Comes The Kakistocratic Plutocracy

 

We’re past the point where dactylonomy can account for the billionaires Trump has selected for positions of authority in his impending kakistocracy. Megadonors all, it’s likely they’ll execute the offices they bought to their own benefit, not ours. From this team of benefactors, unprecedented corruption is more likely than not. Role-modeling even as he ascends to Earth’s reportedly most powerful position, Trump keeps hawking eponymous, overpriced junk. The latest is cologne. Grifters gotta grift.

Consider Stephen Feinberg, billionaire investor who’s donated tons to Trump, as Deputy Defense Secretary. He’s invested in several companies that have Defense Department contracts. Then there’s Jared Isaacman, selected as NASA administrator. Described by Trump as an “astronaut” because he bought his way onto a couple of civilian space flights on an Elon Musk Space-X capsule, he has millions in investments in Space-X. It’s a lidless cookie jar.

Topping the list, of course, is Elon himself, the world’s richest humanoid, who spent close to $300 million on the campaigns of Trump and other Republicans. His companies are, collectively, the greatest recipients of government money. We await the scrutiny he and also-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy will apply to those corporations as they erase $2 trillion from the national budget as promised. What cuts are more likely: your Medicare or Musk’s contracts?

One thing Musk will do for sure is strong-arm any senatorial dissenters from Trump’s proposed collection of incompetents. When Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) pushed back mildly on Trump’s plan to fire FBI Director Wray in order to install subservient, revenge-promising Kash Patel, he heard from front-line right-wing icons like Charlie Kirk, who said, “Senator Rounds, you are up for reelection in 2026. If you vote against any of Trump’s nominees a primary challenge wouldn’t be hard. Just a reminder.” To which Capo di tutti capi Musk added, “Those who oppose reform will lose their primary/election. Period.” He can find another $300 million in his couch cushions. It seems to have worked on Senator Ernst (R-Iowa), too. It’s government by cement overshoes.

Not all of Trump’s picks are billionaires, but they have in common a wealth of inadequacy and/or inexperience: Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and more. Where checks are balanced, none ought to gain Senate approval. However, given the threats and intimidation Republican lawmakers are receiving, and their signature senatorial feebleness, it seems their ascendency is assured.

Also not a billionaire, but more dangerous than any to the lives of every American is Robert F. Kennedy, Junior. As a formerly practicing physician, husband, father, and grandfather, I find his positions on vaccines and other health matters profoundly disturbing. Like Trump – and maybe it’s the attraction – he’s happy to push thoroughly disproven lies. For example, on his festival of untruths and confabulations during his Meet the Press appearance this past weekend, Trump spouted off about Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado, despite its political leaders and police saying it’s untrue. And, because every day is Opposite Day with him, he later announced, pulled from a sunshine-free anatomic locale, that “Democrats are fighting hard to get rid of the Popular Vote in future Elections." After which minds surely achieved maximum boggle.

It’s likely Trump knows he’s lying, but because it keeps his voters happy, doesn’t care. With Junior Bobby, though, who can say? Given his years of addiction to various forms of neurophysiological abuse, not to mention his resident brain worm that dined on parts of his brain before dying, of fright, possibly, he may no longer have the brain loci in charge of separating truth from fiction, science from conspiracy.

Whatever the reason, if allowed, as Trump promised, to “go wild,” his beliefs about vaccines, fluoride, disease vectors, and more become policy, there will follow, without doubt, deaths of many Americans. Children, especially. Having Dr. Oz, a Trump-level-charlatan, quacky pusher of bogus medical “remedies,” in charge of Medicare and Medicaid won’t stanch the death flow, either.

Based on Junior’s global history, deaths are predictable. His disinformation campaign about measles vaccines led directly to children dying in Samoa. His conspiratorial insanity about Covid vaccines was equally deadly. And his intention to curtail infectious disease research, given the certainty of another pandemic, is ominous.

If his hiring criteria indicate the disconnected world in which he lives, it’ll be worse than we imagine. The reported interview questions he asks are crazier but no less portentous than Trump’s. 

From his history of business failures as well as how he mishandled Covid-19, we know Trump is a terrible manager: impulsive, distractable, uninterested in details. As long as they’ll advance his announced need for vengeance, and unless they interfere with his golf game, he’ll be letting the aforementioned appointees do as they wish. It bodes ill in more ways than one.

