Help!
We're drowning in corruption
Sometimes, when I’m lecturing kids on career day at one of our ICE detention facilities — after they’ve finished their weevil gruel and have tidied up the concrete slabs where they sleep — I will hear this when I open the cage up to Q&A: “Mr. LeBlanc, what was Jennifer Aniston really like on the set of Friends?” Of course, most of them are from Central America, so it’s more like: “Señor LeBlanc, ¿cómo era realmente Jennifer Aniston en el set de Friends?” To which I tell them, “I know we all look alike, but wrong Mateo, my confused amigos.” Or sometimes I just tell them that she was really nice, and let me cut the line at craft services. Because you’ve gotta give the young people hope.
I then tell them it’s good they’re inquisitive, but they need to ask bigger questions. Questions like, “What the hell is wrong with this country that I’m getting thrown out of, and why did I think it was a good idea to come here in the first place?” Because have you taken a hard look at us in the mirror lately? Many decades ago, Walker Percy wrote of the cross-cultural corruption in the port city of New Orleans: “Unfortunately and all too often, the Latins learned Anglo-Saxon racial morality and the Americans learned Latin political morality. The fruit of such a mismatch is something to behold: Baptist governors and state legislators who loot the state with Catholic gaiety and Protestant industry.”
But we’re all New Orleans, now — without all the great music and food and chances to gain colorful beads for showing our tits to parade floats. And stability-wise, we’re giving famously corrupt Latin-American politics a good name.
Our Trump-related corruption scandals are now so thick on the ground — any one of which would be a show-stopper in any prior administration – that I’m actually getting bored, and find myself yearning for a good old-fashioned sex scandal. For a White House whistleblower to tell us that Donald Trump is having a sweaty tryst with Scott Bessent, and that they got caught making angry love to each other on a pile of Argentinian tomahawk steaks. (Which, if enough Americans pictured it, would finally bring down the price of beef, as we all became instant vegetarians.)
Forget all the semi-high-minded ideals stated at the dawn of MAGA, how it was supposed to be wresting control away from elites, how it was a people-powered movement, how justified populist outrage would lead us through the desert and into Canaan where the streets would be paved with – what else, besides Mr. Trump’s favorite precious metal — gold. Which is now covering every other surface of the Oval Office, making it look like a disco in one of Uday and Qusay Hussein’s off-grid palaces, the one where they’d invite their real friends over for goblets full of Courvoisier before jumping into a teen-hooker dogpile.
But ten months into what Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and all the other evil Steve’s hope will merely be the second of Trump’s many unconstitutional terms, it’s hard to name a damn thing Trump has done for the working or middle class, which is still getting hosed on everything from grocery-store prices to health insurance premiums – set to double and even triple if Republicans don’t extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which they’re showing no inclination to do since King Donald hasn’t yet told them to. (Even as he’s promised $40 billion to help bail out his MAGA goombah, Javier Milei, in Argentina.) He has bigger fights to fight than merely serving the American people. Fights like pardoning criminals his family has done business with, rewarding his new billionaire tech friends, punishing his enemies (anyone who prosecuted, investigated, or even just criticized Trump), waging war on American cities even while campaigning for a peace prize for not bringing peace to the Middle East (the ceasefire has already predictably unceased) or Ukraine (Vlad is always on line two, talking Trump out of whatever he said he was going to do). All while reaping an additional $3 billion in the last year on everything from crypto scams to media-extortion settlements to whatever other hustle he can put his short fingers to.
So that if you had to boil MAGAhood down to one enduring principle — and “principle” might be way too strong a word to describe it — it would be: Trump does whatever he wants to do, whenever the hell he wants to do it. Which comes with no Supreme Court or Congressional pushback. Consequently, the rest of our politics now consists of either:
a. Feckless Democrats yowling into the void. Watching Hakeem Jeffries try to replicate real human emotion with his robot-Jesse-Jackson routine and eighth-grade drama-class hand gestures is an exercise in masochism. Jeffries being joined by his ineffectual Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, to whom you just want to give a warm shawl and soft foods, easing him into his senior-center chair, as his time has come, and long gone.
or…..
b. Republicans and MAGA-media catamites who have ceded all authority — both moral and political — to their Cheeto-dusted David Koresh, and who would rather store their huevos in Trump’s man-purse for safe keeping, rather than exhibit any. Their lives now primarily consist of waiting for the next Trump indefensible outrage, then reverse-engineering it to make it sound not as mentally-deranged as it clearly is. It can’t be fun. But it is the life they have chosen, and since they’ve stopped legislating or providing oversight, it’s pretty much their only job requirement. At least until the next election, assuming we still have those. Which if Trump calls them off, the Johnsons — Speaker Mike and Podcaster Benny — will likely vehemently defend. Since to them, and legions like them, an “atrocity” is now defined as a Trump prerogative that has not yet been rationalized away.
