I haven’t been summarizing the news lately. Obviously. That’s because, since 2025, it’s involved the paying of more-than-a topical-bit of attention to what Donald Trump says and does on a regular basis, and I find myself mentally and physically hindered when it comes to doing that. I can’t get past it. My tolerance for imbibing that kind of grand-stage-idiocy is that of teetotaler, were Trump to be the Everclear of national politics. Which he is. At the least, having more or less the same effect on people’s health and wellness, over time.
You know, except for those who consume the stuff on a regular basis.
But it’ll catch up to them someday, too.
Trump is a walking rhetorical tautology. Speaking about him is saying the same thing people already know by having watched him for over a decade now. The unbrainwashed, I mean.
But then something will still pop up in the news, directly from the man’s mouth, and I’ll find myself thinking, ‘I can’t believe that jackass just admitted that.’
What we’re seeing now, weeks before the midterms, is this: many who voted for him, who believed it wasn’t going to be this way in this country (or probably had no idea because they didn’t know to think that far ahead) are finally—finally—starting to see that he doesn’t care about their financial livelihoods.
But what’s so mindboggling, and what makes the man so objectively stupid to me, is not the fact that he doesn’t care about altering his message before the midterms—where Republicans stands to lose big, because of what he’s said and done and nothing else—but the fact that he doesn’t even care about showing he doesn’t care. Even the biggest dictators in the world today make a point of publicly proclaiming their concern for domestic policy, even if all that policy amounts to, behind the scenes, is control of the population. And that’s with the ability, too, to rig an election outright.
America is a democracy, and Trump’s given up on trying to do what you’re supposed to do to control the population in a democracy. Which is, at the very least, not say things that make everyone realize that you really don’t care if the population suffers.
Trump did just that (again) at a rally in Georgia for Republican candidates on Saturday. He took the stage and said the following, unedited:
“So, our country is making hundreds of billions of dollars because of what’s happened in the Middle East, because they’re coming to Texas, and they’re coming to Oklahoma, and they’re coming to Louisiana, and they’re taking that oil. They’re making hundreds of billions of dollars, our country is, on oil. And then on top of it, we have Venezuela, and we have Greenland, because Greenland has a lot of oil. So, we’re making hundreds and hundreds of billions—trillions of dollars. But my people said, ‘Please don’t mention that, sir, because people are paying a little higher’. That number is going to come way down. But what we’ve done for this country—we’re making money like this country has never made before. So I said, let me say it very gingerly, very softly, because somebody would say at the fake news, ‘He’s bragging about making money! While people are suffering at the…,’ you know, because, you know, you’re still paying lower than Biden, and Obama, and they don’t have nuclear weapons. But they’re going to be coming. No, I could just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ That’ll be the headline. But I said, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.’ We’re making a fricking fortune. Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time. And those pump prices are going to come down.”
Just because you preemptively proclaim, ‘This is what people are going to say after I say this,’ doesn’t make the actual reason behind what you say any less obvious or true, especially if there are many years’-worth of documented evidence showing that, based on your own words and behavior, both in public and private, that’s how you think.
I’ve said it before: Trump treats America like his own business. Making America great is to make the business and finances of America great, the executive class richer, and nothing else (bigotry-based social policy aside). The goal is balancing the books, securing future sources of revenue, growth, crushing competition, and so on. Because that is what you do in the business world to succeed at that level. And in this metaphor, there is no bigger business than America.
And those of us who aren’t the figurative executives, who aren’t worth many hundreds of thousands to billions of dollars—we make up America’s low-level employees. We were always going to be treated like the grunts and middle managers of any exceedingly large company: absolutely expendable, without a second thought. Regardless of how much we love or believe in it.
But that was not and never has been the job of the president or federal government, to ignore its citizens. Lawmakers from both parties, but particularly Republicans, have tried to destroy social services—assistance with food, child-raising, healthcare, etc.—for lower-class and struggling people for decades, and have tried for just as long to convince them that they’re doing the country at large a favor when they do.
But what is a company but its lower-level employees? It’s taken for granted in the upper echelons of the business world that someone, somewhere, will always be available to fill a lower-level position should it become vacant. But in governing, there is no outsourcing. There is no seeking out the cheapest labor force, no playing different countries against each other in order to get the biggest tax incentives and subsidies for building a factory somewhere. Everything is right here, and the employees are, always and forever, incapable of being fired.
