It’s said that the mark of a truly good leader isn’t just the decisions they make, but the people they make them with. Which makes sense. A good leader knows they don’t know everything and will seek advice from people more learned than them on things they don’t know about. Further, a leader attracts people to them who like their message.
So let’s take a look at the people who surround Donald Trump, to determine what kind of leader he is. Let’s start with the kind of people who make up his fanbase.
1.0 The Kinds of People Who Like Trump
Who likes Trump? Who are the people who he most appeals to?
Let’s have some fun first. The first sort of people who like Trump are what I’m going to call the MAGAts. They’re people who got swept up in Trump’s cult of personality - and I do mean “cult.” I don’t have time to do a full BITE Model analysis of the MAGAts, so I’m not 100% sure, but the way they talk and act about him shows that they’re not thinking normally. These people talk about Trump as if he’s the second coming of Christ. These people would rather Vladimiere Putin run America than a Democrat because they are just that lost in the sauce.
These people love his tough guy bravado show. They will never not vote for him because at this point they’re dogmatically invested in him as their Dear Leader. The result is that…they act kinda weird.
It makes perfect sense to them, of course! It has to, or they wouldn’t do it. Some of them even make sense to me. Wearing a bandage across your ear in solidarity of the wound a person you cared about received? That’s sensible, if a little unusual. But then they start wearing diapers because Trump is supposedly shitting himself and I have no idea where the mental hoops are on that one. Frankly, I kinda don’t wanna know.
It’s to the point where when I was writing this section, I found it very easy to get confused between real and fake stories. There’s a story about supporters carrying around a pretend cup of J. D. Vance’s sperm, complete with unaltered photos, and I believed it because that’s honestly not that different from the diaper thing. Then when I decided to double check the story it seems that it’s probably untrue? The timing doesn’t match up exactly and it looks like there was only one cup. So if it was a Trump Supporter, it was just one absolute nutter getting a few people to join in on their weird little joke.
Honestly though, these guys are pretty harmless, so I don’t want to spend much time on them. There are crazies all over the place, and while I’d argue Trump is definitely very good at attracting them, they’re not exclusive to him. Besides, they’re a little creepy and very weird, but they’re not hurting anyone directly. Which is less than I can say for the other people on this list.
Trump is a wealthy man, and so are many of his friends. It would make sense that he does things to appeal to them. Hell, he cut all their taxes and defunded the government for them, why wouldn’t they?
Most of them are pretty quiet, letting their money do the talking. Trump is a bit of a toxic name after all. But he serves their interests and that’s what I want to focus on.
Trump proclaims he’s here to drain the swamp and is our last hope of fixing America as a political outsider, but he absolutely isn’t. Not if the problem with America is that the corporate fat cats are putting their fingers too much in our government. It shouldn’t be a shocker that the man whose finances make a nightmarish web of inscrutable horror, who refuses to divest himself from those business, and who keeps getting billions in direct donations from the wealthiest industries with the most to benefit from buying him off is probably in their pockets - partly because they’re his pockets.
All of that said, these guys are also…not the worst. Yes they’re funneling billions of dollars into the campaign of a madman, but that’s they’re right and I won’t stop them from supporting who they want - even if I think you shouldn’t be allowed to donate that much to any campaign. That money will be used to hurt people, and that’s terrible, but a lot of these guys are so divorced from reality that when they fire someone, they think the firee should just spend a year at the beach with all the money they have to come back to the job market when it’s better. I can’t hate ignorance as much as I hate malice. And speaking of malice.
So to understand the modern Nazi you have to understand that a good number of them have realized directly calling themselves Nazis is bad publicity. They want you to join them and they know the past 80 years has been spent making sure the immediate knee jerk reaction to “Nazi” is “fuck off.” So they’re not Nazis, they’re just “concerned citizens,” they’re not white supremecists, they’re “Christian nationalists,” they're not trying to enact the Final Solution, they’re protecting themselves from the Great Replacement. They don’t “hate black/jewish/queer/latino/whatever’s on the menu today people,” they just think white people should be “proud of their heritage” too.
They’ve also given their image a glow-up. Instead of being loud, swastika-covered skinheads, they’ll dress in tailored suits and speak politely, using philosophical language and college-educated rhetoric. With this change in their rhetoric and appearance, they talk to you, the normie - yes that is what they call you - about how “you know, those immigrants are really a problem.” They’re taking all the jobs and causing all the crime (a lie). They’ll slip in these little hints that “they” want to erase white culture, and that white people are being “replaced”. Oh, no no no, they don’t want to kill the migrants, they want to “remigrate” them back to their homes. And once you buy that, they start pulling you further and further down - or letting you do that to yourself. Remigration sounds good, but it’s also expensive and they might sneak back in. Surely there’s a cheaper solution. A more…final one.
This is why knowing their dog whistles is very important. Nazis think they’re being clever when they put SS in their username or replace the swastika with the black sun. There are any number of a thousand symbols they use to signal to each other that they’re all in on the “joke,” ranging from Old Norse Runes to the 🥛 emoji. And to a degree, they are. How crazy do I sound when I say “that guy’s a Nazi because he has 1488 in his username!”? Sure, it could be a reference to the 14 Words that are the core of nazism, followed by 8 to mark the 8th letter of the alphabet - HH, for Heil Hitler - but maybe it’s just their birthday! You don’t know for sure, and to call someone a Nazi without knowing for sure, that makes you the bad guy.
