Month: July 2025

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Donald Trump must have thought he had it made.

His pet Congress passed his omnibus budget bill to help people in his income range at the expense of everyone else. His pet Supreme Court basically takes every judicial case against him and finds some way to say that the Constitution still exists, but it just doesn’t apply to him. He got a bureaucracy that used to help with disaster relief to create an internment camp for brown people in Florida, and call it “Alligator Alcatraz.”

For lo, Donald Trump is the One Supreme Godhead, in whom, by whom, and for whom all things are made.

He even has direct control of the Kennedy Center, for he is Music, and he writes the songs.

There was actually a pretty good article by centrist Damon Linker on the general trend towards autocracy. The gist of it is that there is a lot of stuff that’s already been in the system (like the 1807 Insurrection Act) that could be used to create a dictatorship but did not because presidents previously acted in good faith. But just as there was no clear line separating the Weimar Republic from Nazi Germany, any change to the system would most likely happen laterally through existing laws and precedents and not by a clean break towards autocracy.

The punch line is: “How will we know when we’ve gotten there? Perhaps only when we come to realize the extent to which our laws—and the Constitution—have already been reinterpreted to be compatible with formerly unthinkable acts.”

This country is going to have to take radical action to reform its government. That doesn’t mean nationalizing McDonald’s and turning it vegan. And it doesn’t mean writing legislation specifically against Jeff Bezos to punish him for being rich.

It does mean that if Congress does pass some bullshit statist law (like say, banning TikTok) and the Supreme Court agrees 9-0 that the ban stands, then the ban needs to be enforced as ordered, not postponed indefinitely because TikTok bribed Trump, Trump is our president, and in our country, we let the president do whatever he wants, the law be damned.

THAT level of monarchical corruption is bigger than anything the Republicans are doing with ICE. That at least was authorized by the One Big Bullshit Bill. But Trump defies both “his” Congress and “his” Supreme Court because we just let the president do whatever he wants.

But that needs to be changed, not least because all those Republicans who cheer and jeer for their Messiah aren’t going to feel so good when some other president who isn’t Trump (it might even be a Republican) tries to go in different directions and they think they need to stop him. Like Congress or the Supreme Court might raise an objection and then the new guy can just pull out Trump vs. United States and tell John Roberts “You see this thing you wrote here? Where’s my due deference, bitch?”

That’s the problem. The radical agenda to reshape this government doesn’t just assume that Republicans will get to run this country forever, it assumes that Trump will be president forever and he will never die and he will never age, even though everybody can see him getting slower, more tired and more confused every week. But the setup is basically built around Trump and his personalist Mob boss approach to the world, and once that’s gone, it’s not going to work the same way with someone else.

Especially since Trump’s signature accomplishment was an omnibus budget bill that took benefits away from constituents in primarily red states, which he could only pull off because everyone in the cult loves him so much, but then Elon Musk told us that Trump is in the Epstein Files, which apparently nobody knew before now!

That’s the goofy thing. When I mentioned Elon’s post a while ago, the public reaction to it seemed to be kinda muted. I mean, why not? I thought everybody already knew this. Didn’t the cult already know Trump was a convicted felon? Didn’t they elect him anyway? If they didn’t know about Jeffrey Epstein, they must be dumber than I thought. Shows me for underestimating them.

Of course the real issue is that it probably would have blown over if Trump could just play cool and keep his mouth shut. And you know how that always goes.

Like having FBI heads Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who’d done so much to press for the release of the files before getting into government, suddenly turn around and say there was nothing to see and Epstein didn’t kill himself.

And then Pam Bondi’s Justice Department said there WERE no Epstein Files.

And when questioned about the whole thing at a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump lashed out at a reporter, asking why anybody would care.

And then, on July 12, Trump went on Truf Censhal and posted… THIS thing… https://x.com/BillyM2k/status/1944183426598257091

Wow. With a poker face like that, it’s no wonder Trump bankrupted six casinos.

Trump is the president of the United States. He and Pam Bondi have access to all the documents. He could release the Epstein Files at any time.

If he can’t, it’s because he’s IN them.

