Recent news from Trump World is beyond astonishment.
- On April 23, 2025, Donald Trump announced he would host a special dinner at Mar-a-Lago for the top 250 holders of his meme coin and provide an inside scoop on planned regulatory policies affecting cryptocurrency (hint, there won't be any cryptocurrency regulation) and offer a special private White House tour to the top 25 holders.
- On May 2, 2025, Donald Trump posted an AI generated photo on his OWN social media platform depicting himself as the Pope, as if to say "I run America, I run the world, why don't I just run the Catholic Church as well?", maybe as a joke or…?
- On May 2, 2025, DHS head Tom Homan publicly threatened Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers with arrest and prosecution for potentially "interfering" with federal immigration officers who show up on state property and interact with state workers. Evers merely instructed state employees to involve the legal team of their department if contacted by federal officials to ensure they complied with state and federal law.
- On May 4, 2025, Donald Trump appeared in a taped interview on Meet the Press and answers a question about whether if, in light of recent court rulings against his executive orders, he needs to follow the Constitution and allow due process, he answered with "I don't know."
- On May 4, 2025, Donald Trump posted a comment stating he is directing the federal government to re-open Acatraz prison as part of his efforts to alter how American handles its most violent criminals.
The meme coin promotion is a political corruption hat trick even the worst of Trump's predecessors could not have possibly imagined or concocted. The ownership contest spiked the price of the meme coin which creates wealth for Trump. The spike in sales of the coin (at any price, up or down) create transaction fees paid to Trump for additional income. And the contest allows Trump to deploy another scheme for identifying true believers for future exploitation while also packing Mar-a-Lago with 250 people for a weekend at $2,000 per room list price. That's $500,000 right there per night. You didn’t think Trump was going to invite them all down to crash at his place and bend a knee for free, did you?
It only takes a few seconds of thought for connections between these events to become apparent. The first obvious connection with the crypto coin scam could be imagined as a bad Hollywood mashup between a second remake of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the Bernie Madoff biopic The Wizard of Lies. Trump coins serve as the Wonka bars hawked to the public seeking a chance at a "golden ticket" to visit Mar-a-Lago and get first dibs on hearing about any policy changes on cryptocurrency, putting money in Trump's pocket three different ways (see above). But there's no need for anyone to buy the coins for insight into administration strategy on crypo currencies. The Trump Administration has explicitly stated it is halting ALL criminal investigations into ANY cases that were pending or under investigation regarding crypto currency. PERIOD. End of story.
Unlike Willie Wonka however, there's no wholesome ulterior motive in running the golden ticket contest to find the one wholesome player to take over the empire. The meme coint contest is simply another way for Trump to grift his own supporters and collect intelligence on who the wealthiest, dumbest bootlickers are among his supporters that can be counted on for future favors and extortion.
Unlike Bernie Madoff, the Trump meme coin scheme isn't truly a traditional Ponzi scheme victimizing innocent friends and family without anyone knowing. The scam is a combination of bribery and money-laundering that is completely obvious to the participants and the larger public. The participants don't care, however, because the value of money funneled through the illusion of coin purchases is far exceeded by the value they think they will derive from publicly demonstrating fealty to Trump via the only yardstick that really matters – his wallet. And unlike Bernie Madoff, no one involved thinks they have any legal worry from the scheme since the guy accepting the bribes thinks he has the ultimate golden ticket from the Supreme Court, a Republican controlled Congress and the Constitution.
From the USSC, Trump enjoys a presumption of innocence from evidence gathering and investigation of anything he claims to be "official duties." From a spineless majority of Republicans in Congress, he faces no immediate threat of sanction much less impeachment for DOZENS of blatantly criminal acts and violations of his oath to "faithfully execute" the law and uphold the Constitution. Even when he publicly states on television he isn't sure he is obligated to provide due process in American courts, not a word is heard from Republicans anywhere in government. From the Constitution, Trump enjoys unlimited pardon power that can short-circuit any criminal investigation of anyone under him he wishes to protect.
