Tag: Chris Hayes

Grifter in Chief

hydra

I've not done much posting lately on the plethora of horrors coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's not that I haven't been aware of (at least some of) them, nor that they've been so numerous and unrelenting as to have overwhelmed my ability to comprehend—yet—it's just that I know I'm largely if not completely preaching to the choir here. At least when my uncle isn't lurking around.

Once more, I turn to our pal Craig Calcaterra to sum up what I'm trying to say but with better verbiage (emphasis mine to relate it to my own stuff as well):

Every single day something happens which reminds us that America is being torched by cruel, nihilistic bigots and ignoramuses for no reason beyond their destructive and psychotic whims. No country I can think of has ever so willingly and so deeply harmed itself like America is harming itself right now. Even countries who flung themselves into destructive wars believed, at last at the outset, that they were doing something to help themselves or advance their cause, whatever it happened to be. America, in contrast, is voluntarily maiming itself knowing full well that what it's doing will work toward its own ruin. All because we stupidly elected a Mad King who doesn't understand a goddamn thing and doesn't care that he doesn't understand a goddamn thing. And now that he's descending into acute dementia, a few dozen truly evil and hateful people who have attached themselves to him are doing whatever they want without a shred of oversight or consequence.

I try to roll with all of this awfulness most days. Some days I try to actively ignore it if I can manage to. Other days I try to find the bits of hope among the destruction or I try to focus on history and the longer view as a means of reminding myself that all things, even bad things, do eventually pass. For the past couple of days, however, I haven't been able to do any of that. For the past couple of days all I've been able to see is the bleakness and pointless pain and misery being inflicted upon millions by vile people who care about nothing and no one but themselves, their grievances, and their greed.

I really don't know what to do anymore. All I can muster right now is a bit of thankfulness that it's Friday and that I can fucking turn my brain, my computer, and my TV off for 48 hours or so and try to forget about it all for a little while.

In some ways, I think we are all Craig right now.

But yesterday was so egregiously corrupt, with essentially crickets from much of the press—the exception being Chris Hayes, who was rightly outraged/gobsmacked/incredulous on his show (see below)—so I need to vent a little bit.

President Corrupt, Cruel, Incompetent, Moron Fuckface raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes and grift by hosting a contest: the 200+ largest purchasers of $TRUMP—which is an essentially valueless cryptocurrency (trading now at around $12 per "coin" after having declined from $75 around inauguration day to $8 last month) that POTUS47 makes money on via transaction fees, so any purchase or sale of any of it rings his cash register—win a dinner at Bribe-a-Lago with the grifter-in-chief, anonymously and with no reportage of the event, so trade favors and scheme safe from prying eyes, and a next-day tour of the White House with the man they bribed. The buyers of this corrupt access are largely unknown as they made their purchases under pseudonyms and/or usernames, though one admitted "winner" was Chinese crypto-bro Justin Sun, who was being prosecuted for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission until POTUS47 took office and put the kibosh on that. Because who doesn't like securities fraud? It's not a big jump to conclude that at least part of Sun's $18.5 million gratuity was thanks/payment for services rendered in dropping the legal case against him, and since most of the rest of the "donors" are anonymous, who knows what other quids were being quo'd last night.

I'll admit readily that I do not fully understand cryptocurrencies, but the nature of any currency is that it only has value to people/entities willing to accept it. National currencies (and international ones—the Euro is real) are governmentally recognized as legal tender "for all debts public and private" within a country's jurisdiction, but crypto has no such backing. If you try to spend bitcoin at the supermarket you'll find it's not worth anything to the merchant. If you try to spend $TRUMP coin, your only willing recipients will be fellow cultists. It's not currency, it's a digital trading card. No shade to card collectors, but they're a niche thing. I have a many-thousand-strong comic-book collection that is worth a fair chunk of money, but only to other collectors/enthusiasts/merchants. (Along with some junk and commons, I've got a Silver Age Superman comic for sale on eBay right now that's getting no bids among my fellow niche members; even within a niche people are fickle.) The president is grifting people with trading cards, and not good ones like Willie Mays or Honus Wagner cards, no, these are all Jeff Schaefers and Cliff Mapes.

One of the fools who copped to spending more than $100 million on presidential meme coin grift was a 27-year-old New Yorker named Vincent who has parted with far more than that amount in the service of making POTUS47 richer, as he boasted about having previously bought numerous Trump watches, Trump sneakers, Trump NFTs... Vince is the best mark there is for this regime of corruption, a cult devotee with money to burn. Sadly, he's not representative of the cult at large, members of which are just as easily suckered and might spend proportionately more when grifted, but reach a limit to their means/ability to go into debt a lot sooner. (The same people who, along with the rest of us non-multi-millionaires, would be utterly screwed if the budget House Republicans passed in the dead of night were to become law.) Vince is also a likely anomaly among the contest "winners," as most of them are thought to be foreign oligarch types and crypto-scammers looking for fewer obstacles to their own grift schemes.

This is, of course, on top of the acceptance by the US government of the "gift" of a glitzed-up Qatari 747 that the Qatari monarch no longer wanted and couldn't sell to anyone, a "gift" that us undoubtedly an attempt at a Trojan horse, a "free" gift that will cost American taxpayers on the order of a billion dollars to outfit as another Air Force One jet, a process that any sane Congress would kill dead in its tracks but might actually get rolling with these yahoos in charge.

Of course, even absent the rest of the voluminous impeachable offenses committed in just these four months, corruption on this enormous scale would get the president impeached and thrown out of office posthaste if the majority in Congress had any fidelity to their oaths of office. Sadly, Speaker Mike Johnson and the entire Republican caucus in the House, as well as most of the Republicans in the Senate, are traitors and/or cowards in the face of intimidation by the White House.

Midterms cannot come soon enough. Assuming we get them fairly; the level of election fuckery this regime will attempt is terrifying to contemplate. But we have to fight. And when those elections do come, we've got to turn out in numbers so vast that they overwhelm the cheating you know the regime will apply.