All of this is to say that Nazis have made themselves very difficult to call out by weaponizing plausible deniability. But make no mistake, just because the lunatics aren’t shouting “Sieg Hiel!” at the top of their lungs, doesn’t mean they don’t want to get all of the Black, Jewish, Latinx and anyone else they personally don’t consider white out of America by any means necessary. They can call themselves whatever they want, just because they built a castle out of shit and not a bunker, doesn’t mean it isn’t made of shit. You can call it whatever you want too. I’m going to call it what it is - a steaming pile of shit.
So when I call Richard Spencer a Nazi, I’m not just saying that because I don’t like his very punchable face. I’m saying it because Richard Spencer has been at the forefront of the Great Replacement - a conspiracy theory about how brown people want to fuck us whities out of existence. When Richard Spencer says “Hail Trump! Hail our people!” while raising his hand in what is not exactly, but is suspiciously similar to a Nazi salute, I shouldn’t have to write entire paragraphs on how this is a Nazi doing a Nazi thing to support his favorite candidate, who he views as sympathetic to his Nazi cause.
I shouldn’t have to explain that when people like Sebastian Gorka see Trump as a great inroad for their political plans, we should be very concerned. As soon as I tell you that he is a supporter of the Magyar Garda, an antisemitic military organization so awful the EU banned it for being fascist, and a member of the Order of Vietz, which traces its heritage back to Nazi-occupied Hungary and was instrumental in shipping Jews off to the camps, I shouldn’t have to explain how whatever sort of policy plans Gorka has are probably not in the interests of anyone who cares about Jews. Sure, he denies it when directly asked, why wouldn’t he, he knows it’s toxic. But then he signs his doctoral thesis with L. v., the initials commemorating himself as a member. Deeds, not words, as they say. He was so toxic even Trump kicked him out after a few months.
I shouldn’t have to explain that when David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK, says Trump is the first president he’s voting for because he’s the first one who he believes will carry out his will, that this is a bad thing. That whatever the rest of his plans, whatever color his soul, these people believe and are excited about him.
And I shouldn’t have to talk about Charlottesville. But I do, because people are good and want to give others the benefit of the doubt. A kindness the Nazis are more than eager to abuse.
I want to touch on it just a little bit deeper, because I think the circumstances around it are very illuminating. First of all, there’s no room for equivocation here. There were Nazis at this event, of all stripes. That’s what they meant by “unite the right”. Even if you argue that the average person wouldn’t recognize the black sun or the odal rune or 1488 or whatever else as Nazi symbols where they were presented on the shield wall, behind that, in the actual protest, there were swastikas and burning crosses galore. It would be impossible not to notice, and not to notice the rhetoric being spouted. If you were on that side, and you didn’t leave in disgust, your morals need some serious reevaluation. If you want an in depth description of just how bad it was, I suggest watching this video.
These assholes then killed someone. And in the wake of this, what did the leader of the free world say? To the grieving family, to the worried nation, to the horrified targets of past Nazi violence, how did he respond? When the worst sort of scum crawled out from under the floorboards and killed in his name, our president said that “there are very fine people on both sides.” And no, his follow up of “not those people” doesn't cut it.
I said anyone who stayed needs to reevaluate their morals, and I mean it. If you are standing on the same side as a swastika flag I don’t care what you believe, you’re choosing to stand with Nazis. Even if these people somehow didn’t look at the list of speakers and recognize them all as a cavalcade of varying flavors of Nazis, a “fine person” would have left as soon as they saw the first swastika - and there were a lot of swastikas.
Which isn’t to say they’re bad people. Maybe they were pressured into staying either by friends or inertia. But even those people were willing to put, say, the discomfort of leaving a party early over the wellbeing of others across the nation. Further, just because they’re Nazis doesn’t mean every one of them beats children and tortures cats. Hitler was very kind to his dogs. So I’m sure that yes, if you take a snapshot of the life of your average Nazi, they’re just a normal person for the most part. But so was Ted Bundy, if you forget the “making lamps out of women’s skin” thing. And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Just because they’re “fine people” some of the time, doesn’t make them fine people. The Nazis love it when the media runs stories about how “normal” they are because it makes it easier to forget they’re people with a desire to watch other people suffer and die. They need to be stopped first, then we can start talking about empathizing with them.
And again, I shouldn’t have to explain this. I should not have to explain that if you stand with Nazis, you are not a fine person, and that our President should be fucking ashamed of himself for even thinking that was a reasonable thing to say. That everyone who believed it should also be ashamed. But here we are. This is why White Supremacists love Trump.
It would be one thing to say that he’s just letting them think he’s on their side, and purely using them as an untapped voter block. But that isn’t all he’s doing. He is making active decisions to cover up their crimes. He’s doing everything he can to hide the surge in Hate crimes since he took office.
All of that said, can we at least agree that even if Donald Trump is not a fascist, he is at least fascist adjacent? That he’s using fascist principles to his advantage? Perhaps as a useful idiot? And can we please all agree that that is a problem? And while we’re at it, can we also agree that
are also bad? Look, I know America Max news or whatever have been making a nothing burger out of treason, but that’s what it was. It was an actual attack on our capitol, where the flag of traitors flew above the building, and people died. The only reason it didn’t turn into a massacre is that the Capitol police were smart and kind and the attackers were stupid and entempered.
I’ve already spoken about the January 6th riot, so I won’t spend too much time on the events themselves. I will say that since then, the evidence of Trump’s responsibility and complicity has skyrocketed.