At this point, there can be zero doubt that a painful financial contraction is coming. No rational person would argue that the American economy prior to January 20, 2025 represented a sane, equitable or one hundred percent ethical environment. That is impossible to argue given the dominance of $300 billion dollar and up corporations and the share of wealth controlled by the top one percent. However, the actions of the Trump Administration since January 20, 2025 have explicitly confirmed there isn't a single sane person holding any control within the Trump Administration nor any sane person with influence on those in power.
More importantly, there isn't a single lever at the disposal of government – spending, taxing, regulation – the Trump Administration plans to use to stabilize employment, tame inflation or ensure availability of basic products and markets for consumers and producers in America. Instead, every action taken by the Trump Administration can be mapped to only four possible motivations:
- a desire to exact pain on persons or entities (domestic or foreign) Trump hates
- a desire to grift private family wealth from business segments dependent upon favorable government policies
- a desire to continuously generate shorting / insider selling opportunities for cronies by continually shocking financial markets
- a compulsion to be the only name in the news EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY
"I Don't Know" (If We Have a Constitution)
Trump's other actions related to immigration, court orders, the roles and responsibilities of state governments and prison strategy all point to a single observation... America is already operating in a post-Constitutional dystopia. A Constitution only provides value if combined with a judiciary and administrative branch who both put the rule of law above immediate tactical political goals and petty squabbles and combined with a public that understands WHY the rights stated in the Constitution are there.
Why is Trump allowed to get away with publicly conveying outright contempt for following Constitutionally mandated processes? Partly because the judiciary has been corrupted and corroded over the past forty years with extremist dogma pushed by the Federalist Society, an organization formed after Republicans failed to get Robert Bork on the Supreme Court during the Reagan era to ensure the next Bork-like candidates all passed the gauntlet and reached the bench.
That effort paid off, not just on the Supreme Court (all SIX of the Republican appointees since 1990 still sitting) but across the entire judiciary. Even if that fraction is only twenty to thirty percent of current federal judges, that is enough of a presence to allow venue shopping for particular issues to bypass normal sanity that would emerge from a more balanced judiciary and get extremist policies argued all the way to the USSC and ruled on in favor of extremism. And even if a case takes years to reach the court, flawed rulings at the lower layers have the effect of slowing down proper law enforcement which is often as effective as no enforcement or having an opposing policy in law.
Trump is also escaping consequences because a super-majority of the gerrymandered Republican majority controlling Congress is equally hostile to those Constitutional principals if they conflict with their religious extremist social views or their peasants-be-damned hostility to anyone not in the one percent.
Ultimately though, Trump is escaping consequences because the majority of Americans, even counting those who voted against him, still do not comprehend the true damage being done by the wholesale dismantlement of crucial federal agencies.
The average American understands NOTHING about banking and financial markets. So what if a bunch of internet geeks want to swap digital widgets online and lose their money? Because BANKS want to make money on that trading and will inevitibably drag YOUR bank deposits into their gambles in this space which WILL eventually explode, risking YOUR money with theirs.
The average American has forgotten the true meaning of innocent until proven guilty, despite a decade of television series regarding wrongful convictions and rigged DNA test results affecting decades of cases in multiple counties. Why should I care if some Venezuelan gang members get kidnapped off the street and flown to a prison in El Salvador? Keeps my family safe… Because these people are NOT being given due process and there are MULTIPLE cases of people with zero ties to any crimes being swept up and disappeared. If you have a Mexican sounding last name or a tattoo, YOU literally could be next.
The average American, like Trump, may not understand that one of the most fundamental responsibilities of any government is to not just enact laws, enforce them, prosecute offenders and adjudicate those cases fairly and consistently without prejudice but to handle punishment for those convicted as well. If some drug-smuggling scumball gets arrested and convicted, why should I care where he gets incarcerated? If you've already displayed contempt for due process, you likely also fail to comprehend the idea of wrongful convictions and thus fail to comprehend the moral aspects of hiring out the "punishment phase" of justice.
