The Predator s Ballroom

Rendering of White House ballroom. Image: White House.

Was there ever a better time to be the only Washington insider? Free money (in case you are in need of a bomb shelter or a triumphal arch), free women (apparently for $45,000 a year Natalie will run after your golf cart), free crime (all those Get Out of Jail Cards handed down from the Supremely Corrupt Court), and free wars (“Sure, put Iran on Pete’s tab…”).

Then if you’re feeling sorry for yourself—that Vladimir Putin has more money or that Jeffrey Epstein had more girls—you can find amusement by having ICE round up your enemies (real and imagined) and by sending in the army or the Stephen Miller Band to fix the next election. As Mel Brooks (when he was dressed up as Louis XVI) liked to remind us: “It’s good to be the king.”

So when did the United States decide to trade in its republic (with at least a few ethics laws and some accountability) for a monarchy whose coat-of-arms might well be an obese man cavorting with nymphs around a water hazard at the Mount Olympus Golf Resort and Spa?

For constitutional scholars among us, I am sure it is tempting to say that at the 1787 Constitutional Convention James Madison gave away the democratic franchise when he lost the argument with the likes of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, and allowed the country to tolerate both a chief executive (aka the president) and a Senate untethered to proportional representation.

Nor did it help the cause of American democracy that the first election was little more than the investiture of George Washington, who ran (if that’s word) unopposed for his two terms.

To be fair to Madison and his spiritual colleague Thomas Jefferson (then in Paris as an ambassador), they both assumed that constitutional power was vested in Congress, and that the secondary roles of the president and the judiciary were to enforce the “will of the people.” (They also considered all of the judiciary, not a few unelected Supreme Court justices-for-life, to be another branch of government.)

Otherwise, they had little doubt that the American government would devolve into a predator’s ball—an insider trading ring that, were you to merge Crédit Mobilier with the leases around Teapot Dome (it was an oil field in Wyoming), would give you the ultimate dummy corporation, The Trump Organization.

In the evolution of American democracy into a republican pantomime, it did not help that in the last two hundred years the United States has turned war into a pastime of the ruling class—further marginalizing Congress and the voting public into something as inconsequential as a “live” studio audience in front of a televised game show.

I stand in awe of Abraham Lincoln as a man, writer, thinker, and politician who despised slavery but acknowledged that the cost of saving the Union in the Civil War was to centralize power of the executive branch. Because of the circumstances, Lincoln was forced to issue greenbacks, command the armies, and dispense slavery—all on his signature (powers that Trump can only dream about).

Later wars—notably the Spanish-American War of 1898 (which brought such fiefs as Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico into the estates of the nobility)—allowed subsequent presidents to consolidate their power under the bloody shirt of national security and economic necessity. Who could say no to that?

World War I centralized more political power in Washington—democracy ceded its responsibilities to the bureaucracy—and the womanizing, racist Thomas Woodrow Wilson established the precedent that the decision for war or peace should only rest with one man, the president, even if he is a mediocre hack along the lines of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush.

After World War II, the United States fought a series of splendid little wars—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan among them—that, while draining the populace of blood and treasure, completed the evolution of the democracy into, first, a corporate oligarchy and, subsequently (under Trump’s reign of gilded terror), into a form of country-club fascism.

In none of these imperial masquerades was a popular vote held to declare war. All that was required was an executive fiat. Nixon had a few whiskeys with Henry Kissinger and bombed Cambodia. Even the saintly Nobel laureate Barack Obama was able take the United States back to war in Afghanistan simply by announcing that it was “necessary.”

The difference between W’s jihad in Iraq and Trump’s crusade is that, in attacking Iran, Trump became the first American president to use war as the extension of an insider trading scheme.

Trump’s mission in the Persian Gulf is not to deny Iran the capability of developing nuclear weapons. Nor is it his goal to support the nascent democratic movement that is opposing the theocratic Iranian rule of the mullahs. He’s there simply to corner the petroleum market by having the American navy choke off the supply.

In the Middle East, all Trump wants to do is to position himself as the price fixer of world oil so that, in turn, the oil sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf will pay a share of their action (with oil over $100 a barrel) to Don Jr., Eric, or Jared (the latest sighting of three wise men near Bethlehem bearing NDAs and looking for finder’s fees).

Nominally in the U.S. Constitution, the emoluments clause limits the take of the American president from foreign governments and kingdoms, which later was clarified by the General Services Administration at around $450. But clearly $450 in 1787 dollars is now worth about $2.2 billion, payable in $Trump coins or other untraceable cryptocurrencies.

In turning the American republic into his own Estates-General with its court (and powdered orange wigs) by the sea in Palm Beach, Trump has had many willing accomplices, many of whom, I suspect, are being paid “a little something, you know, for the effort.”

What else explains why the Supreme Court, the Senate, and a majority of members of Congress, not to mention wide swaths of the bureaucracy including the military, are willing to go along with an insane Trump presidency?

It has to be clear to even the dimmest courtier in Washington that Trump is mentally and physically incapable of holding office, and that his only core value is stealing from the taxpayers. (Who’s paying for his bomb-sheltering ballroom, memorial arch, reflecting pool, Iranian war, action-warrior social media cartoons, hush money to the J6 rioters, and nameplate on the Kennedy Center?)

I am sure if you were to follow the money, you would discover the extent to which Trump has privatized his government and staffed it with his own pay-to-play loyalists.

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi and current FBI Director Kash Patel, for example, both had their snouts in the honey pot that is Trump Media before they joined the federal government (© The Trump Organization. All rights reserved.)

Then there is the complete indifference by the Trump gang in investigating the extent to which Justice Thomas has monetized his seat on the Supreme Court, just as there is no accountability when Trump sends two of his bagmen (with financial ties to various Middle Eastern money wells) to negotiate (for what?) in the Iranian and Ukrainian wars.

It used to be that influence peddlers paid off government officials to get what they wanted from Washington. That’s how it worked in the time-honored way with the Grant and Harding administrations. But Trump has inverted that pyramid scheme, in that he seems to be paying members of his inner circle (Natalie’s $45K on up…)—in the hope that he can peddle his own influence and, by so doing, pocket even more billions.

Matthew Stevenson is the author of many books, including Reading the Rails; Appalachia Spring; The Revolution as a Dinner Party (China throughout its turbulent twentieth century); Biking with Bismarck (France during the Franco-Prussian War); and Our Man in Iran. Out not long ago were: Donald Trump’s Circus Maximus and Joe Biden’s Excellent Adventure, about the 2016 and 2020 elections, and The View From Churchill, about the places that shaped the life of the British wartime prime minister. His next books are Playing in Peoria (by bike across the American Mid-West) and Friends of Kind, a literary travel history of World War I.