Pardon Me, But...

 

Because I grew up in a family of lawyers, I indicated my intention to become one on college applications. Once there, though, I found myself having more fun in science labs than in libraries. Then, returning home on Christmas break, my mom showed me letters I’d never seen, ones she’d received after my biological father died, unexpectedly, after an operation, ten days before I was born. He was a doctor. They were wonderful letters of sympathy for her and praise of him, from friends, from patients. Several noted that after he died, I was born, as if handed a baton. Also, his name was Sid. I think showing me the letters was premeditated [no pun], since Mom always introduced me to her friends as “Doctor Schwab,”. I’d tell them, “You can just call me Doctor.”

Did it make me a liar, having told colleges I planned to be a lawyer? Or was it a change of mind? Is there no difference? I ask because people are calling President Biden a liar for pardoning his son, after saying he wouldn’t. So, despite initially deciding not to, I will opine, notwithstanding that, compared to the serious significance of serially selecting sinister sycophantic simpletons by Trump, it is but a blip. (What’s not a blip was Biden’s decision to run again. That had real consequences for us all.)

I’ve been asked if, under the same circumstances, I’d have done the same. My answer was yes, if the situation were identical. If I were President of the United States, subject of years of performative, fact-free, ready-for-Fox “investigations” by hypocrites like James Comer and Jim Jordan, and evidence-lacking, no-indictment accusations that mine was a “crime family;” if my son had, after suffering the loss of his mother and siblings, struggled and eventually turned to drugs and alcohol, committed victimless crimes for which he eventually took responsibility, paid what he owed, and, defying the odds of addiction, cleaned himself up; if a plea agreement proportionate to the crimes, one that similar offenders not bearing my name would have been offered, had been reached and then retracted under pressure from a Trumpy US attorney; if it was clear that he’d be pursued endlessly as a surrogate for attacking me; then, yes, I’d have pardoned him.

In doing so, President Biden finally brought the country together. Both sides agree: what he did is indefensible. From the right, it’s unprecedented abuse of power. (I’ll eschew applicable whataboutism.) From the left, though perfectly legal, it flouts the rule of law. Now, no matter what Trump does on the road to imperial power as his heads of agencies round up everyone on his enemies list, neither President Biden nor any Democrat can ever again claim to value democracy. They say. Absent the pardon, Trump and his tools would surely have behaved admirably.

For sure.

Liberal politicians and commentators whose opinions I respect are all but unanimous in their anger at Biden for what he did. Clearly, I’m wrong. So let’s move on.

Let’s consider the implications of Russian state TV host, Vladimir Solovyov saying about Trump’s intended appointments, “What an excellent team is coming along with Trump! ... If they are allowed to get in, they will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick. They are so great!”

That, I offer, has vastly vaster implications for America’s future than pardoning Hunter Biden. More than appointing a mega-donating art collector with no military experience as Navy Secretary. More than choosing Trump-pardoned Daddy Kushner, a convicted felon who served time for tax cheating and other deplorable behavior, to the Kushiest, most food-and-wine-forward of ambassadorships. More than Putin’s favorite defender as DNI. More than a morally deficient talk-show host as SecDef, who might be on his way out, and whose nomination confirms Trump’s hasty, superficial thinking in making his choices.

Latest atop the heap of horrible is Kash Patel, graduate of a low-ranking law school with a high admission rate, as FBI director. It’s the inverse of the boy who cried wolf. Having endlessly and falsely accused President Biden of weaponizing government, in choosing Patel, Trump has erased any doubt of his intention to do just that. Kashing in on right-wing media, Patel has been everywhere, promising to go after every politician, journalist, news station, and government employee who’d not shown similarly slavish devotion to Trump.

Mr. Patel, or, if he’s rejected, the next anti-constitutional genuflector Trump would appoint, will remake Trump’s FBI into the equivalent of Putin’s KGB. Seeing nothing wrong with that, selectively redacting the First Amendment, Republicans of the sort who attend Trump’s rallies will delight, unconcerned about future ramifications.

In South Korea this week, risking arrest or worse, its people rose up to force their president to rescind his declaration of martial law. That’s courageous commitment to democracy. With half of our country clamoring for Trumpian dictatorship, while their media revel in it, it seems unlikely to happen here. That’s indescribably more ominous than a parental pardon.