Hey, some quick thoughts today on the crazy scale of obvious corruption that goes on, you know, every day. For Savannah-area folks, you can join me and Jessica Leigh Lebos for free at an event this Saturday where we’ll discuss my book. RSVP for the event here and order the book here (and get 30 percent off with the code 08TERRIBLE). You can also listen to my full discussion of the book with the fine folks at KAXE in Bemidji, MN at the bottom of this link. As always, the best way to support the work we do here at Doom is with a paid subscription or a contribution to our Coffee Fund.
The older I get, the more efficient I seem to be at many things. I know there will be a time in old age when this is not the case, but hopefully by then some of the many things I am required to spend my time on will have passed.
One of those requirements is having to pay a lot of attention to what elected officials say and do. Maybe I’ll always have to spend what I estimate to be a solid 40 percent of my time doing this, which, combined with general news consumption and my own investigations and stories, becomes more like 60 percent of the minutes in a day.
But I have a child now, and a house that needs some work, plus my book is out, plus I’m feeling a bit squishy so I’m at the gym relatively frequently, and I like to play music as often as possible, ideally every day. Family, friends, recovery, paying bills — life gets busy and fast.
So when it comes to paying attention to the many, many things our elected officials say and do, plus the consequences of those actions on people who often don’t have the power to do much about it — like immigrants dying in awful conditions in facilities across the country — I have to be efficient.
Luckily, people like Donald Trump and just about every single person around him makes what they do and how they do it incredibly obvious.
Just days past his latest corrupt gambit — the advertising, marketing, and grift-filled spectacle that was UFC Freedom 250 — Trump is on to his next corrupt project or stunning failure, depending on how it shakes out.
The details of the deal over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and ending our war there are out and they’re not great, at least politically for Trump. He basically just blew hundreds of millions of dollars — and wasted the lives of 13 American service men and women — on a war that didn’t need to happen, and is now preparing to ink a deal that is no better than the one Barack Obama made with Iran a decade ago.
But Trump, who has spent his life incorrectly believing that he is smarter than every single person in the world, blew up Obama’s deal under the guise that it was a cash-laden handout to Iran. Now, Trump is about to give Iran even more money — not to mention the blood and treasure we’ve expended in our war effort. (Dead American soldiers are just the start. Our munitions reserves are incredibly depleted thanks to Trump and Pete Hegseth’s unnecessary and relentless bombing. Plus, soldiers and airmen are now run down after having spent months screaming across the region in service of Trump’s military adventurism, which he has openly said he’s bored with.)
But it’s not just that Trump’s deal with Iran does nothing new, or that it’s cost us much more than the previous one did, it’s that, like everything Trump touches, it’s probably entirely corrupt.
That’s because the deal promises $300 billion in funds to rehabilitate the Iranian infrastructure we destroyed. The exact language of this bullet point in the deal says those funds will come from both the United States and “regional partners.” That’s vastly more than the $1.7 billion promised by the Obama administration as part of the previous Iran nuclear deal. If you don’t think that those in Trump’s orbit and probably Trump’s own Trump Organization will somehow find a way to profit off all those billions of dollars, you haven’t been paying attention.
Every deal Trump has made during his second term in office has financially benefitted himself, his family and their companies, or the slew of business interests still held by members of his cabinet. The Iran nuclear deal, if it holds, will be no different.
The scale of the Trump administration’s corruption is historic. Sunday’s birthday blood match, in previous times, would have been an impeachable offense in and of itself. Trump’s corruption perverts and harms rules, norms and laws like a steamroller every single day. It will continue until someone puts a stop to it. Republicans won’t do this. It will be up to Democrats, hopefully starting in November, to begin a second reconstruction project that ensures no future presidential administration will be able to get away with all that Trump has.
Trump as president exists for a lot of reasons. Among them is the obvious fact that Reconstruction failed following the Civil War. Since then, a shifting coalition of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and hyper-capitalist forces have successfully been able to flourish. The systems under which they’ve done so must end in order for a truly democratic republic to continue. The reforms of the Watergate era were a start, and something similar — albeit much more aggressive — must start taking shape now. If not, the historic corruption of Trump will become the norm, not the exception. At that point, people like me probably won’t even be able to make a living. And all of us who aren’t inside the system of corruption and influence will work in service of it.
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