The emboldening of Donald Trump is something we have to abide, but can we survive it. He has now nominated a shill for the financial industry--Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer specializing in managing mergers and initial public offerings as well as counseling wealthy families on wealth preservation --who has already made it clear that his control of the SEC will be directed at "job creation" and moderating financial industry regulation, as if moderation is all that is needed to keep the financial industry from doing to us again what it has done to us over and over again in our history. All of that is nothing but a euphemism for the paternalism of wealth, if I may coin a phrase, and what it means in general terms is more of what Donald Trump is emblematic of: the corruption of greed. He is one more member of the executive branch who will shepherd in a new gilded age as gaudy and self-aggrandizing as the Trump and his Tower itself. We're back to the Gordon Gecho creed: greed is good. It's now official.
I don't know whether Ronald Reagan would approve, but we are embarking on an era in which the notion that wealth trickles down is going to be put to the test again...one more opportunity to confirm that wealth doesn't trickle down; it trickles up. The concern has to be that the new era of Mammon worship will result in a reprise of the last one: stagnating wages, reduced opportunity to do anything but run in place like hamsters on wheels, obscene accretion of wealth among a class of plutocrats that includes corporate officers, heirs and heiresses, thieves and whores. And it could all have been predicted if the Trump candidacy had been thought to have been anything but a joke at its inception. The way Trump won was by portraying a common man...just incidentally a rich one. Set aside flags that should have been raised by his behavior in the course of getting rich and the influences that brought him to believe that all that stuff was alright and just consider the things he said to garner public support. He called Hillary Clinton one of the most corrupt people ever to run for office in this country's history, yet his own corruption was never really brought up to any effect. Seizing on a catch phrase that was approved by those who wouldn't think about something said by someone to whom they gave credence, regardless of the merit of the phrase or the lack thereof, is one of the things that made his ascent possible. What made Trump--his carnival barker demeanor and his mountebank's ability to sell snake oil and then discredit those who were sickened by it--has nothing to do with political policy or rationality. It has to do with the willingness of that portion of "the people" who can be fooled all of the time. It has to do with the willingness of a sharper like Trump to use any means to get what he wants, even if it is destructive or inimical to the common good. Trump is his appointees. He is not the embodiment of plain talk. He is the emblem of an industry of which he is a prime representative: the confidence industry. Trump is a confidence man, and I mean that in the worst sense of the concept.
People gravitated to him not because of his "plain talk." They gravitated to him because he said he was a plain talker. They didn't flock to his rallies because they wanted to hear the plain truth. They did so because they wanted to hear someone say the things that they didn't dare say themselves because they were so odious. They voted for him not because Hillary Clinton is corrupt, though whether she is or not isn't an issue on which I would care to take a position. If corruption were disqualifying to Trump supporters, Trump would never have been able to get anyone to watch him descend on that gold plated elevator in his tower. But his ability to make that label stick to Hillary Clinton...to make Ted Cruz into "lying Ted"...to make Marco Rubio into "little Marco"...and most importantly to make Hillary Clinton into "crooked Hillary" that got him elected, and that ability was an endowment from the great mass of American voters who would rather foam at the mouth than think. And now, he is going to take what he wants because enough of us are willing to give it to him.
It should be clear what this is all about from Trump's rejection of the possibility that the Russians poisoned our electoral well. If Hillary Clinton won the popular election by almost three million votes, Donald Trump lost it by that much, and the Trump never loses.
But we do.
Your friend
Mike
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