Dear America,
There is a sense in which the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 election by a plurality, if not a majority of the voting electorate--I say voting electorate since about 5 million of the voters whose votes redounded to the benefit of Joe Biden in 2020 decided not to vote at all in 2024--provides relief by dint of closure for those of us who dread the next Trump presidency. While the farcical advent of Trump's early-named cabinet nominees fills most of us with considerable consternation, somehow it all has a predictable, déjà vu quality that does little more than confirm our fear that as in his last administration, he won't actually be draining the swamp, he will just be replacing the old alligators with their bigger, younger brothers and sisters. I think most of us have resorted to the almost delusional hope that Trump will accidentally do a good job in spite of his prior record and his indefatigably miscreant character. He may continue to lie, scheme and contrive, but perhaps to no effect as the wheel keeps on turning in its own ineluctable way bringing about the best of all possible worlds. Some things Donald Trump can't change no matter how hard he tries. But the fact that the election is a fait accompli is meager consolation in that some of the new alligators are far more menacing than the old ones. Take Elon Musk for example.
He seems to be Trump's constant confidant and companion...a guru rather than a trusted advisor. Musk's influence on our president-elect appears to be more like a thrall than just a friendship or tutelage. The two are often seen together and news reports put Musk at Mar-a-Lago more and more often with Trump seemingly beaming with his hand on Musk's shoulder. All the while Musk looks out at the world with the confidence of an unassailable sage whose place in the pantheon of the Trumpist elite is impenetrable and perpetually assured while he spews his far-fetched ideas as if they were a function of afflatus: Trump's own Rasputin, and a half-trillionaire in the bargain. It appears that the new oligarchy is going to be a plutocracy as well, and here we are out here worrying about paying for rent and eggs. Our country is in the hands of rich people who care less about us than they do about how much money they can accrue so that they can brag about it invidiously. It appears that those in power in the second Trump administration are haughty and bizarre, not empathetic and rational about it. Trump and Musk see a problem, which is the imbalance between how much the government takes in and what it spends, and their solutions seem to be to reduce or eliminate programs that the government relies on to control the institutions on which we rely--departments of government that regulate corporate misfeasance, education and health for example--and at the same time reduce taxes, presumably on the wealthy as in the last Trump tax cuts. We are looking at a change in the orientation of our country politically that will employ the corporate orientation toward profit rather than the extant orientation toward the common weal, effectively re-instituting the failed doctrine of Reaganism, which worked on the postulate that if the rich do well, their good fortune will rain down on all of us; It didn't. Neither Trump nor Musk seems to have heard that the forty years or so of trickle down economics led to an ever increasing decline in the prosperity of the common man relative to the riches of the corporate aristocracy, inflating the gap between them ever wider. Trumpism will not "make America great again." It will drag us into a sort of corporate feudalism that will render the working man and woman serfs while it works as a parapet from which the rich watch over us making sure that we don't demand more.
Your friend,
Mike
There is a sense in which the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 election by a plurality, if not a majority of the voting electorate--I say voting electorate since about 5 million of the voters whose votes redounded to the benefit of Joe Biden in 2020 decided not to vote at all in 2024--provides relief by dint of closure for those of us who dread the next Trump presidency. While the farcical advent of Trump's early-named cabinet nominees fills most of us with considerable consternation, somehow it all has a predictable, déjà vu quality that does little more than confirm our fear that as in his last administration, he won't actually be draining the swamp, he will just be replacing the old alligators with their bigger, younger brothers and sisters. I think most of us have resorted to the almost delusional hope that Trump will accidentally do a good job in spite of his prior record and his indefatigably miscreant character. He may continue to lie, scheme and contrive, but perhaps to no effect as the wheel keeps on turning in its own ineluctable way bringing about the best of all possible worlds. Some things Donald Trump can't change no matter how hard he tries. But the fact that the election is a fait accompli is meager consolation in that some of the new alligators are far more menacing than the old ones. Take Elon Musk for example.
He seems to be Trump's constant confidant and companion...a guru rather than a trusted advisor. Musk's influence on our president-elect appears to be more like a thrall than just a friendship or tutelage. The two are often seen together and news reports put Musk at Mar-a-Lago more and more often with Trump seemingly beaming with his hand on Musk's shoulder. All the while Musk looks out at the world with the confidence of an unassailable sage whose place in the pantheon of the Trumpist elite is impenetrable and perpetually assured while he spews his far-fetched ideas as if they were a function of afflatus: Trump's own Rasputin, and a half-trillionaire in the bargain. It appears that the new oligarchy is going to be a plutocracy as well, and here we are out here worrying about paying for rent and eggs. Our country is in the hands of rich people who care less about us than they do about how much money they can accrue so that they can brag about it invidiously. It appears that those in power in the second Trump administration are haughty and bizarre, not empathetic and rational about it. Trump and Musk see a problem, which is the imbalance between how much the government takes in and what it spends, and their solutions seem to be to reduce or eliminate programs that the government relies on to control the institutions on which we rely--departments of government that regulate corporate misfeasance, education and health for example--and at the same time reduce taxes, presumably on the wealthy as in the last Trump tax cuts. We are looking at a change in the orientation of our country politically that will employ the corporate orientation toward profit rather than the extant orientation toward the common weal, effectively re-instituting the failed doctrine of Reaganism, which worked on the postulate that if the rich do well, their good fortune will rain down on all of us; It didn't. Neither Trump nor Musk seems to have heard that the forty years or so of trickle down economics led to an ever increasing decline in the prosperity of the common man relative to the riches of the corporate aristocracy, inflating the gap between them ever wider. Trumpism will not "make America great again." It will drag us into a sort of corporate feudalism that will render the working man and woman serfs while it works as a parapet from which the rich watch over us making sure that we don't demand more.
In the privacy of my own thoughts, I allow for the possibility that I am wrong...the hope that I am, really. But this apprehension I have isn't a function of partisanship or fealty to my sixties-era egalitarianism, so when I think about these things I find myself turning inward. I try to focus only on the financial security that my wife and I have built over the course of decades of working life, financial prudence and careful planning, and the arborvitaes and hemlocks we have planted around our yard to serve as a barrier between us and whatever we chose to exclude from our existence. That gives me solace and a sense of security, either real or false. We can go on with our lives no matter what Trump and his army do outside. Hell, we don't even have to watch the news anymore if we don't want to.
Happy New Year.
Your friend,
Mike
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