He claims they were there because of concerns about the election, but who was the one telling lie after lie after lie about the election? Who was the one who arranged the January 6th protest, and who spent the entire time waxing on about the dangers of letting people get away with stealing the election.
Even if you don’t believe he’s responsible because you shut your brain off whenever it comes to Trump, there is no denying two things.
The first is that, at the very least, he sat back and watched as this went on. When he was told his mob was going after Pence, and that Pence had to be taken to a safe place, his response was “so what?”. When McCarthy called him and told him his people were rioting, he said it was Antifa. When McCarthy proved that it wasn’t, he said “well maybe they are more upset about it than you are” and hung up. He did nothing. And he could have done any number of things! The riot was stopped because the National Guard was brought in (by Mike Pence, by the way, not him) and was stopped relatively peacefully. Trump could have done that, but he didn’t, because he does not care about our country or our constitution, he's a sore loser, a baby and is terrified of facing consequences for his actions. To deny this is to deny the reality of the situation. Mentally twist yourself into whatever position you need to argue he’s not responsible, blame Nancy Pelosi for not “properly defending the capitol” in conspiratorial undertones that imply it was an inside job (even though Pelosi asked for more defense beforehand and was in fact not responsible for the number of Capitol police there that day or capable of calling in the national guard), the absolute and undeniable fact is Trump knew what was going on, and did jack and shit for over 3 hours. Or, more accurately, until he knew his plan had failed and there was no reason to let his “day of love” continue. And what did he do? He put a little video up telling them all they were very special people and should leave in peace. And before you say “why didn’t someone else do anything?” that’s because he’s the COMMANDER IN FUCKING CHIEF! When the Capitol is attacked it’s his fucking job to stop it! Only he and two other people have the authority to do that and Pence was technically overstepping when he finally made the call. If Trump had called the guard in to stop the insurrection when it had first gotten out of hand, I guarantee you I would have praised him for it and re-evaluated some of my thoughts on this. But he didn’t. He let this happen, and the only reason for that is because it would benefit him.
The second is that this is the sort of following he’s cultivated. Disavow them all you want, the people most enamored with Trump are these crazies. When else has this happened? What other President has had a following that stormed the Capitol because they thought the election was stolen from them? Even Al Gore didn’t have that, and he is arguably the most justified in history to the claim. This is not a kind of crazy that happens by accident, you need to cultivate it. He’s already making the same sort of whining noises for the 2024 election that he did in 2020. He stoked the fires of insurrection, is stoking them again, and my worst fear is that they will not die out with him.
My expectation for this election is that Kamala is going to win both the popular and electoral votes, but that Trump will use every single opportunity he can to complicate matters and ruin everything. Then, if that fails, he’s going to try for another physical insurrection attempt. What happens from there, I can’t say. Enough of the generals hate him that I think any actual coup attempt will be repelled, but who knows how the damaged nation will react to this and what happens from there.
The fact is, these are all reasonable assumptions based on previous events. When I say Trump is a threat to democracy, I’m not parroting liberal talking points, these are hard facts and reasonable inferences to make from them. The Capitol riot is a thing that objectively happened and was terrible for our democracy. Anyone trying to argue otherwise is wrong, and anyone pretending Trump wasn’t responsible on some level is at best, a fool.
2.0 The Kinds of People Trump Hangs Out With
But those are just his fan base. While Trump can certainly be blamed for signaling to them and using them, it would be understandable if he were just a disgusting person who used those sorts of monsters to his end. So, what sort of people does Trump keep in his inner circle? Who does he like to hang out with? Especially recently?
Laura Loomer has been a constant shadow for Trump for some time. He’s literally seen with her more often than his wife. In fact, is anyone else surprised by how much his wife doesn’t want to be involved with her husband’s political career? I’m sorry, I’m getting off track. We’re talking about Laura Loomer and how she shouts that "the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center." She called for a White Ethnostate, because she’s a Nazi, and is so appallingly racist that even Marjorie Taylor Green is calling her racist, that should probably concern you. Worse, she seems to have his ear pretty good, too, with multiple insider reports saying the reason Trump keeps saying conspiratorial nonsense is her.
Because, see, she isn’t just racist. She’s also completely nucking futs. She believes 9/11 was an inside job, that The Deepstate is using Magic Science Waves to create storms to stop people from voting for Trump, that some lunatic with a bomb was a member of Anti-Fa when he absolutely wasn’t, all while calling for the death of democrats, because at this point why not. She is a vile piece of filth, and she is currently the vizier in his ear.
One of Trump’s favorite people to talk to and talk about is Elon Musk. The guy even came to a Trump rally in a black “Dark MAGA” hat and jumped around like an idiot to celebrate for him.
Look, I apologize to all the Muskiites out there, but Elon is an idiot. I’m not saying that because I don’t like him, I don’t like Jeff Bezos either but I wouldn’t call him stupid, mostly because he’s not. Musk, however, very much is. He is not some all-powerful ubermensch genius, he’s the modern Thomas Edison, and I mean that in the bad way. Only where Edison at least understood the basics of the technology he would minutely improve and then patent, Musk apparently doesn’t even know the Δv equation while trying to make a rocket. For proof of that look no further than what happened with Twitter when he bought it.
