Letters from an American - December 13, 2024

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

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December 13th, 2024. Time magazine's interview with President-elect Donald Trump, published yesterday, revealed a man who was so desperate to be reelected to the presidency that he constructed a performance that he believed would woo voters, but who has no apparent plans for actual governance. Trump deliberately patterned the Republican National Convention, where he accepted the party's nomination for president, on a professional wrestling event, even featuring a number of professional wrestlers.

It appears now that the campaign itself was, similarly, a performance, possibly, as Tom Nichols of the Atlantic suggested, simply to avoid the threat of conviction in one of the many federal or state cases pending against him. In the Time interview, Trump called his campaign 72 days of fury.

During the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised that he would slash the prices that soared during the post-pandemic economic recovery, although in fact they have been largely stable for the past two years. He hammered on the idea that he would erase transgender Americans from public life. The Republicans invested $215 million in ads that pushed that theme, making it a key cultural battle. He and his surrogates attacked immigrants, lying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield,

Ohio, for example, were eating local pets, and that Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and falsely claiming that the Biden administration had opened the southern border. The Time interview suggests that now that he has won back power, Trump has lost interest in the promises of the campaign. Notably, when a Time journalist asked Trump if his presidency would be a failure if he doesn't bring the price of groceries down, he answered, I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down.

It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard, but I think that they will. He then pivoted to a different subject, and that was all he had to say about the price of groceries. When the journalist asked Trump about the current attempt of Republican lawmakers to force transgender women to use men's bathrooms, Trump indicated he really didn't want to talk about it, noting that it's a very small number of people we'reLago and has indicated she uses the women's bathroom there. Asked whether he would reverse Biden's protections for transgender children under the Title IX section of the Education Amendments Act of 1972,

prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, Trump clearly hadn't given the issue much thought. Although it was this expansion that fed Trump's rhetorical fury over what Republicans claimed was boys participating in girls' sports, he answered simply, I'm going to look at it very closely. We're looking at it right now. We're going to look at it.

We're going to look at everything. Look, the country is torn apart. We're going to look at everything. Trump's response to the interviewer about immigration can't really be parsed because it remains based in a completely false version of the actual conditions, including that the Biden administration has admitted more than 13,000 murderers to the U.S., which has been repeatedly debunked, and that other countries are emptying people from mental institutions into the U. US, an apparent misunderstanding

of the word asylum in immigration. Under both US and international law, a person fleeing violence or persecution has the right to apply for protection or asylum in another country. If Trump has now abandoned the performance he used to win the election, Trump's planned appointments to office reveal that the actual pillars of his presidency will be personal revenge, the destruction

of American institutions, and the use of political office for gain, also known as graft. Trump appears to have tapped henchmen for revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable to the law. On Tuesday, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported that during Trump's first term, his Justice Department secretly seized records from two members of Congress and 43 congressional staffers, as well as phone and text records from journalists. That use of the Department of Justice against those he considers his enemies seems to have been behind his attempt to make loyalist former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz,

the United States Attorney General. Mired in a sex trafficking scandal, Gaetz had to step aside. Trump then tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose support for him extended not only to pushing the big lie that he won the 2020 election, but also apparently to dropping Florida's case against the fraudulent Trump University in exchange for a $25,000 donation to one of Bondi's political action committees. The conservative Washington Examiner

has urged US senators to closely scrutinize Bondi in confirmation hearings. The Justice Department oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, and Trump's handling of the director of the FBI also appears to be aimed at his enemies. In 1976, Congress established that an FBI director would serve a single 10-year term,

with the idea that such a director would not be tied to a single president. In 2017, Trump fired the Republican FBI director picked by President Barack Obama, James Comey, after Comey refused to drop the investigation into the ties between Trump's campaign and Russian operatives. In Comey's place, he settled on Christopher Wray. But Wray oversaw the FBI's investigations into the pro-Trump January 6 rioters and the

raid on Mar-a-Lago after Trump lied about retaining top secret documents. Trump was also angry that Ray told the congressional committee that he had seen no sign of cognitive decline in president Joe Biden. Trump made it clear he intended to get rid of Ray and replace him with the extreme loyalist Cash Patel. Ray's term expires in 2027, but on Wednesday he announced he would step down

at the end of Biden's term as Trump wants him to. Trump cheered the announcement saying the FBI had illegally raided his home. In fact, a judge signed off on a search warrant and added, we want our FBI back. Cash Patel has vowed to dismantle the FBI as well as to go after media that he considers disloyal to Trump.

