Neocons With MAGA Aesthetics

Maaaaaaaaaan.

I really hoped that over the last few months, when the guy who once promised to "drain the swamp" (as implausible as that ever was) started getting openly chummy with every slimy three-letter-agency creature, every Silicon Valley "founder grindset" twerp trying to sell smart bombs to the Feds, the most vampiric oligarchs you can imagine in the financial and media and tech industries, crypto hustlers, private equity ghouls who would personally feed orphans into a woodchipper if they thought it might raise quarterly earnings by 1%....anyway I really hoped that voters would punish the guy's obvious turn away from anything resembling a common-folk populism by, I don't know, maybe not voting for him?

One never went broke underestimating the judgement of the American voter, I guess.

One also never went broke underestimating the sheer feckless self-destructive idiocy of the "democratic" party. In a campaign where Kamala might have picked up some votes (turns out she needed a lot of those!) by standing for peace, or against corporations, or even against the specific terrible foreign-policy decisions made by prior administrations that helped get us into this mess....her brilliant idea was to literally bring Dick Cheney's daughter on the stage with her. This was her ace in the hole. Her secret weapon.

In a development shocking to only the people with too many credentials to know anything, this did not work. Dick Cheney's daughter has repaid the favor by immediately redirecting all the talent in flattery she has toward the new boss. We all end up with the friends we deserve, I suppose.

So I guess one nice thing about this is that nobody will ever use words like "brat" or "coconut-pilled" to favorably describe a politician, ever again. And some of the people who wheeled a half-sentient lump of cells around the White House and told everyone he was doing great, until the entire American public watched tapioca pudding leaking out his ears on live TV, will face one one-thousandth of the consequences they deserve for their lies.

But on the other hand, it's an absolute golden age to be a princeling who started a tech company with a name from the Lord of the Rings (may Tolkien's ghost haunt these people eternally) that sells subscription-based access to Fort Meade to let them monitor Americans through their smart toasters. I cannot imagine a better era in which to exploit the gullible or powerless for profit. In a small Middle Eastern nation that has lately determined to settle all its decades-old blood feuds by annihilating the neighbors it's been feuding with, and everyone remotely related to them, one can only imagine the celebrations.

If there's one hope to take from this mess, I guess, it's that maybe if one was able to fast-forward a few years, one could imagine a critical mass of people becoming so annoyed with the Way Things Are that they start to take it out on the People In Charge in a.....kinetic manner. Historically, the track record of such events actually improving anything is unfortunately dubious at best, but emotionally, I can really understand at this current moment why it might feel cathartic. Satisfying, as the kids would say.

If there's a second hope to take from this mess, it's the timeless structure of the long con. The realest cons always hinge around a common principle; you let the mark think he's in on the con. Every good scam is pitched as a way to let the targets scoop up easy money they didn't earn--often from the scammer. Right now, a bunch of vile yet dimwitted swamp creatures think they've got possibly the world's most successful con man in the history of con men maneuvered into exactly the situation they want him in, and they're gonna make a lot of money off this. I'm just saying, if this was a movie, I can guess how things are gonna go down in the next scene. And wouldn't it be wild if all the 27D-chess trust-the-plan weirdos crawling around in the deepest abyss of the internet turned out to be right, even vaguely so, about something?

Statistically, though, something even dumber will happen.

Fuck.

I'm hitting "post" and getting another drink.

Correction. A previous version of this post mistakenly referred to participants in the private equity industry as "people". The author deeply regrets the error, and it has since been rectified.