I could talk about how every decision he’s made has hurt it, from banning the block function to renaming it. But I think I’ll stick with my favorite example - the advertisement lawsuit. See, Musk sees himself as a free speech absolutist, believing that anyone should be able to say anything. Which is a fine position to hold, I suppose. But free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. If you use your public voice to espouse the death of GRSM/LGBT folk, then people also have the right to call you a bigot for that and tell everyone that’s what you believe, and other people have the freedom to choose to not platform you again. And if you put an ad for Disney next to a Nazi talking about how we should just gas the (ethnic slur for Jews) already, then Disney is well within its right to believe that’s detrimental to their brand and that the cost of their brand being associated with Nazis isn’t worth the benefit of the advertising on that platform. That’s not cancel culture, Elon, that’s people using free speech. The fact that people use grading organizations to help them determine that instead of each individually spending millions on doing the market research themselves doesn’t mean they’re colluding against you, either. That’s just called good business practice.
And that right there is the problem. It would be one thing if Musk were an actual absolutist who legitimately believed in the freedom to say whatever you want without consequence, but he doesn’t. See, when he discovered the Twitter account that posted status updates of his private plane’s location and flight plans, Elon immediately banned it. In a world of absolute free speech this should be allowed. It’s just words, after all, right? It's not even secret information - it’s all in the public record, freely available to anyone who knows how to find it - this guy was just using Twitter as a platform to aggregate and share it. Musk’s argument that it’s a potential threat to his safety because the crazies will always know where he is shouldn’t matter - it’s still speech and still the users right to say it. That’s what “absolute free speech” means. And while he did reinstate the accounts of journalists he banned for calling him out on it, he never reinstated the account itself.
This wouldn’t be the only instance of Musk censoring things. For a man who believes in the “free marketplace of ideas,” he has a really bad habit of forcing his views down people’s throats and silencing those of his detractors and opponents. Twitter’s algorithm is unkind to leftist views, and that is by design. And that’s where we really get into why Musk isn’t just an idiot, but a fascist sympathizer.
Now, I know I always say that the color of Donald Trump’s soul is up to him, but the thing is I do have an opinion on it. I just don’t think it’s productive to argue what truly is going on inside his head when his actual motives are secondary to the real damage he can, has and will cause. Musk, on the other hand, I legitimately have no god damned idea what he actually believes. But when I see him retweeting Great Replacement Nazi Propaganda, I’m sort of concerned he’s at least not bright enough to see through the lie. When he allows right wing scum bags like Alex Jones back on his platform, but then refuses to reinstate the accounts of equally pernicious leftist voices, I see at least hypocrisy if not self-delusion. And when he files a lawsuit against companies for not putting ads on his website because the website doesn’t meet the standards they require, I see at the best a petty loser who can’t admit to a mistake and at the worst one who is vindictive that his hateful message can’t be spread.
Again, I don’t know where along these spectrums the truth lies, but I don’t really care. What matters is none of these things reflect well on Musk. Musk is a self-interested loser. He pretends to be this genius, but he falls for dumb conspiracy theories and has tantrums whenever he’s not surrounded by yes men. The only reason Tesla and SpaceX are as successful as they are - and they’re not nearly as proficient as you think, the Tesla Cyber Truck has some hilarious flaw like having the accelerator get stuck or exploding when the battery gets wet - is because there are people at those companies whose job it is to keep Musk in check. As soon as Musk had to fend for himself he started trying to technobabble his way into sounding smart while breaking everything. Because as it turns out, when your motto is “move fast and break things” and you don’t have a dedicated team to clean up after your messes, you get left with a MESS. He’s not a genius, he’s a whiny idiot who used his family’s wealth to pay smart people to do smart things and then plastered his name all over their work.
And what matters for our purposes here is that Trump either buys the hype, or likes the man in spite of it. This is the man who has dropped the value of Twitter by over 70% because he breaks Chesterton Fence after Chesterton Fence with no respect for any of it. He’s a racist, a transphobe, and an asshole. He’s the worst sort of example of what Tech Bros are, which is why he’s their king. And as much as I love taking shots at him specifically, this is about Trump. And Musk is willing to give Trump a platform, a megaphone, and a shitload of cash to run his campaign, and Trump happily accepts it all. What does that say about him?
3.0 The Kinds of People Trump Appoints
Okay so those are just his friends. Maybe he keeps them around because they’re really nice people and he believes in free speech more than the lives of other people. That’s unacceptable, in my opinion, but maybe you’re okay with that as long as the people are hyper competent (spoiler alert: they’re not). So let’s talk about the kind of people he gives power to. We can all agree that if you give a Nazi a position of power, even if they’re really good at their job, you’re a bad person, right?
Now we don’t have time to go over every single one of his picks for every position. And to his credit, Trump occasionally made some good postings. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. So let’s pick some from around and see what we get out of them, shall we? Let’s start with the obvious - the man he chose to be his first Vice President, Michael Pence.
What better place to start than the man Trump trusted to take his place should something happen to him, Michael Pence. The dude is old, and has been in politics for a long time. He actually used to be a Democrat, but then the Southern Strategy happened and he flipped to Republican in the early 80s, and that’s when he really began his career.
His career is marked by mediocrity and conservative actions. As Governor of Indiana, laws he passed include, but are not limited to one that required all terminated fetuses to be given funerals, tax cuts exclusively to corporations, laws that prevented local businesses from offering better wages then the federal ones, passed various laws to help kill renewable energy initiatives in his state, and one that allowed people to legally discriminate against LGBT people. You know, the usual sort of things conservatives do.