He has written a trilogy of children's books about Trump titled The Plot Against the King, and he has published an enemies list of 60 people he believes should be investigated for crimes because of their political stances. Trump's appointments also feed his anti-establishment supporters who want to destroy institutions, especially his tapping of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. A leader in the anti-vax movement, Kennedy has attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA. Today, Christina Jewett and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times reported that the lawyer who is helping Kennedy pick the health officials he will bring into office, Aaron Ciri, has tried to stop the distribution of 13 vaccines. In addition, in 2022, he petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. If approved, Kennedy will oversee the FDA. The third pillar of Trump's presidency appears to be graft for himself, his cronies, and his family.

Dana Mattioli and Rebecca Bauhaus of the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is planning to donate a million dollars to Trump's inauguration fund in an effort to shore up his ties to the incoming president. Mark Zuckerberg of Metta handed over a million dollars as well, as did both the chief executive officer of OpenAI and AI search startup Perplexity. Trump has refused to sign the paperwork that would require him to disclose the donors to the inauguration fund. Today, Jonathan V. Last of the Bulwark called the fund a slush fund, pure and simple.

There is no required accounting for how the money is spent, making it, as Last says, a way for rich people to funnel money to the incoming president that he can then use however he sees fit, completely unfettered and under cover of darkness. The inauguration fund is no different than feudal lords approaching the new king with gifts of rubies or mobsters showering a new mayor with envelopes of cash. There are other ways for people to buy influence in the new administration.

As Judd Legum pointed out on December 2nd in Popular Information, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, a Chinese national, bought $30 million in crypto tokens from Trump's new crypto venture, an essentially worthless investment that nonetheless freed up about $18 million for Trump himself.

In March, 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation. Sun posted on social media that his company is committed to making America great again. Trump appears willing to reward cronies with positions that could be lucrative as well, tapping billionaire Tom Barrack, for example, to become his administration's ambassador to Turkey.

Barrack chaired Trump's 2016 inauguration fund and was accused and acquitted of secret lobbying for the United Arab Emirates in exchange for investments of tens of millions of dollars in an office building and one of his investment funds. Trump is also putting family members into official positions, tapping his son Don Jr.'s former fiance, Kimberly Guilfoyle, to become the U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after news broke

that Don Jr. is seeing someone else. Trump is pushing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to name his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to the Senate seat that will be vacated by Marco Rubio's elevation to Secretary of State. And he has tapped his daughter Tiffany's father-in-law, Masad Boulos, to become his Middle East advisor. Various newspapers have reported that Boulos' reputation as a billionaire mogul at the head of Boulos Enterprises is undeserved. In fact, he's a small-time truck salesman who has nothing to do with Boulos Enterprises, but permitted the confusion, he says,

because he doesn't comment on his business. And then there is Eric Trump, who announced yesterday that the Trump organization has made a deal with Dubai-based real estate developer Dar Global to build a Trump Tower in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. When asked about potential conflicts of interest, Eric Trump said, I have no interaction with Washington, DC. I want no interaction with Washington, DC. So far, there has been little outcry over Eric Trump's

announcement, despite years of stories focusing on Republicans' claims that Hunter Biden and President Biden had each taken $5 million from the Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden sat. Yesterday, the key witness behind that accusation, Alexander Smirnov, pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI and hiding the more than $2 million he received after that testimony. Early this month, President Biden pardoned Hunter, saying that he had been charged only because he is my son

and that there is no reason to believe it will stop here. On December 5th, Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican of New York, told the Fox News Channel that House Republicans would continue to investigate Hunter Biden despite the pardon. If there is one major continuity between Trump's campaign and plans for his administration, it is that his focus on shock and performance, rather than the detailed work of governing, still plays well to the media. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.