You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You

 

by Pa Rock

American Voter

Donald Trump is not an "employee" of the United States in the true sense of the word.   His team manages the country according to his dictates, prejudices, and whims, but the majority of his "leadership" comes from late-night rants on social media and general shit-posting.    Trump, who weaves in and out of coherence, makes an annual salary of $400,000 plus $50,000 for office expenses, which is very low by corporate standards, though more than he can actually justify - and Trump says he donates all of that $400,000 back to the government.

But $400,000 is just chump change in American politics.  The real money comes from political donors - rich individuals, corporations, and foreign royalty and governments.   Filthy rich South African Elon Musk famously poured around $250 million (that's a quarter of a billion dollars) into the Trump campaign in 2024, and New York banking heir, Timothy Mellon, kicked in $200 million.

Miriam Adelson, the widow of gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, gave $106 million to Trump's 2024 campaign, and according to Trump (not a reliable source), she has promised to up that figure to $250 million if he runs for a third term in 2028 - something he is constitutionally prohibited from doing, but according to legal beagle Alan Dershowitz, might just be able to do anyway.  (Dershowitz has paid a social price for licking Trump's boots, and claims that his friends and neighbors on Martha's Vineyard no longer invite him to parties and other social events.  Boo-effing-hoo!). 

So if Alan Dershowitz can get Trump on the ballot, and our social and financial betters like Adelson, Mellon, and Musk, can finance a campaign far better than a public effort, and if the new plane from the Qatari royal family has been retrofitted at taxpayer expense to where it is worthy of a Trump campaign, maybe the citizens of the United States can spend four more years watching Trump doze at meetings, hurl insults at dead people, and prance around his new ballroom like slumlord royalty.  

It would be a very sad state of affairs for America and our democracy, but it could happen.   If it does, he won't be working for us.  He has never worked for us - he works for them, the donor class, the oligarchs.  They have the best access to the American presidency and the American treasury that money can buy.

As the late Molly Ivins so eloquently put it:  "You got to dance with them what brung you."  The people who bought the presidency for Donald Trump own him - they brought him to the dance - and the rest of us just pay the bills and clean up the mess when they all go home.

Happy holidays.