He wasn’t completely terrible though. How about all the additional funding he gave to education, especially pre-schools? Although he seems to really hate public education, taking funding intended for them and filtering it to private and charter schools (more on why that’s a problem later). Oh, also, he’s a creationist, which might explain why he’s so interested in killing science curriculum.
Wait, not great. Let’s try again.
How about the fact that he took the state’s reserve from $2 billion to a much higher number? Except he did that by stripping funding from college, social services and corrections. So much for the party of law and order.
Is the picture becoming clear? Pence is a staunchly religious conservative who worked hard to protect businesses from the working class and apply his personal Christian morals to his state’s laws. Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed, but he was always mediocre. More importantly, his personality and platform were well known.
See, in the 2016 campaign, Trump had a problem. A lot of the religious saw this philandering, multi-divorced businessman as unchristian. The best choice for a vice president would be a man who could alleviate their fears that their religion wouldn’t be shoved into the government. He was advised that Mike Pence was the perfect choice. So he chose him.
In office, Pence did a lot of grandstanding and speaking to delegates, broke a lot of ties in the Senate and once Trump got around to actually acknowledging the Corona Virus, he put Pence in charge of that. Something Pence did…not terrible with, I guess. He lied about it in an attempt to keep people from panicking, and exempted himself from mask mandates because he needed to look people in the eye.
You know. The eyes that the masks cover? Apparently?
But he at least did what he could to get the vaccine rollout as quickly as possible.
So yeah. Mediocre. At best.
And then 2021 happened. Specifically, January 6th happened. Pence’s decision to not defy the rule of law and approve the actual winner of the election didn’t go over well in Trumpland. The chant “hang Mike Pence” being shouted at him by a crowd of lunatics was apparently enough to give Pence a sick stomach about ever working with Trump again. He has repeatedly called Trump out for The Big Lie and has done a lot of passive-aggressive “endorsement of candidates that Trump endorsed against” and “turning the president’s ’too honest’ insult into merch” type stuff.
Nowadays, he works for the Heritage Foundation and as a podcaster, citing humanoid ghoul Rush Limbaugh as an inspiration.
So Mike Pence is a mediocre politician with a particularly well known track record of being pro-business, pro-Christian, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, and anti-worker. He also turns out to have a soul. He left the Trump collective after they threatened his life just because he didn’t want to end democracy.
Let’s look at, oh, one of his cabinet members.
Let’s talk about Betsy DeVos, because I have a particular beef with her. Betsy DeVos is the heiress to the Amway fortune, and her brother is the man who started everyone’s favorite group of war criminals, Blackwater. She comes from money, and a lot of her early political activism involved making sure money could stay in politics. She then focused on running and otherwise supporting school choice programs and working with private schools.
This is to say Betsy DeVos had always been interested in education, so she was not an unexpected choice for Secretary of Education. She was, however, a controversial one. Hers was the first cabinet position to ever be decided by VP tie-breaking vote, and the reason for that is that there are two ways to look at Betsy DeVos. From one angle, she is a heroine come to bring parents of all stripes the ability to more dynamically choose the education their children get. From the other angle, however, she is a vampire come to suck the blood out of public schools and leave all those who must rely on them with scraps at best, while forcing everyone else to learn her particular religion.
See, Betsy DeVos doesn’t actually like public education all that much. She prefers private schools instead, and a lot of her time in office was spent steering public funding towards private schools with things like voucher programs and then deregulating those voucher programs. She also began deregulating student loan programs, because let’s not forget, her wealthy friends gotta make their money too.
Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to be adopted into a family that was able to afford private schooling for me my entire student career. I’m grateful for that, and my parents always strove to make sure we didn’t just go to private schools, but good private schools. Mom and dad, if you’re reading this, thank you.
And that’s just it - I was fortunate enough. My family had the knowledge and time to research good schools, and the money to send us to them. Not everyone has that fortune. Wouldn’t it be nice, say DeVos and people like her, if everyone could have that fortune? And it does sound nice! Everyone can have the chance to have a wealthy, private school education.
Except there are a few assumptions there that are worth unpacking. The first is that private schools are inherently better than public ones. Let’s look at curriculum standards to see what I mean. In some cases, not having to follow a restrictive curriculum is great! I learned some really cool stuff about European History in highschool that I wouldn’t have gotten to learn if I had instead gone to a public school. Things about the first World War and the death of the age of kings and the rise of the Soviet Union that were very relevant to the state of our modern world. Things that I don’t think I’d have learned as thoroughly in a public school. But to learn those things, there were others I didn’t learn about. Further, having a mandated curriculum that everyone has to learn means that other people can more or less assume you know a thing and don’t have to teach you about it, only remind you. It’s an effective way to make sure everyone starts at the same foot.
Neither type of education is better, inherently. They’re both just tools with different efficacies in different situations. Or at least that’s how it is in a perfect world.
See, another downside of not having a mandated curriculum? What you teach doesn’t have to be things that are, say, alternately useful or relevant to a child who is already sure of their future in a particular field. This means that, especially if they’re heavily unregulated and unmonitored, they don’t have to teach things that are true. Sure, the kid is gonna suffer for it when they go to College and find that they’re the only person who thinks Christopher Columbus discovered The District of Columbia 70 years ago, but that’s their problem. Right? They’ll learn the truth eventually, right?
