Reader, I used to be flawed. So terribly flawed. It pains me to confess this however, again within the distant previous (final 12 months), I wrote some very nasty issues about Donald Trump and his household. Now that I’m older and wiser I realise how misguided this was. So let me set the file straight: the incoming president is an exceptionally good-looking man with an extremely excessive IQ. We’re all blessed that this very secure genius has taken day out of his busy {golfing} schedule to guide the free world to prosperity.
What do you reckon … was I sycophantic sufficient or do I want to put the flattery on even thicker? I’m asking as a result of, as you’ve little question seen, genuflecting to the uber-transactional Trump is ramping up now that inauguration day is approaching. Enterprise leaders are breaking information with the quantity of cash they’re dumping into Trump’s inaugural fund. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump wrote in a publish on Reality Social in December.
Mark Zuckerberg actually does. Not solely has he praised the incoming president as “badass”, he’s rejigged Meta’s management to be extra Trump-friendly. Trump ally Dana White has been appointed to Meta’s board. In the meantime Nick Clegg, the previous British deputy prime minister, is leaving his position (with tens of millions in his pocket) as Meta’s president of worldwide affairs. Joel Kaplan, essentially the most outstanding conservative voice on the firm – who is thought for his assist of Brett Kavanaugh when he confronted assault claims – is taking Clegg’s place. Meta can be eradicating fact-checkers and eliminating restrictions on what folks can say about matters corresponding to immigration and gender. So if Trump desires to proceed to unfold lies about immigrants consuming cats in Ohio, I assume it’s all good with Meta.
Jeff Bezos is giving Zuck a run for his cash within the obsequiousness Olympics. On the Bezos-owned Washington Submit, editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes just lately resigned in response to the newspaper refusing to publish a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos, together with different titans of business, kneeling earlier than Trump. Whereas the Submit’s opinions editor stated the choice to axe the cartoon was solely pushed by the truth that they’d already revealed a column on the identical matter, Telnaes appeared to suppose in any other case. In a substack publish she known as the choice “harmful for a free press.” Final 12 months the Submit additionally made headlines after a choice to forestall its editorial workforce from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris.
It’s not simply Trump getting buttered up by Bezos. The streaming division of Bezos’s different child, Amazon, introduced on Sunday that it’s releasing an “unprecedented behind-the-scenes” documentary about Melania Trump. Brett Ratner is directing – it’s the filmmaker’s first main venture after being accused of sexual misconduct by no less than six girls in 2017. It’s not clear whether or not the Trump household is being paid to take part within the movie; the final consensus, nonetheless, appears to be that this isn’t a lot a documentary as a puff piece. Melania is thought for being extraordinarily personal, in any case, so one imagines she wouldn’t permit anybody behind the scenes until it was very a lot on her phrases.
What different get-on-Trump’s-good-side tasks has Amazon bought within the pipeline, one wonders? Would possibly Ivanka Trump do a Duchess of Sussex, and create her personal way of life present? Or maybe Tiffany Trump (whose father-in-law is her dad’s new Center East adviser) can lastly additional her goals of being a pop star. Who is aware of. One factor that does appear alarmingly clear, as financial elites jostle to get in Trump’s good books, is that the billionaire takeover of the US is full. We’re very a lot dwelling in an age of oligarchy.
After all, this isn’t (all) Trump’s doing: his second time period is the symptom of a damaged system, not its trigger. The US has been on the market to the very best bidder for a really very long time. Energy has been consolidating into an ever-smaller set of palms for many years – a course of catalysed by Residents United: the 2010 supreme court docket determination that paved the best way for nearly limitless quantities of cash in politics.
What’s totally different now, nonetheless, is how shamelessly transactional Trump is. If there’s a silver lining to the present second maybe it’s the transparency of all of it. The US has lengthy thought itself distinctive; a beacon of democracy utterly incomparable to the likes of oligarchic Russia. Trump’s crass modus operandi makes this phantasm of American exceptionalism more durable to take care of. That’s a great factor: you’ll be able to’t change what you don’t acknowledge. And it’s time to acknowledge that democracy doesn’t simply die in darkness. It’s been dying for years now, in plain sight.
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