Trump: Is He the Thief in the Ballroom?

The fight isn’t between left and right anymore: it’s between oligarchy and the people, between those who hoard power and those still brave enough to believe in democracy...

Trump is now trying to extract a quarter-billion dollars from the American treasury — our tax dollars — to compensate himself for the troubles he faced when Merrick Garland belatedly tried to hold him to account for criminally stealing classified documents, trying to overthrow the 2020 election, and his explicit, public outreach to Putin to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails and make them public that helped him win the 2016 election.

The decision about whether to give him the $230 million will largely fall to Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice she heads, assuming no Republicans in Congress dare challenge him. The obscenity of his former private attorney — who looked the other way for eight years in Florida when she was Attorney General there and Trump and Epstein were up to their dirty deeds — ratifying this demand is astonishing.

But, like his tearing down the East Wing of the White House to make way for his Mar-a-Lago-style “ballroom” in defiance of the laws giving authority over the White House to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Trump’s defiance of the law and simple decency is another symptom of this gilded age that 44 years of Reaganomics has brought us to. (Thomas Jefferson himself designed the White House’s East Colonnade; that’s how obscene Trump’s wrecking crew’s actions are.)

The period from 1933 to 1981 saw an explosion of government activity designed to benefit average working class Americans. Democrats pushed into law — in every case over the loud objections of Republicans — the programs that quite literally created the first widespread American middle class in the 1950s.

They included Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour week, workplace and product safety protections, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, free quality public education, protections for the environment, banking and insurance industry regulation, public health programs that almost doubled the average American lifespan, high progressive taxation on great wealth, and numerous others.

In the 44 years since Reagan’s inauguration, there hasn’t been a single major program passed through Congress that doesn’t benefit giant corporations or the morbidly rich (or both) more than average people. Even Obamacare was a Heritage Foundation plan from the 1980s to enrich the private, for-profit insurance industry at government expense.

Instead, neoliberal free trade, tax cuts for the wealthy and giant corporations, along with an evisceration of dozens of protective programs and regulations, have led us into a second gilded age.

We’ve shifted, gradually at first but rapidly over the past decade, from being a democratic republic into a full-blown oligarchy, a system of governance and economics where all major decisions are made by and for the interest of the very wealthy — the oligarchs — with little consideration of the needs of working class and poor people.

Oligarchy, critically, is always a transitional form of government that rarely stands for more than two generations. The reason is simple to understand: when people figure out how badly they’re being screwed by the oligarchs, they rebel.

Facing that rebellion, the oligarchs have two choices.

First, they can do what American oligarchs did in the early 1930s during the Republican Great Depression and give in to the people, allowing things that will grow the middle class like the long list above. After their plot to assassinate FDR failed in 1934, they retreated to their business offices and contented themselves with simply making money for the next 47 years, leaving politics to the politicians.

Alternatively, the oligarchs and their bought-and-paid-for politicians can crush the rebellion with what President Grover Cleveland referred to (during the gilded age of the 1880s) as their “iron heel,” by criminalizing dissent, gerrymandering and voter suppression, control of the media, and imprisoning the rebellions’ leaders.

Trump and his toadies, particularly the ideologues like “Pee Wee German” Miller and “ICE Barbie” Noem, have chosen that latter path. They’re actively moving to turn America into a fascist state, complete with masked secret police and hundreds of brutal concentration camps for those they determine to be “illegals.”

They’re starting with Hispanics, but have made clear in both word and deed that, like in every country that’s followed this path to fascism in the past, their political opponents will be next. Miller is already referring to voters who’ve registered as Democrats as members of a “domestic extremist organization.”

Thus, America stands at a turning point.

Will we succeed in pushing back against Trump’s naked corruption and theft from the American people? Will we restore the rule of law, the tradition of checks-and-balances, of three co-equal branches of government, and rule by the people?

Or will Trump and his lickspittles (including on the Supreme Court) turn America into a tinpot dictatorship with the head guy making off with billions from the public purse while punishing anybody who tries to hold him accountable?

To a large extend, the answer to those questions lies with us.

If we remain fully engaged, lean hard on our elected officials (particularly Republicans), and demand accountability, there’s considerable hope, as I noted yesterday. The number to call your member of Congress is 202-224-3121.

On the other hand, if we retreat back into work and family, ignore the news, and stop showing up to protest and demand our democracy back, America’s extraordinary experiment in self-governance will die as Trump — the thief in the ballroom — continues to rip off the American people and enrich himself and those around him while building his police state.

Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Thief in the Ballroom”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now availble in bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social