Without even arguing about the FORMS of punishment that are appropriate, doesn't it seem inherently wrong for a government to enact some law banning X, hunt down any thought to have violated that law, convict them then expel them from the country? This isn't a reference to illegal immigrants committing US crimes on US soil, being caught, convicted and returned to their home country or some other country. This is about AMERICAN CITIZENS being convicted of crimes and being sent to prisons in foreign countries. Trump has stated he wants to treat American citizens this way as well. That's why he referenced Alcatraz. Not because it would just be additional capacity but explicitly because it had a reputation as a particularly cruel facility. With Trump, cruelty isn't a side effect of any particular policy, it is often one of the primary goals.
The average American voter doesn't seem to be processing that concept yet that is exactly what Trump is proposing for American citizens in American prisons that he doesn't like. Trump has no problem with that. It's simply a shorthand for him to telegraph his toughness and it's shorthand that is easy for people to pick up that short-circuits any understanding of the core issue. Even for those convicted and imprisoned, those prisoners still have human rights. Sending selected categories of prisoners out of the country and forgetting about them is an abandonment of that moral responsibility. Ethically and morally, this is no different than Iran outsourcing terrorism to Hamas or Putin outsourcing major campaigns of the war against Ukraine to Wagner Group, a private corporation.
Is there some way of breaking this mode of thinking about prisoners' rights, even when people think that a "few bad convictions is the price for being a hard ass on violent criminals?" Ponder this. Roughly 3175 convictions have been overturned in the US since 1989 based upon new DNA testing or other facts coming to light about prosecutorial abuses, evidence fabrication or incompetent defense counsel. If the idea of possibly 3175 innocent people sitting in jail for decades isn't disturbing, what about the fact that this statistic means there are 3175 other actual individuals who committed these crimes who were NOT prosecuted and punished because the system thought it got the right person or purposely railroaded an innocent person to bolster their own statistics and career?
A Path To Recovery?
Any glance at social media since January 20, 2025 highlights the dilemma facing the United States. Every time the Trump Administration does something outrageous and a court eventually engages and puts a temporary restraining order on an action or explicitly issues an injunction with prejudice, liberal leaning outlets immediately post commentary essentially conveying "At last, the courts are weighing in and they're putting a stop to the madness". It isn't clear what the intended effect of this type of coverage is but a possible effect is that readers / viewers pause a moment, take a breath and conclude that this nightmare is coming to a halt so the country can begin returning to normal.
This is delusional thinking.
Recent rulings from courts, including the Supreme Court, are still MEANINGLESS. From the previous analysis above, the country still exists in a state where
- The President has public contempt for the law and the Constitution and the President controls the vast majority of resources who actually enforce court orders.
- The President has appointed leaders in his Administration with equal contempt for the law and Constitution.
- The judiciary is similarly "infected" with enough extremists with authoritarian sympathies to allow a large number of criminal actions to escape punishment, further poisoning the public's faith in equal justice.
- The idea that the damage will stop after the November 2026 elections when a frustrated public return Democrats to power is laughable. Even if they win both the House and Senate, they won't win two thirds of the Senate required for an impeachment conviction.
- Even if voters suddenly flip the House and Senate and provide a two-thirds majority in the Senate so Trump can be impeached, who's next in succession? Vance? He's proven to be as corrupt and authoritarian as Trump. Mike Johnson? He conspired with Trump in 2020 and continues to genuflect to Trump rather than filling his role as Speaker of the House reflecting its Constitutional prerogatives and duties. Who might Vance pick as a VP if he became President? He has the same talent problem as Trump. No one with two brain cells and a conscience is willing to be associated with him, drastically impairing the talent pool.
It is not at all evident that the institutions of the United States will survive to January 1, 2027 to put out the fires being lit across the country today. More pressure is required on Congressional Republicans TODAY, and every day going forward, to attempt to force a reckoning with what they are enabling and to trigger a reversal much sooner.
WTH
