TRUE BELIEVERS
- laurencedbeck
- May 9
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
CORRUPT AND CRUEL EXCESS AT THE HELM
There is so much that is so wrong emanating these days from Trump and his merry band of corrupt oligarchs and sycophants that it is hard to know where to begin. A good starting place would be the complete absence of accountability that will continue to fuel the venal fires already ignited by the cruelty, incompetence, greed and corruption of the cabal at the helm of the US government. So what can stop it? There is a possibility that unhinged implementation of the “plan” by those presently responsible for implementing it will kill the beast before it can devour the nation.
To begin with, it is important to understand that there is a “plan,” crafted over decades by skillful architects determined to undermine the capacity of the federal government to provide the institutional infrastructure necessary to govern a large nation with regional differences and vastly different demographics. If you can subvert the federal infrastructure, the nation will devolve into an even more easily controllable and corruptible agglomeration of fifty states, each with its own laws, rules, and regulations. Without a credible federal presence, each state with its own agenda becomes an island of governance with often disastrous implications for addressing national concerns.
Ronald Reagan gave the plan a rousing baptism when he used his first inaugural address in 1981 to declare that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”* That was the clarion call for the right-wing architects to go to work. And go to work they did. For decades filled with fits and starts but quite a few successes, they crafted the “plan”** while sowing the seeds of division and stoking the fires of racism, economic inequity and nationalist delusion. Then it became time to unleash the full force of the “plan” and “make America great again.”
Enter Trump and his merry band of oligarchs and sycophants. And this is where the whole thing may have gone off the rails. The architects of the “plan” were quickly shunted aside in favor of a new crew of extreme right-wing implementers committed more to Trump than to the “plan.” The result is a despicable cast of characters determined to achieve the plan’s ends regardless of the means, while seeking to appease the grifter-in-chief and personally profit from access to him.
If you have been paying any attention, some or all of the following Trump “team” players have popped up on your news feed: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem (aka ICE Barbie), Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (now doubling up as acting National Security Advisor). Each and every one of these folks was nominated to a cabinet post and confirmed by a compliant Republican Senate majority while the Democrats whimpered.
Not to be forgotten in this mix, Vice President J. D. Vance appears on the scene now and again to ensure the chaos and confusion required to obfuscate one or more of Trump’s mindless pronouncements or social media postings. Then, to help fill out the “team” roster, throw in the tariff whisperer and ex-con Peter Navarro, the heartless and spineless Stephen Miller at Deputy Chief-of-Staff, FBI Director Kash Patel, traveling real estate tycoon and US Special Envoy to everywhere Steven Witkoff, and soon to be UN Ambassador Mike Waltz (recently fired National Security Advisor). As if this is not enough, remember that there are even more players waiting in the wings for their shot at the big time.
As icing on the cake, they put 27-year-old White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt out front almost daily trying to make sense of it all. She has her own two-step – put it out there with confidence, walk it back with confidence. What she lacks in knowledge, perspective, and judgment, she more than makes up for with confidence.
These are the implementers, and they are the best reason to believe that the nation has a fighting chance to survive the current onslaught, and then spend years undoing the damage and recapturing the delusion of American exceptionalism. Unfortunately, to get there, right now we have to go to bed each night hoping that tomorrow will bring new cruelty, new assaults on the rule of law, new chaos, and higher egg prices. And most of all, we have to hope that each day Trump will again tell us that “I run the country and the world.”***
This guy who thinks he runs the country and the world has unleashed a collection of henchmen only capable of overreach. When overreach begins to remind the body politic that there really is something to lose, piling so much on so fast becomes the only viable strategy to obfuscate the inevitable collapse. So think about some of the greatest hits of the past months in that context.
How about public health policy where the collective silence of willfully ignorant Republican politicians seems to suggest that they are covertly rooting for the measles to return with a vengeance. Then, while that begins to sink in, the team is hard at work randomly defunding medical research into cancer, women’s health, childhood diseases, dementia and a host of other critical public health programs, so that this great nation can save money to ensure tax cuts for the wealthy. Further, while the fearless leader and his team blather about making America healthy again, they are actively undermining the meager federal capacity to regulate the crap that’s in our food and the pollutants in our drinking water.
On to immigration, where the policy seems to be if we round up a whole bunch of immigrants and ship them off to anywhere that is not the United States, the admiring crowds will applaud. Then, as long as you send them to a gulag or some hellhole without any semblance of due process, the admiring crowds will cheer even louder. This works until the guy in the hellhole turns out to be your kid’s soccer coach, or maybe your gardener, or maybe just a hopeful immigrant laborer picking fruit in terrible conditions for little pay so everyone else can have a fruit salad. Sadly, however, the best chance for immigrants later is unvarnished cruelty now.
Another productive area for examining mindless devastation seems grounded in the notion that if you can demonize ethnic, social and cultural diversity as a threat to the majority, you can engage in an ethnic, social and cultural cleansing that strips the national fabric of the collective glue necessary to resist. While not as visually pleasing as a good immigrant round-up, denigrating the value of history and heritage separates a nation from its past and plants the poison seeds that will rot its future.
Remembering that there is so much that is so wrong right now, the Trump rolling wall of tariffs seems to have America’s economic stability and some elements of the world economic order hanging on a precipice while Trump and his merry band of corrupt oligarchs and sycophants gleefully shift the sands below. However, at a micro level, that same rolling wall of tariffs can produce instant winners and losers. The losers will be most of us. You can see it in Trump’s ignorant doubling down on a message of collective sacrifice to save an economy that was doing just fine before the moron opened his mouth.
The winners will be the grifters, those clinging to the soiled coattails of the grifter-in-chief, each hoping that some of the “magic” will fill their pockets with the ill-gotten gains at the heart of the grift. As a heads-up for those who haven’t cashed in yet but yearn to do so at the expense of others, the cryptocurrency grift and the insider trading grift are still in full swing. And don’t forget all the corrupt possibilities that Elon Musk presents with everything he touches.****
There are corrupt and cruel people now running America’s federal government. If you watch while it happens, and make peace with others who do the same, you become part of the problem. Meanwhile, many others seem to be finding their way to joining a resistance that is beginning to take some shape.
Thank you for the cast of characters. I have had trouble figuring out what asshole is in which position. Altho kissing trumps asshole is it where they all can be found. You are great at clarifying issues. Well done.
I hope clarity helps others stand up to the oligarchs.