I don’t know that there’s ever been a president in history who’s been more of a solved equation than Donald Trump.
Historically, most presidents have understood the sanctity and decorum of the office (and, concurrently, the importance of keeping the federal government a mysterious and opaque arm’s length from the public realm), and thus projected the image we’ve all come to recognize when we see ‘president’. Stand at a podium, pivot robotically, give a speech someone else wrote that hits on the positive points of the relevant issue—or whichever, inside that current Overton window—make it seem like you care, assuage fears, reinforce optimism, then depart, answering maybe a few questions as you approach a plane or helicopter or just disappear behind a heavily-guarded door. Give a photo op here, do a hardball interview there, stump during election season, but do it all in a way that people expect from the 21st century leader of the free world, and be sure to foster no cognitive dissonance.
Not only has Trump, by now, defenestrated all we think of when we look at a president—and rightfully so, because it’s been largely that disingenuous, historical image consistently not jibing with economic and social reality that got him into the White House today—but he’s installed a cadre of ass-kissers and toe-lickers behind him, inferior versions, whose political careers and appointees now seem to run on the fuel of vitriolic showmanship and the intolerable fumes that spew from behind.
I could give a hundred examples of his neo-Bonapartism, but how about the most recent: today it was announced Trump fired his attorney general, Pam Bondi. The reasons were, of course, as transparent as the man himself: the level of protection she offered him, as head of the organization, hadn’t been to his satisfaction. Whether it was blocking him from criticism due to his entanglement with the late sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein, prosecuting his perceived “enemies” for lawfully investigating/penalizing him during his first term and after, or for not impossibly proving he won the 2020 presidential election by producing enough votes to have beaten Old Man Biden in the relevant swing states, neither shield not spear was broad/piercing enough for the man’s insatiable tastes.
So flip! Off the bow of the ship. And on to the next.
Clear like cellophane, the man is. And while knowing how to solve an equation regarding the study of a particular object’s behavior over time doesn’t necessarily mean you can predict what it will do at any given moment (as, with Trump, there’s just no telling day in and day out what he might tweet or bumble into a microphone), the overall theory of Trump is sound and well-established.
He’s in it for Trump.
Another case in point: military intervention. It’s obvious now that every time he’d used the term “America First” on the 2024 campaign trail, despite the non-interventionist context, he meant ‘the country of America first’, meaning the image he’s always had of it dominating the world as it has for the last eighty years or so, or at the very least the western hemisphere, for over twice that. Today, he even had the supervillainish callousness to say with a straight face that the nation with the largest economy in the entire world can’t afford to assist low-income or working class families in taking care of their children under 13. Why?
“We can’t take care of day care,” he said. “We’re a big country. We have fifty states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.” [my emphasis added there]
The U.S. government spends around $30 billion on child care every year, give or take. The Pentagon budget is around $900 billion, give or take. In case you wanted to compare.
Of course, he wants the states to pay for child care, in a remarkably surprising bout of familiar, limited-government Republicanism. And he wants them to do it…how? By raising taxes. Which, of course, is pure Trumpism, meaning a reversal of tried-and-true political notions. But that’s Trump for you. When you’re in it for you, and as protected as you are now with a GOP-led, toe-licking Congress (or a gaggle of rabidly loyal lawyers in your civilian life), you don’t give a shit. You say moronic/nonsensical/contrary things, and assume (moronically/nonsensically/contrarily) that the means always justify the ends. As long as you’re getting your way.
So, is eliminating much of federally protected childcare ‘Americans first’? No. It’s America first on the global stage. With everyone else cowering in their boots, somewhere in the cheap seats. Including many Americans.
That’s the point of all this military intervention. Trump doesn’t care about freedom or justice for the people of Venezuela, or Iran, or Nagorno-Karabakh. He cares about putting his name all over everything before he’s dead—buildings, airports, streets, awards, battleships, future textbooks or anything else that seems reasonable, because it brought America back to some kind of glorious advertisement he was brainwashed into admiring back when he was a (millionaire) kid in the 1950s. Only one modernized and re-branded for the Trump Organization (i.e. America, from 2025 throughout 2028), which now extends from coast to coast, and border to border.
And the safest way to do that is to get in, bomb the hell out of a capital and its environs—catch the leaders, kill them—but make it so you’ve completely and totally pulled out before anyone can meaningfully cry ‘foul’. Which, in Trump’s case, would be much of rightwing media, the only kind he actually listens to or cares about.
Are you familiar with a ‘5 pump chump’? Trump should be. If, for no other reason, than it’s his M.O. as military commander. It’s the mocking phrase for someone who has sex purely for himself, for the orgasm. Which, for the average man under average conditions, takes no time at all to realize, coitally speaking.
The speed at which the administration conducted these campaigns is proof of concept. Is there significant physical assistance to rebuild the infrastructure and government, afterwards or during? Financial assistance to keep the economy afloat? Military assistance to protect the weakened establishment in its quest to re-establish in a more favorable manner toward its population?
No. Not in the least. It’s all about him. Entirely self-serving. Ask any woman who’s ever been so inadequately ‘pumped’, as it were. Spreading your legs for someone, expecting something gratifying in return, and getting nothing but a rollover and a clicking off of the lights a couple minutes later with a still-full reservoir, night after night after night. They’ll tell you who the pumper was thinking about the entire time.
But from the point of view of the guy, it’s everything. It’s what it’s all about. You got yours, and you’re on top of the world. And in the case of Trump, there’ll be no breakup until the end of his term.
He’ll be in it for himself from now until then, as long as the country (and rest of the world) keeps parting those legs.
