欧博百家乐Kelly McParland: Trump behaving like a self
For a guy who peddled glossy golden high-top sneakers and a line of superhero trading cards bearing his image during his run for the presidency, accepting a “free” US$400 million flying palace from a foreign country eager for his favour is just another day at the office for Donald Trump.
In Trump’s case, the office is the White House, and the luxury jet he’s been offered by the Qatari government is just more evidence of the high favour in which he’s held around the world, according to official spokespeople. That the Trump family business is building a luxury golf and beachside residential development in Qatar in a deal including a company owned by the Qatari government is beside the point. As is the fact the president is accepting the gift from a foreign power while prosecuting a tariff war launched on the premise that Americans should do their business with fellow Americans — for the sake of the nation — rather than favouring unAmerican competitors.
Doesn’t matter. In a country where each new day starts with another headline about the latest capers in the Oval Office, it’s just another big ho-hum. Remember last week when he wanted to tariffize the movies, as if anyone could define precisely what made a film American when virtually every such venture involves input from around the globe? Or the sudden need to rescue white people from South Africa, where they make up just eight per cent of the population but own 75 per cent of the private land?
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What’s notable about the Qatari commotion is not that it’s worse than any other hundred-or-so Trumpian brouhahas, but how little these episodes disturb the placid surface of American indifference. As the president was welcoming the exceedingly generous freebie from an authoritarian monarchy where political parties are banned, his Republican disciples in Congress were releasing their plans to slash up to US$880 billion in spending, largely targeted at the Medicaid program that provides health coverage to low-income adults, children, pregnant women, the elderly and people with disabilities.
The Congressional Budget Office calculates the plan would remove coverage for about eight million people who can’t afford their own. New costs would be imposed on those earning above the federal poverty level, which starts at US$1,300 a month for individuals.
The disparity between the president’s good fortune and that of his flock, many of them no doubt firm Maga-ites, was noted, but caused no serious disturbance. And no wonder, it’s not like anything’s changed.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the richest 19 households in the U.S. gained an extra US$1 trillion in wealth last year. More, it said, than Switzerland’s entire economy. The country’s top 1 per cent now hold 31 per cent of its wealth, against 3 per cent for the bottom half of the population. From outside its borders, the U.S. may bear a worrying resemblance to the Bourbon nobility just before the French Revolution, but within its walls, America’s aristocracy appears perfectly safe. The last time Americans stormed anything, it was in support of the very administration — all covered by generous, subsidized health benefits — that demands they start paying their own way for doctor visits.
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That insouciance evidently extends to the president’s increasingly blatant use of his position as a means to further enrich himself and his family. The Qatari resort deal is just one of an impressive collection of money-making schemes in the works for the first family and those who have successfully cozied their way into the circle of friendship.
Trump governs by whim and has a well-established practice of reversing, re-reversing and possibly re-re-reversing himself under pressure, so the fate of the Qatari gift remains up in the air. But it fits his steady reduction of U.S. ethics to the subterranean levels he inhabits.
Anne Applebaum, the journalist and historian known for her work on autocracies, has taken to collecting samples of the administration’s self-serving dealings. Examples in her Kleptocracy Tracker range from the unashamedly blatant — an ultra-private club in Washington launched by Donald Trump Jr. and friendly mega-donors where supplicants can pay up big time to win the favour of presidential surrogates — to the byzantine, which is the only way to describe the web of interconnected interests behind the billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and related dealings that have immensely increased the Trump family’s net worth since he took office.
Trump is due to host the biggest buyers of his family’s own crypto coin, the $TRUMP, at an “ultra-exclusive private VIP Reception” and gala dinner this month. The coin, launched just as its namesake was reclaiming the White House, hit US$5.5 billion within hours of launch, much of the buying reportedly by foreign interests with much to gain by proximity to the presidential ear. Is it likely to cause significant damage to the president’s standing? Not likely. These things pass largely undisturbed across the American consciousness, like a flock of birds crossing at high altitude, noticed, perhaps, but shrugged off as just another matter of no great significance.
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A country that once fought a war to free itself from the clutches of a near-absolute monarch now dozes idly through a debauched regime it elected itself and continues to tolerate as it busily promotes its own interests over theirs. When future historians come to puzzle over this strange time, the toughest riddle may not be how or why Donald Trump managed to become president, but why Americans let him corrupt so many of their beliefs and institutions, unmolested and in plain sight.