And even the paste-eaters in the Church of Trump are not yet so stupid as to where they can’t make basic deductions. They can still add two and two to make four. For Trump to survive, he has to convince them that two and two make five. That the Epstein Files that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino did so much to demand, the files that the regime made a big deal about publicizing with White House ceremonies to hand out files to Trumpworld influencers, those files not only don’t exist and never existed, they were all made up by Hillary and Biden and Obama. And in this case it may be too much to ask, mainly because the whole premise of the Church of Trump is that their Lord and Savior is saving us all from the corruption of the Deep State, and all the evidence seems to indicate that he’s part of it.

Now, I personally am not going to believe things have changed until all the Trumpniks hate their Messiah as much as the rest of us do and they go out in the street and protest him like the rest of us do and come out in public and demand that he and his Mob be GONE.

And if it ever does get to that point, we’re gonna need to decide what to do with these people. Trump and all of his underlings who’ve done nothing but break the law under color of authority. Where are we gonna put them all when they’re awaiting trial?
Hey, isn’t there that new prison in Florida?

It may not seem like it now, but I still consider myself a right-winger.

Like, I actually agree with the Trump Party that we need to kill the Department of Education. After all, almost all the people who vote for Trump are products of American public education, so clearly it’s not doing any good.

And I believe that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right to bear arms and we need this because we can’t trust the government. Especially when it’s run by Republicans.

And I believe that our culture will be overrun if we don’t get a strict immigration policy. After all, the Iroquois didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

So in principle I should be on board with what the Trump Party is trying to do in Washington. If I’m not, it’s because I’ve not only seen how Trump operates in practice, (for more than eight years counting his time as monarch-in-exile puppeteering the Congress) I’ve seen how “fiscal conservatives” actually did things in the years before Trump assimilated the Republican Party.

As part of his personalist agenda to fuse the identity of the American government with his own ego, cult leader and incidental president Donald Trump demanded that Republicans pass his “One Big Beautiful Bill” in time for him to sign it on July 4. As it turned out, it was all Republicans could do to pass it in the Senate despite having 53 votes. In the end it went to a 50-50 tie on July 1 that had to be broken by Vice President JD Vance. In the Constitution, breaking tie votes in the Senate is the only real job that the Vice President has, other than succeeding the president in the event that he dies, which I’m sure JD Vance is hoping for as eagerly as the rest of the planet.

Why was it so hard for Trump’s devout worshipers to pass this bill? Because a lot of it hurts their constituents. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska only voted for it after Republicans specifically created exemptions for food stamp cuts in her state, but she still accepted Medicaid cuts in the final package. Many of those cuts would endanger funding for hospitals in rural communities with little medical service.

Yet despite all of the slashing to services the bill is projected to increase the budget deficit by billions, because it makes permanent the Trump tax cuts from his first term, which otherwise would have expired this year, while further increasing tax cuts for the upper percentile while eliminating tax breaks for the working poor and even upper middle class. And it further increases the deficit with billions in increases for the Pentagon and ICE.

All of this is supposedly based on the dogma that lower taxes will actually lead to greater capital generation and thus more money for the government, but what we are seeing already from Trump 2: Electric Boogaloo is a contraction. The Commerce Department reported last Thursday that the country’s gross domestic product declined by 0.5 percent in the first quarter, above the projected figure of a 0.2% decrease. Consumer spending growth was only 0.5 percent, down from a full 4 percent increase in the last quarter of 2024.

Capitalism works because we think we’re all going to get something out of it, and government policy under the Trump regime is to have a government that spends all of its money on catering to the donor class (including Trump and his inner circle) while increasing funding for the security state that Trump needs to deal with protests against the fact that capitalism is no longer working for everybody. And meanwhile as revenue increases for the upper percentile, the workers and middle class that the economy actually depends on will have less money overall (especially as they have to spend more on health care) and that will lead to a loss of consumer spending and investments, which will hurt that managerial class in the long run.