Think I’m exaggerating when I use the “a” word? Well, you wouldn’t, if you take in any other news source besides Fox, Newsmax, and LindellTV. (Yes, the My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell, is now pretending to run a journalism outfit. But don’t laugh. Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon has now accredited his disinformation team, as the real journalists have checked out due to Hegseth’s asinine journalism-restrictions mandate.)
But one atrocity after another has occurred just this week. As it now has every week since inauguration day. There are so many — remember all the random DOGE firings and IRA-tariff wreckage that happened in the winter and spring? You probably don’t, as that was several hundred news cycles/atrocities ago.
But let’s catch you up to speed, and put things in perspective. Because I honestly believe that evil most readily overruns us when we fail to recognize it as such. So without providing hyperlinks (I’d rather you stay here and not give you more reading assignments, but all is Google-y verifiable), here’s a snapshot of the chaos, dysfunction, and dictatorial behavior that has been exhibited just since the last time I published here one week ago (partial-credit: Drudge Report):
Trump commutes certified congressional conman George Santos’s sentence because he’s a Trump supporter…..Trump pardons crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, Binance having ties to Trump’s sons World Liberty Financial……Trump is building a masked, shadow police force (ICE) who is accountable to no one…….Colombia’s President accuses Trump of killing innocent fishermen who he is accusing of being drug runners….Trump’s Homeland Security czar, Kristi Noem, has two private jets bought for her, totaling $172 million, while the government is shut down for a third straight week, with no end in sight, as tens of thousands of federal workers go without paychecks…..Donald Trump destroys one-third of the White House, despite formerly promising not to, while completely demolishing the East Wing without permission or comment from appropriate authorities or the public, in order to make way for his $300 million narcissism gymnasium, where he can work out his sociopathic ego (his ballroom, which will also be accented in gold, and the cost of which keeps moving northward)…..Trump is asking for $230 million from his own Justice Department (headed by his own personal lawyers) for the “crime” of investigating him for his perpetually skeevy/unlawful behavior……Trump’s supposedly not racist, but his new refugee plan includes accepting 7,000 white Afrikaners from former-apartheid state South Africa, and virtually nobody else.....a Trump-pardoned January 6th rioter was just re-arrested for threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, even as Trump is still considering pardoning serial sex-criminal, P. Diddy…..A Trump pick for a top watchdog position had to withdraw himself for lack of congressional-confirmation support after his Nazi sympathies were revealed, even if he’s still employed by the administration…… …..Trump posts an AI video of himself wearing a crown in a fighter jet, dumping a payload of literal shit on the American people protesting him in the “No Kings” protest……Trump’s spokespeople reply “Your Mother” to inquiring reporters who ask who is responsible for Trump’s iffy choices……A Don Jr.-linked drone company wins another Pentagon contract…..
And on and on it goes. As I bold-printed above, just demolishing the People’s House, which doesn’t belong to Trump, but which he seems to think does as the ultimate nightmare renter, is alone worth pushing back hard against. But there is so much more than that — much more than I’ve even listed in his last single week of activity.
And if you’re fine with all that, you should ask yourself what’s broken inside of you. Because I can almost guarantee you that wherever you stand on the political spectrum, you wouldn’t have been fine with it ten or fifteen years ago.
The true danger of corruption isn’t merely that it’s evil. Because conscientious good people tend to react against evil. The real danger is that evil ceases to be regarded as such by otherwise good people. Rather, it just becomes the new normal. Our corruption Muzak. Something that is processed as background noise, then ignored.
I realize it is uncool to quote science-enthusiasts these days. Since Trump-appointee RFK Jr., and his MAHA adherents, prefer to plug into their feelings about science, rather than observable reality itself. But here’s something astronomer/science-nerd Carl Sagan wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World (not a Trump biography), that bears repeating, and which nicely distills the present moment:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Here’s hoping Sagan’s wrong, but I see no evidence of that being the case ten years into the greatest political con of all-time.
Bonus Track: In keeping with today’s cover snap, I didn’t really have a drowning song I was dying to play, but have an offering from the same family. Everyone should have a sea shanty or three in their arsenal, and this is one of mine. Here’s Dan Zanes — formerly of the Boston-based eighties garage-rock band The Del Fuegos — doing an old Scottish tune from the 1930s, itself partly set to a Gaelic traditional. A haunting ballad called “Mingulay Boat Song.”