What The Hell America!

DONALD TRUMP AND HIS CHILDREN, cronies, allies, appointees, saboteurs, and fellow uber-rich will never stop trying to seize ever more power and make ever more money. It’s taken some of us far too long to realize it, but this is almost always the simplest, most logical explanation for whatever is going on.

“Whatever” here encompasses threatening countries, law firms, universities, and media organizations; decimating agencies and programs that protect public health and safety, financial as well as physical; trapping visitors and migrants in privately run detention facilities; and facilitating financial opportunities for self, family, friends, and fans.

We are looking at an unprecedented level of corruption. And between the rich and the rest, we’re seeing a values gap so wide and deep that it’s becoming an abyss. It’s time to accept that, deal with it, and try to understand it.

Let’s start with this: Nobody pursues a career in the civil service to make a fortune. You sure don’t get rich quick, and hardly anyone gets rich at all. That goes for government employees at any level, from park rangers and scientists to teachers, cops, diplomats, and the military.

Same goes for journalism, especially print journalism. Alas.

These fields are largely mission driven. They have many rewards, and you can make a decent living, but raking in billions or even merely millions? Not happening. That could consign us to what Donald Trump might call the suckers and losers crowd. I prefer “people who don’t measure their worth in dollars.”

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Which brings us to the greed gap. Trump is demonstrably insatiable. He has a Louis XIV Sun King thing going in the Oval Office (golden basket, golden paperweight, golden angels, golden moldings, golden vases, golden coasters), an homage to the monarch credited with saying “L’État, c’est moi.”

Trump has taken that bon mot to heart. Using his vast governmental powers for profit, he’s on a control, vengeance, and self-promotion streak that is yielding bigger bucks than most of us will see in our lifetimes.

As PoliticalWire publisher Taegan Goddard put it Thursday, “his knack for inventing new forms of corruption still manages to surprise.” Goddard was referring to Trump’s latest “open for business” communiqué: Buy a $TRUMP meme coin, meet the president (who owned 80 percent of the coins when they launched, so he’s exceedingly well positioned to clean up from new purchases). “There are no ethics disclosures, no campaign finance filings, no rules at all,” Goddard wrote. “It’s not just unregulated influence-peddling. It’s bribery with a QR code.”

It doesn’t stop there. How about extortion by edict? So far Trump has extracted nearly $1 billion in free legal aid for causes he supports from law firms he’s threatened to punish for displeasing him. (What causes what might those be? His own future defense? Democrats are trying to find out.) ABC News has donated $15 million to the Trump presidential library, as yet unbuilt, to settle a defamation lawsuit he brought. The “cross me, you’ll regret it” message was unmistakable.

Using the honey-rather-than-flies approach, Donald and Melania talked Amazon founder, Washington Post owner, and government space contractor Jeff Bezos into paying an astronomical $40 million for a documentary Melania is making about herself. A few months later, Bezos landed his first space launch contract of the Trump era.

Vietnam is also making friendly overtures. Last fall, before the election, Trump oversaw the signing of a private $1.5 billion contract to build a Trump golf club in Vietnam. The Vietnamese prime minister recently promised to fast-track the project and urged the Trump Organization to expand in Vietnam. His apparent goal was to head off huge Trump tariffs on Vietnamese exports to America, but Trump announced a crushing “reciprocal” tariff of 46 percent and so far has not lowered it.

Nor has it helped, at least yet, that Vietnam is trying to get closer to Elon Musk. The Vietnamese government last month approved a five-year trial of Starlink satellite internet service in their country—a $1.5 billion investment by parent company SpaceX, with Musk in full control after foreign ownership requirements were eased.

Our own government is also in thrall to Musk. Thus we get headlines like these: “Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX is frontrunner to build Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield” and “Musk to Force Pentagon to Build and Then Pay Him to Use Network of Killer Satellites.”

This isn’t the half of it, though. Every time you see a headline about the killing or decimation of a federal program or agency, ask yourself why and answer it yourself: The private sector wants to make money off of whatever that agency had been doing.

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This is why the Trump IRS plans to kill Direct File, a new program that lets Americans file their taxes online for free directly with the IRS. Tax-preparation firms have spent millions toward getting rid of it, led by TurboTax-maker Intuit, which has been lobbying against simpler, cheaper tax filing for two decades. The company spent nearly $8 million on lobbying in 2023 and 2024, and kicked in $1 million for Trump’s inauguration activities.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and over 175 of her House and Senate allies told Trump officials last week that the 2024 pilot program “saved the average user $160 in tax return fees and hours of effort preparing their return. Users overwhelmingly love the program: 98 percent of Direct File taxpayers in 2025 were ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with their experience, a world-class figure.”

How long before private companies expand from fighting to keep current contracts and market share, to moving in to take over other swaths of federal responsibility in areas reeling from DOGE firings and resignations? Like, say, tech assistance, Forest Service firefighters, or Social Security call centers? Excuse me if I, a taxpayer, am not sold on this.

But I’m not surprised, either. Trump told us who he was when he said at a 2016 debate that not paying his taxes “makes me smart.” He told us again Thursday when he rejected a plan floated by Republicans to raise taxes on millionaires, to partially offset the deficit-busting costs of his wildly expensive agenda.

“Are there any really really really rich people who don’t completely suck? Struggling to think of one who isn’t going full ancien régime on us,” Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery asked the other day on Bluesky. Her responders threw out some prominent names: Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Former Bezos wife MacKenzie Scott. Former Bill Gates wife Melinda French Gates. Mark Cuban. Abigail Disney. Taylor Swift.

And, of course, there are countless unknowns doing good with their millions. There’s even an organization, Patriotic Millionaires, with a terse mission statement: “Tax the Rich. Pay the People. Spread the Power.” They call themselves “proud traitors” to their class—“investors, business owners and executives, lawyers, inheritors, filmmakers, authors, and, most importantly, patriots,” trying to fix a rigged system.

But the thrust of Jeffery’s point remains. Trump, with his 13-billionaire administration and anti-populist populism, is giving the rich a bad name.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a 1926 short story, the rich are “different from you and me.” They are more cynical, he said, and “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are.” A century later, the Trump 2.0 era is a powerful reminder that, actually, some of them are far worse.