Mike Brock, quoted from CW Daily on June 30, said: “We are witnessing a capitalist class so drunk on its power that it has become incapable of recognizing its interests…so contemptuous of the institutions that created their wealth that they are destroying the conditions that make capitalism possible.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is actually one of the smartest commentators I’ve seen lately, had words to say about this in his July 1 Substack, basically on the subject of whether intelligence means making a lot of money. Quote: “There’s no intelligence in gathering great wealth if it means long-term destruction of the community. If you make money manufacturing an item that pollutes the local water table and causes cancer among local residents, that may be “smart” in the short term because you can take the money and live elsewhere. But you’ve also created a precedent for others to do the same until you’ve perpetuated climate change that makes water scarce, produces fewer crops, and creates greater poverty. The country is weaker for your children and their children. Even generational wealth has its limitations if the country is weak. That shows a lack of foresight which proves a deficit of intelligence. Of course, those living in mansions, sailing on yachts, and vacationing on the Riviera don’t see it that way. Which proves the point. They lack the intelligence to see the bigger picture which is the catastrophic effects of their myopia.”

But maybe an example will demonstrate what all of this means for anybody who relies on government services.

I work at a call center. This is in fact the same call center I mentioned in 2020 when I “endorsed” Trump’s re-election. And for obvious reasons I am still not going to give too many details. Everybody I work with is wonderful, it’s at least been steady work and more money than I previously made before in my life, which says more about my career prospects than I want to admit. But January we were all told that all of the customer care phone positions were being phased out. In fact my supervisor up to that point told us that she was one of the first people being let go. The only reason I and my co-workers are staying on, ostensibly through October, is because we work the graveyard (overnight) shift and they still need coverage. Frankly, half of the reason I wanted that shift is because I knew it had guaranteed job security. The drawback being that when somebody calls for emergency services at 4 am local time, I rarely get a supervisor on the phone because companies seem to think that people only suffer property damage from 9 am to 5 pm.

This drawdown also means that when we had a small pool of agents to begin with, there is no slack. I rarely take paid time off because there is only staffing for two agents on weekends which means only one person would be handling office emails and calls.

Well, the agent I normally work with on the weekends is no longer able to work from home, due to a home issue that I am not privy to know, and while they have a replacement to handle the call queue, she is not skilled to handle the email queue that we also have to deal with. This meant that in the last weekend I had no one to help me handle the email queue that had ballooned to almost triple digits because apparently no one was handling it on my days off either.

They still did not have anyone skilled for emails on Monday, which meant for the third day in a row I had to handle the entire email queue with no assistance. On a Monday. On the last day of the month. Which, like the first day of the month, means that every household in the People’s Republic of China, AND Taiwan, and North AND South Korea needs to be calling and emailing customer service every single minute for any reason or no reason at all.

So this meant that while I had no one to help me cover the backlog of emails, which eventually reached over 200 by midnight, I also had more than 80 calls backed up in the queue well past 7:30 Pacific, at which time swing shift left and I only had one person helping with the call queue. Which meant that we didn’t get calls done until 11:30 pm, at which point I still had to handle 200 emails in less than four hours.

Why? Because Jesus Christ is real. And He wanted to show me that He loves me more than anyone else in the whole wide world.

Or more realistically, because the company has been downscaling its operations for months now despite the fact that the customer base has not gotten any smaller, which means that when one of the regulars for the 24 hour line was not able to attend, there was no backup called because having properly skilled coverage for a Monday on the last day of the month was not that fucking important.

And this is what happens when the bean counters decide they can shave pennies by cutting back on manpower, without telling the customer base. Who, in California, seemed to be under the impression that June 30 was a state holiday called Let’s All Synchronize Our Watches And Cram The Customer Service Number With Water Line Break Emergency Calls Day.

Why did I bring up this anecdote?

We have been told by the right wing, in its more sober moments, that government needs to be run “like a business.” Which runs into the issue of how business is actually being run. That anecdote was an example of how management is running business “like a business.” That is, the directors are strip-mining all resources to maximize executive profits in inverse proportion to employee compensation and customer satisfaction. And with the Trump regime and its pet political party, we are seeing how rich guys plan to run government “like a business”: Into the ground.

The difference is that this works, sorta, with capitalism in that you can always go some place else to get private services and there is turnover precisely because someone else is able to capitalize on demand and provide services when other companies lose service quality or go bankrupt. What happens when this “management” approach happens to the only federal government we have?

We’re about to find out.