Let Them Eat Cake... If They Can Afford it.

 

     First off, let's please dispense with the fiction that anyone in this psychological freak show of an administration gives a shit whether you live or die. Let's jettison the bumper sticker slogans like "America First" and "Make America Great Again". And let's wean ourselves from the comfortable and stubborn delusion that this government has our backs.

     Except if they're about to plant a dagger into them.

     The wheels are coming off the shit wagon and it's not just we in the liberal reality-based community who can see it. MAGA voters, the ones whose catchphrase is, "I love you, Mr. President, but..." are also hurling brickbats at this viciously avaricious kakistocracy of a clown show.

     Let's start with a video Dan Scavino, Trump's former caddy, put out on Twitter. Scavino had commissioned an AI-generated video of him riding a gilded luggage cart with two women and spurting champagne all over the place. In the last frame of the video, you can see Trump running into view. In an endless procession of tone-deaf videos that have come from this administration, this was perhaps the worst.

     Meghan McCain was one of the first to call attention to this AI slop and the White House then immediately removed it, which is why I had to settle for a screengrab. Even right wing Twitter accounts were outraged by the sheer cluelessness of Scavino's video, calling attention to the fact that while Americans and farmers are struggling with soaring prices of fuel and are having more and more difficulty putting food on their tables, the White House is rubbing our faces in the fact that they're living high on the hog while the rest of us suffer.

     And that was apparent long before Scavino's video yesterday. We got a good glimpse of their arrogance when Trump unveiled his flying bribe, the $400,000,000 Qatari jet "gifted" to him, which then cost the government over a billion dollars to retrofit to meet Air Force One security standards. "Look at my fabulous flying palace," Trump might was well have said, while the rest of us can barely afford coach as air fare skyrockets and thousands of flights are canceled every week. The only reason why they haven't built a solid platinum yacht for him is because there isn't enough platinum in the world.

     And the administration made it a point of kicking people off SNAP or reducing their benefits (Arizona, where I live, leads the nation in that regard). Early in his second term, Trump wiped out a half a billion dollars in food aid shipments to food banks across the country. And about six months before that, he axed another billion dollars in food aid to schools and food banks and crippling their ability to buy food from local suppliers. And just a couple of days ago, Trump and his vicious goons cut over three quarters of a million people from their health insurance. Got devastated by a natural disaster? Even if you voted for Trump, you're shit out of luck. It seems if there's any way to inflict pain on the American people, Trump and his psychopaths will find it.

     It's more difficult than ever for first time home buyers to acquire a mortgage or for existing home buyers to stay on top of their mortgages and homeowner's insurance. Rents are through the roof. And yet, in the middle of this quiet epidemic of poverty (which Trump recently called the "best poverty"), we're supposed to cheer this bloated autocrat while he tears down the East Wing at the White House to make room for a 90,000 sq. ft. ballroom that nobody but he wanted. With the inevitable cost overruns, the ballroom now has a price tag of at least $1.6 billion.

     Not too long ago, Trump snapped at a reporter just for mentioning the word, "affordability". "I don't want to hear about the affordability!" And around that time, Trump was asked if he factored in the financial pain of Americans before starting an illegal war against Iran and he said no, not even a little bit.

     Spoken like a true sociopath.

     And Trump is utterly and completely incapable of understanding why Americans can't muster any enthusiasm for his ballroom, the monstrous 250 foot-tall arch, painting the Eisenhower Office Building white, his marble helipad on the South Lawn, encasing the Rose Garden with concrete where he can then hold lavish bribe parties or his bungled attempts to improve the Reflecting Pool. He thinks, as with the kings and emperors of old, he can run the country by royal fiat or imperial edict with an endless succession of Executive Orders. He's utterly incapable of understanding the checks and balances baked into the Constitution by the Founding Fathers.

     And heaven forbid the media or the people should raise a whisper of protest. Trump's automatic and autocratic default setting is to snarl at those who refuse to cheer him on while he enriches himself at the expense of the American people.

     When he was in his 80s and long past his prime, Robert Frost once cryptically said, "I need all the honors I can get." Now that he's in his 80s, Trump is more or less in that same mindset. Trump knows his power is waning, that the Democrats will retake both chambers of Congress and that, despite his best rat-fucking efforts, after the midterms in a little over a month, he'll be a lame duck. This is why Trump is psychopathically obsessed with chiseling his name on the Kennedy Center, which was built and named to honor President Kennedy, not him. Hence the arch, the ballroom, everything. He's trying to remake Washington DC in his image.

     He feels the walls closing in. He knows he cannot run for a third term. In a little over two years, he'll be gone for good. And even to a guy who's incapable of reading the room, some things are obvious.

     And he will leave behind a festering ruin of what was once a great country, one in which people cannot afford food, fuel, health care or medicine, a nation with a middle class worn down to a nub in which only the 1% can afford things like beef. The guy who vowed to Make American Great Again will be allowed to slink back to Mar a Lago to enjoy the ill-gotten loot he collected in bribes and by pilfering the national treasury without giving a single thought to all the people to whom he'd denied food and medical care.