Dawn of the Don

A few weeks after the recent election, we were having dinner with a small group of friends. Of course, the results of the vote began to be discussed and my buddy sitting next to me, a physician, articulated a sentiment I had already heard a few times.

“I just wish I could stick my head in the sand,” he said. “And not pull it out for four years.”

“Just in time for J.D. Vance’s inauguration?” I asked.

“Not funny, amigo. Not funny at all.”

What are sane people supposed to make of this country? The president-elect, convicted of 34 felonies, will face no sentence from a New York judge, and becomes the beneficiary of an “unconditional discharge.” The convictions were upheld but there are no penalties. See kids? This is what we mean by “liberty and justice for all.” If you are rich and a politician like Trump or Richard Nixon, or a state officeholder in Texas, you get expensive lawyers and cut deals and are never held to account for your crimes.

I would have liked to see the bastard spend a year at Rikers Island and make that the de facto White House. Secret Service agents would smuggle in cans of spray tan instead of hacksaws and an American president would trade the Resolute Desk for a Resolute Cell. There is, of course, no precedent for any of these scenarios. No president has ever been convicted of a felony or faced potential imprisonment for crimes committed, which sounds a bit like something Trump might say.

“No president has ever been convicted as much as me. Historians tell me they’ve never seen anything like this. Grown men with tears in their eyes come up to me on the street and say, ‘Sir, we are just so impressed. We’ve just never had a convicted president before. This is a first.’”

The New York convictions are not subject to the immunity ruling handed down by the black-robed clowns of the Supreme Court. Trump was not president when he paid off a porn star with hush money and tried to cover it up, which was just one of the financial crimes for which he was convicted. Nonetheless, he can brag once more about being the first at something, which is no other president before him has been convicted of a felony. If he were just a reporter trying to get into a news conference, he’d likely be screened out of the White House with a felony on his record.

Where does this leave us here, the country formerly known as the greatest democracy history has ever known? (Yeah, hyperbole, I know, but fewer Americans make the assertion these days.) Since you can’t tell your crimes without a scorecard with this guy, let’s just remind everyone that in 2020 he tried to overthrow a legitimate election, talked of calling out the military to seize voting machines, and fomented a riot that was an assault on the Capitol Building. People died and he watched it on TV in a tent. He had already illegally taken classified documents from the government and squirreled them away in boxes filling the bathtubs and showers of his marbled mausoleum in Florida, and he used every legal measure to delay his prosecution, a strategy that worked.

But we went ahead and elected him anyway.

There must be shorts in the circuitry of the American zeitgeist. We appear to have a culture gone mad, inexplicable politics, improbable outcomes, and incomprehensible ruination. Start with war. We are quick to send our young into combat for reasons having nothing to do with our democracy at home and then we tend to ignore their issues upon return. The “highly decorated” U.S. military vet who blew up a Tesla outside a Trump hotel in Vegas wrote in advance of his suicidal act that this country was “terminally ill and headed towards collapse,” and that he was trying to “cleanse” his mind of the “brothers I’ve lost” and “the burdens of the lives I took.” He, perhaps, deserves a posthumous medal for ending the existence of one of those trucks.

American Dystopia

How many more like him exist as a result of our tortured politics and policies? Might be more just now aborning with the incoming president who has said he’s interested in acquiring Greenland and taking back the Panama Canal and making Canada a 51st state. The first two suggestions are not as flippant as the insult to Canada. Greenland is rich in natural resources that could increase the wealth of corporations and friends of the American president, who are mostly, of course, corporations and their executives. Hell, we invaded Iraq for oil; why wouldn’t we chase the rare earth elements in Greenland, which are reported to be among the largest untapped reserves on the planet and make possible batteries for electric cars, among other devices of modern life. There is also iron ore on that island, gold and other precious metals like platinum, uranium to create nuclear weapons and power, zinc and lead for various industrial applications, and, yes, even diamonds.

It’s Not Even Green

Still think Trump is kidding about Greenland? The island is an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark but invading it might give Trump a chance to play war president like when Ronald Reagan sent the Marines into Granada down in the Caribbean to rescue 800 American medical students and survey an airport runway allegedly being built by commies. Ronnie didn’t really get to have his own little war like most presidents so he had to gin up an excuse for a military stunt to prove he was willing to protect the Western World from Soviet and Cuban forces. Such was the danger of the American assault that U.S. forces hovered off the island’s coast and waited as it shuffled TV camera crews and still photographers to the beach and gave them time to set up their gear to record the heroics.

There is probably too much time being spent contemplating the bespoke horrors coming from the second coming of Trump, though. My sense is that his incompetence, combined with the egos and lack of understanding of government in his cabinet, will largely prevent his calendar of stupid events from being implemented. A mass deportation of a million immigrants seems the least likely of all promises to be kept. Where will they find them? There aren’t enough meat packing houses and chicken processors in all the land to find a million undocumented workers, and if Homeland Security sweeps through the farm fields and orchards to grab up migrant workers, food prices will jump even higher, regardless of Trump’s hollow pledge to lower the cost of groceries, and it still won’t be the promised “largest deportation of illegal immigrants in history.”

Serious tariffs are also not likely. As ignorant as most of his cabinet members are and his sycophantic believers, there has to be someone who is telling him tariffs will destroy international relationships and end mutual economic benefits of trade. Texas, in particular, will suffer greatly if the commerce shared with Mexico is harmed by such a policy. In 2023, trade between Texas and Mexico reached approximately $272.3 billion, with Texas exporting $129.6 billion to Mexico and importing $142.7 billion from Mexico. The once and future president has threatened tariffs on Mexican imports as high as 25 percent, a figure that would devastate this state’s economy as Mexico reduces exports because prices would cut down demand, and untold numbers of Texans would lose their jobs. The generation of trade with Mexico accounts for about a trillion dollars of business activity in this country and an estimated 7 million jobs.

So, just shut up about tariffs against Mexico, chump.

The total value of imports from Mexico to the U.S. is approaching $400 billion annually. Put a twenty-five percent tariff on that figure and Americans will pay $500 billion for the same products. Automobiles manufactured in Mexico, already as costly as some homes, would be out of reach for most buyers in the U.S. The “Big Three” carmaker brands in this country, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, are building many of their vehicles south of the border. Trump would get credit for shutting down some production, at least, or maybe all of it, should he order 25 percent tariffs. He has claimed it will be one of his first acts of office if Mexico does not do something about illegal immigrants and drug cartels. Nobody in his circle seems to be aware that drug cartels are doing their uncountable billions in business only because Americans cannot get enough of the products on offer. We appear to be an addicted nation.

Trump has also been insisting he will be a peacemaker and end war. This may be his most fantastical claim among his list of impossible aspirations. He is more of a supplicant to Israel and Netanyahu than even Biden and Harris and they have fed the IDF genocide machine with billions even as requests for restraint were ignored by Israelis. In fact, in one of his last acts as president, Biden has ordered the State Department to deliver another $8 billion in U.S. arms to Israel. Meanwhile, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a friend of Netanyahu’s, is already lusting over the beaches of Gaza as a site for luxury resorts. He sees cocktails and beach balconies set among the ghosts of children slaughtered by American weapons and indiscriminate bombing by Israel. The IDF has eliminated all journalists inside of Gaza and there is little information to share with the world about the estimated 45,000 dead in the genocide. The Gaza Ministry of Health says 44 percent of the victims were children.

I haven’t even written a word about Ukraine or Elon Musk yet but I see there is a sand dune not far from where I am sitting and I am going to go over there and check if there is a comfortable spot where I might stick my head for the next four years.