Wheeler, erstwhile coal industry lobbyist, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who entered politics as the Congressman from Koch, representing the interests of their oil and gs empire which has spent years polluting the public mind with the myth that climate change is fake.
Commerce Secretary and vulture capitalist Wilbur Ross has a long history of insider trading, conflicts of interest, and grifting before being entrusted with the corruption of the census. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue had a history of self-dealing and illegal campaign contributions as a governor before bringing his climate denier credentials to Agriculture. Attorney General Bill Barr’s deliverable is the subversion of Justice to please the Godfather. The list goes on and on.
Once one of these blatant conflicts of interest and instances of self-aggrandizement at public expense would have shocked the conscience, but we are inured to corruption or resigned to it. “The Wall Street Journal” now reads like a police blotter. One after another, giant businesses are revealed to have squandered their good name and endangered the public to make an extra billion or two.
Facebook sold its soul to campaign hackers from Russia and other malign regimes. Wall Street gunslingers blew up the economy a decade ago and themselves in the process. Lehman and Bear failed and many other storied firms only lived to con another day thanks to taxpayer-funded bailouts. Virtually no one paid for their crimes or saw the inside of a jail cell.
Volkswagen defrauded customers by selling them supposedly clean diesel cars. Johnson and Johnson, whose squeky clean brands include Band-Aid, Nuetrogena, and Listerene, has just been ordered to cough up $8 billion for selling prescription poison. They are appealing, of course. Purdue Pharma’s oxycontin business has killed more Americans than the Vietnam War, and they seek to pay their fines by selling more of it. Enron, Deutsche Bank, the atrocities never ends.
Why? Not because the corruption class is so clever. Like Trump’s, most of their bad behavior is hiding in plain sight. But they get away with it because a whole industry is dedicated to lying on their behalf, and even when caught they can afford to litigte endlessly or don’t have to since they are, in the wonderfully cynical witticism of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “committing crimes against which no laws have been passed.”
And why is that? Because we are crazy enough to elect a career criminal as president. And because the donor class that profits from dirty business-as-usual funds the election of its enablers, and brands any candidate a socialist who would tax a billionaire, fight climate change, fund a social safety net, regulate polluters, banks, lenders, or drug makers who are taking advantage of the public they refuse to educate.
We once would have called a place as corrupt as today’s America a banana republic, an oligarchy, a dystopia, a plutocracy, or neo-feudalism. We now call it home.