Now, I’m not saying Betsy DeVos wants to teach lies to our children. I don’t think she’s that malicious. I do think, however, that her strategy of deregulating private schools, funneling public funding to them, and expecting the public schools to find other sources of funding will, amongst other things, allow people to do just that. We live in an age where parents are taking their kids out of school because they’re being taught the Earth is round. Imagine if a bunch of flat-earthers got together to make a private school where their science class only taught flat Earth with the sort of poisonous dogma of a preacher. Imagine there were no regulations about that. Imagine that because of DeVos’ programs, some of the kids who would be going to public school are instead sent to Flat Earth Elementary. Their parents could take them out of the school if they found out, but because all the funding that was supposed to go to public schools went to the voucher programs, the local public school district is absolutely failing. Not enough staff for too many students, no money for updated books or equipment, you know, all the fun stuff that comes along with defunding education. The parents are stuck between their children being taught wrong, or being taught barely anything at all. And that’s if they found out. What if the kids just never mentioned that’s what they learned, until it was too late? What if this was because their teacher told them that their parents were also lied to and in on the conspiracy, and they should never be trusted? This damage to the child’s mind isn’t necessarily irreversible, but it can be very difficult to undo - and how Orwellian is the word “re-education”? This is the world DeVos would create.
Further, and more importantly, her focus on vouchers and how she says things about how she sees herself as “advanc[ing] God’s Kingdom” on Earth, she wants children to go to Christian schools. Which is starting to skirt the separation of church and state. See, in this country, you have a First Amendment right to believe whatever religion you want and to not have other people try and force theirs on you in the public sphere. I believe this to be a very good thing. But see, she really wants every child, be they Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu or Sikh or Uniformitarian or Wiccan or whatever else to receive a Christian education, in the hopes it will convert them.
I get the feeling that if they could just teach their religions in public school, people like DeVos wouldn’t be interested in “school choice” at all.
Let me be clear here. If an informed Hindu parent wants to send their child to a Christian school because they feel that school has a better curriculum in general, and they’re okay with their kid learning about Christ, that’s their right and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it. I do, however, have a problem with public money being spent to do that, and I have a huge problem with that parent being forced into the situation against their will. I would feel the same about it if the religions were reversed - Christians shouldn’t be forced to learn Hinduism on public money. I don’t care what religion is doing it, none of them get to impose themselves on other people’s children who don’t want it, especially on the public dollar.
Real quick, I’m aware there are a large subset of people who believe that America isn’t just a nation of majority Christian people, but a Christian Nation, founded on the Laws of the Bible for Christian folk. This is wrong. I don’t have time to give a full education on this, but it should at least be understood that the Founding Fathers were largely Deists, not Christians, and that when they wrote “Congress shall make no law resting the establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof (Amendment 1),” what they meant was to build a wall of separation between Church and State. Their words, not mine. Like it or not, believe whatever morally you want about it, that’s a fact, and part of the fact means that here in America we don’t get to use public money to promote religion. Again, I think this is a good thing. The spiritual beliefs of a soul are its business, and no one else’s.
Betsy DeVos thinks otherwise, and that’s why I have such a beef with her. She wants to weaken public schools to bolster her envisioned Kingdom on Earth, bringing more souls to Jesus regardless of how much that violates their right to believe otherwise. And she is okay stripping regulations that protect kids from lies and deceptive oversimplifications in order to do it.
All of this said, she isn’t an irredeemably evil human being. When Trump committed the Jan 6th Insurrection, DeVos actually resigned in protest, which is something I can at least respect her enough to mention. Her motivation comes from a place of wanting to better the world, it’s just what she believes about how that should be done is wrong and, in my opinion, harmful.
So, Betsy DeVos is a wealthy heiress with a conservative agenda to privatize schools, who never had experience working with public schools directly, and who used her time in office to weaken the Department of Education. She does, however, have principles and a soul. What next?
Jared Kushner is, on the face of it, a perfect example of nepotism. He is the husband of Trump’s daughter, who was given the position of the Office of American Innovation, a title that didn’t exist before or since, and Senior Advisor to the President. I’ll leave the depth of those charges for you to decide, but let’s start with what he did before the job.
Jared seems to be a quiet man. Those close to him describe him as intensely quiet, a good listener and “uncluttered in his mind, which allows him to filter some things out.” He doesn’t talk much, so we don’t have his words to go on. This makes him a bit of an enigma. But even an enigma can be unraveled. So let’s look at what the man has done.
Mostly real-estate stuff. He seemed to do pretty well at it too, making large profit margins on sales. He even dabbled in news for a bit, buying The New York Observer and turning it into a tabloid that he occasionally used to smear his rivals. While he certainly did make a profit, he lost a lot of good will with previous readers for this change.
Important to note is that Jared was a lifelong democrat, up until Daddy Donny started getting into politics. He was also very apolitical, with seemingly no interest in running for any office and was content with running his real-estate empire. But when he decided to help, he was considered Trump’s closest confidant, and so began their partnership.
Trump then started giving him jobs. The first job he gave him was running the campaign. Which, again, Kushner seemed to do very efficiently. He ran Trump all the way to the White House while only spending 59% of what Clinton did. Of course, there are complexities there worth examining, but I think it’s safe to say he was doing at least something right.
Then, Trump got into office. He was set in charge of Trump’s transition, and was also given a Top Secret Security Clearance so he could hear the daily security briefings. Then, the jobs started to pile up.
See, Mr. Kushner was put in charge of the Office for American Innovation. This office was created to “make recommendations to the President on policies and plans that improve Government operations and services, improve the quality of life for Americans now and in the future, and spur job creation”, mostly focusing on lessons learned from the private sector. What this meant was that Jared was put in charge of things from job creation to fixing the veteran’s office to solving the opioid crisis to upgrading IT infrastructure to making peace in the Middle East. He was even asked to “fix the Federal Government,” whatever that means. This would be a tough ask for the most capable statesmen, and Jared…isn’t.
He even got put in charge of a “shadow task force” to help fight the Corona Virus, secondary to Pence’s official one. He would then go on to use this to make sure the medical supplies the state was buying were coming from Trump’s friends, rather than experienced vendors.
Yeah, ol’ Jared had a few conflicts of interest. He never fully divested himself from his interest in Kushner Companies, or his wife’s brand, so he eagerly used that to enrich himself, like when he and his wife were able to get their chinese trademark fast-tracked. Nothing too serious, but enough that I think it’s worth mentioning because it is still reprehensible.
I could summarize more of what he did, but it mostly falls like that. For instance, he used WhatsApp for what was supposed to be work-related communication, which is, y’know, bad, but it doesn’t seem like he was spouting state secrets over it, so stupid, not evil. That seems to have been most of his role. Quietly sitting there, trying to solve the entire government’s worth of problems, and occasionally using his position to get some extra money. Then January 6th happened.
After the January 6th riots, Jared seems…uneager to continue in politics. He spoke for 6 hours to the committee, wrote a memoir, and seems interested in at least trying for that Middle East Peace thing he was supposed to do - though in his unique, business-man way. But he’s keeping his distance from Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns.
In short, Jared Kushner was a reasonably competent businessman who occasionally makes mistakes and does evil business things, but doesn’t seem to want to burn the world. He also, notably, had no experience in politics at all until Trump dumped the entire government’s worth of problems on him. While not necessarily the moderating influence leftists hoped he would be, he was stable enough that he himself never caused much damage. He probably thought step-daddy was going to give him a nice cushy do-nothing job, and instead got overwhelmed with way too much work and just wanted to be left ALONE, thank you.
Trump sold himself on a platform of fighting for the little guy against big banks, so it’s weird that he would choose former Goldman-Sachs bank CIO Steve Mnuchin to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Not an unusual lie for a politician, but the kind of thing that should’ve made everyone smell bullshit from the get-go.
His political experience before his appointment to the Treasury was…nothing. Exclusively donating to pro-business candidates. He was more interested in running his hedge funds and what not. So Trump put him in charge of the entire nation’s economy.
This is a bad idea. The private and public sectors are two very different things, especially when it comes to profit. More on that with our next pick, but Mnuchin was all about cutting taxes to the wealthy, then acting surprised when that didn’t magically give the government more money somehow. He was also a bit of a jerk? He used government airplanes for his personal business, yelled at teenagers and college kids, and just, in general, was a bit of a pill.
His name also appeared in the Paradise Papers, as one of the many people who protected their money in offshore accounts. I just want to point out that this was the man Trump thought capable of running the country’s treasury. A scumbag.
When January 6th happened, Mnuchin was one of the many people considering use of the 25th Amendment to evict Trump from the White House for what he did.
So, Mnuchin is a terrible person who didn’t care about politics, just his business, ruined the economy and padded his wallet. In the end, even he left Trump and was one of the voices hoping to get rid of him. So he has a soul.
Also, he financed the LEGO Movies, so that’s pretty cool, I guess.
Louis DeJay ran a company called New Breed Logistics (now XPO Logistics) where he made his staff work in 100 Fahrenheit warehouses with no air conditioning and overworked. You know, the kind of awful conditions that cause miscarriages. He also didn’t pay them. So yeah, not a nice dude.
Then 2020 happened, and, see, Trump had a seat to fill on the USPS Board of Governors. Well, actually, he had 5, but the law says that only 5 members can be from any one party, so he can’t directly appoint any more Republicans himself. Like hell he was going to appoint a democrat, the Republicans had spent the entire Obama administration ignoring Obama’s picks, he wasn’t about to hire someone that might interfere with his election interference plans! But the Postmaster General, he’s someone who Trump can’t appoint - but the governors can. And they’re loyal to him, so all he has to do is give them a name. But who to fill it with? Then he remembered Louis DeJoy, that guy who gave $700,000 to his campaign. He worked with shipping, he’d be perfect!
Of course some people had some reservations. When Trump was given two separate lists of competent people who were ready for the job, DeJoy wasn’t on any of them. This is partly because as the owner of New Breed Logistics, he was considered potentially conflicted. A fact that DeJoy immediately went on to confirm by investing in competing companies, like Amazon and subcontracting to his own business.
And of course, all of this ignores that working in the private sector is not the same as the public sector. The United States Postal Service is not meant to make a profit, it is meant to be a public service that we contribute our taxes to to make sure we all get mail. Because, as it turns out, it will never be profitable to ship heavy packages to the backend of nowhere, but a functional and good society still requires that. Grandma shouldn’t have to die because her medicine won’t be delivered to her house because “sorry, it’s just not in the budget to give you your mail everyday.” If the post office can be profitable, that’s great, it’s always good to get more public funding, but that isn’t the point and it certainly shouldn’t be treated like it is.
This seems to be a particular poison that affects the Republican mind. That public services should be profitable businesses and not, you know, public services. The idea that a profit motive should be anywhere near a public service or human welfare is absolutely abhorrent. The whole point of public services is that they’re provided for your benefit and while they themselves might not be profitable, they allow for other things to be. Jeff Bezos wouldn’t have half the money he did if the government didn’t pay for the roads his trucks deliver his products on, but building and maintaining roads is an expense that can’t be directly measured against that profit. You can’t expect the process of building the road itself to be profitable. And yet, apparently, these people want it to be.
Making it even weirder is how Republicans keep passing laws that make it harder to do that? The Post Office used to be able to make a good amount of money by providing basic banking services that could easily be used by poor folk, but Nixon canceled that. Then, the post office had a ridiculous amount of other demands put on it that no other public service has, such as paying for employee’s pensions years in advance (thanks Dubya) that seriously hurt their bottom line. I have no idea why they hate the postal service so much. Probably because it costs tax dollars and tax dollars are, to them, inherently evil or something.
But that’s a bit off topic. I’m talking about DeJoy here, and what matters is he also ascribes to this stupid notion. So he immediately started making cuts to try and get the post offices profitable again. Or that’s the presumed explanation because he never explained anything, he just started canceling overtime, banning late trips to deliver mail, and destroying over 600 high speed sorting machines.
Surprising no one, this slowed down the mail considerably. Not only this, he passed a bunch of rules that just made ballots harder to move. They couldn’t be upgraded automatically to priority if they were sent some other way like they were before, and post officers were no longer considered valid witnesses for signing a mail-in ballot. This, during the COVID pandemic, when mail-in voting was super important especially for people with compromised immunity. But democrats were more likely to mail-in their votes, because they were less likely to believe the bullshit conspiracy theories about COVID being fake and masks not working, so fuck ‘em.
Sound presumptuous? Maybe, but then why did he mainly take those sorting machines out of battleground states with mail-in voting laws that invalidated ballots that arrived after Election Day?
These were expensive to build but easy to maintain machines that could sort 30,000 pieces an hour. There was no other group who would buy them because they were so specialized, so they couldn’t be sold for profit (not that DeJoy even tried for that). The only thing they saved on by throwing them away was maintenance costs. OH, and the man hours it would cost to replace those machines would be even more costly than the maintenance anyway!
This whole thing was so disgraceful that DeJoy got shamed into holding off until after the election, and eventually even repealed everything he did. But by that time, the damage was done - 90% of the machines marked for trash were already removed and dismantled. The Post Office is still trying to recover from this bullcrap.
You wanna know the cherry on top of the shit cake? Because he slowed down all mail, including priority mail, there were animals who were transported by mail who died in transit because they spent days wasting in a molten warehouse with no food, no water, and no air. Admittedly this was mostly lizards and spiders and chicks, but those are still living things that are now dead because DeJoy had to mess with the post office. They died so DeJoy could make a buck. So DeJoy could feed his own narrative. So DeJoy could help his friend keep in power.
DeJoy remains in his office today, and it seems he’s done a turnabout from being a literal walking conflict of interest. For instance, he helped pass legislation that got rid of the ridiculous retirement requirement and seems to respect his office as an actual position of power instead of just a nice way to make money. He’s doing things to account for the decreased load on mailers but increase in parcel shipments in the new age of the Internet. He’s still an idiot who thinks that the post office should be a profitable business, but he’s making somewhat intelligent decisions about how to do that. That, or he’s just a suck up who does whatever his boss tells him. Hard to say.
He hasn’t talked much about Trump since Trump left office. He did testify to the Oversight Committee, but he’s pretty blaise about him, and has even talked about how being associated with “Trump this” and “Trump that” has been really annoying and he doesn’t want that to shape his time in office. Which is admirable, I guess. It’s hard to say much about him because he’s laying low.
4.0 Self Selecting for Insanity
I think that’s a good enough sample. Now, I acted like I sort of chose them at random, but I didn’t. You probably knew that, but you may not have guessed the methodology. I was actually trying to go for the middle ground. If I really wanted to make Trump look awful, I could’ve talked about, say, Bill Bar, a snake with no morals, or actual literal Nazi Sebastian Gorka, or Steve Bannon, who I’d love to personally congratulate for being the first corporal nightmare to get an oval office position. But I wanted to prove a few points, which were best made with the more moderate folks.
The first is competence. Few, if any, of the people Trump appointed had experience in their assigned field. Those that did often had tangential experience in the private sector. Which is only partially helpful.
The next, more important thing is nepotism. Even for those people who are good for the position, their skills are secondary. Sometimes, that’s politics. The choice to pick Pence to appeal to the religious vote despite his mediocre track record is an acceptable decision, the kind that I can get behind even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. But an inexcusable amount of the power he gave, he gave to his friends and family, choosing not competent actors but loyal ones. And not the good kind of loyal, where you care enough about someone to challenge them, the sycophantic kind of loyal, where you kiss an ass until it is no longer valuable to kiss. Or worse, the kind of dogmatically blind loyalty, the kind that could never be convinced he ever did anything wrong, even if he did shoot someone.
And that’s the next point. Everyone of these people has distanced themselves from Trump, or outright disavowed him. People are fleeing Trump, be they lifelong conservatives or family members, because he is just that toxic. Whether he disgusts people away or betrays them, he continuously alienates those he works with and relies on. And regardless of how you personally feel about that and about him, it means that a larger percentage of the people willing to work with him are going to be those dogmatic lunatics and sycophants.
As we’ll see, this is not a good thing.
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