I think you'd have to go back to the last year of the George W. Bush presidency (2008) for a time when the United States seemed as completely on the brink of collapse as it does right now. Mr. Bush and his late VP Dick Cheney presided over two failed wars, assaults on civil liberties in the name of protecting national security, an ill-defined and never ending "war on terror," a housing crash, the worst economic crisis since the great depression, and taxpayer bailouts of corporate crooks who should have been prosecuted for wrecking the economy. It's no exaggeration to say that the Bush/Cheney Administration created the conditions making the emergence of a faux populist like Donald Trump inevitable. Historians of the future will have a field day trying to explain how the political rehabilitation of Bush Cheney and the whitewashing of their crimes was carried out not by Republicans, but by establishment Democrats who required from them only tepid and hypocritical criticisms of Trump.
As America crumbles, here are four hot takes to help you cope.
Hot Take #1: America's Fifteen Minutes of Famish. The late countercultural icon Andy Warhol once famously (pardon the pun) declared "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." During the recent government shutdown, which set a longevity record of 43 days, we learned just how much of a hunger crisis exists in the United States. Even though bad faith actors on the right, from Donald Trump on up, lied continuously about who actually gets food assistance, it became impossible for any sane person to deny the problem. Not surprisingly, when the shutdown ended the [already limited] serious conversation about hunger in America ended with it. The result? The 43-day shutdown did not lead to any new policy ideas to address hunger, the Republicans persisted in providing hunger misinformation and disinformation even when called out on it, and establishment Democrats did little more than virtue signal and eventually cave to end the shutdown. In Warholian fashion, the shutdown reduced hunger in America to a spectacle; the food insecure got their "15 minutes of famish." Sad.
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| The Oshkosh Area Community Pantry assists around 2,800 families per month at the 2551 Jackson St. location. |
Hot Take #2: Trump's East Wing Edict. So apparently a president of the United States can unilaterally tear down a historic addition to the White House without having to go through even a minimal review process. Who knew? An ABC News poll showed the general public is not happy about it. In Wisconsin, 59 percent of respondents in the Marquette Poll said the East Wing should have been preserved, which included 69 percent of Independents and 90 percent of Democrats.
75 percent of Republicans told the Marquette poll that the East Wing demolition was an "appropriate modernization." The Republican response got me thinking. Back during the first Trump term, I had an African-American student who enrolled in multiple classes with me at UW Oshkosh. After every Trump excess, he would approach me after class and say, "seriously, do you think Obama would have gotten away with that shit?" I'd usually laugh and say something like "probably not," but if that student were around today and had asked me the question after Trump's East Wing edict, my response probably would be "FUCK NO."
In all seriousness: does anyone honestly think that if Obama had torn down the East Wing, without any meaningful review of the architectural plans or opportunity for public comment--while doing it with private money from oligarchs with clear interests in manipulating public policy for their own ends--does anyone really think that 75 percent of Republicans would call Obama's edict an "appropriate modernization" of the White House? If you say "yes" you are either a liar or delusional. A more likely result would have been the Republicans in the House and in right wing media spaces accusing Obama of domestic terrorism and immediately opening up an impeachment inquiry. I can hear Sean Hannity: "In taking the wrecking ball to our beloved East Wing, Barack Hussein Obama was able to accomplish the one thing Osama bin Laden could not on September 11: demolishing the People's White House."
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| The Washington Post provided a partial list (behind paywall) of the donors to President Trump's ballroom project. What do they oligarchs expect in return? |
I tend to agree with 82-year-old Ron Winter of Appleton, WI who recently wrote this letter to the Appleton Post Crescent:
My fellow Americans and patriots,
It’s an outrage. At 82, I never thought I’d see the White House damaged without a shot being fired or a bomb dropped. It wasn’t done by the “enemy without” but by the “enemy within.” While presidents have redecorated the White House from time to time, this was a demolition by our own president.
When will the GOP people remind President Trump that the White House isn’t his; it’s “the people’s house” which belongs to “We the people.” Presidents get to live there temporarily for four to eight years.
President Trump’s demolition of the East Wing raises questions. Who gave him permission to do this (even though he himself initially promised the White House wouldn’t be touched)? Did he have the necessary permits? Isn’t damaging government property a crime? It’s doubtful the average citizen would’ve gotten away with this.
Hot Take #3:There Are NO Poor Major League Baseball Teams. After the Los Angeles Dodgers won their second straight World Series crown, we heard some of the predictable grumbling about how "large market" teams like the Dodgers and Yankees have so much of an advantage over "small market" teams like the Brewers and Guardians. I'm always amused by this discussion, because it unwittingly adopts the narrative of greedy owners--who refuse to pursue high priced free agent stars or invest sufficiently in player development while singing the small market blues and hardly providing affordable tickets for families. Meanwhile the average Major League team is worth $2.62 billion, and in the 2024 season team revenues ranged from a low of $296 million (Miami Marlins) to $705 million (New York Yankees). The Milwaukee Brewers, who like many other teams received substantial taxpayer support to build their stadium, are now valued at $1.7 billion and pulled in $337 million in 2024. In 2021, Brewers owner Mark Attanasio had a net worth of $700 million. Today, according to Forbes he is worth $1.9 billion.
I think Matt Snyder of CBS Sports said it best in 2023:
"Owners have every right to run their business as they see fit. They are, after all, the owners. I will submit, however, that if there is an owner out there proclaiming that his/her group can't afford to keep up with the salaries if Major League Baseball, there's a very simple answer: Put up the team for sale. Every single team sale in major professional sports results in a veritable killing for the previous owner. Remember the small market that is Kansas City? David Glass bought the team for $96 million in 2000 and sold it for $1 billion in 2019."
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| Forbes published the valuation data for each Major League Baseball team. The "poorest" team is still valued at $1.05 billion. |
Hot Take #4: Bill Gates Finally Gets on Trump's Good Side? For me the defining moment of Donald Trump's second inauguration was the outsized presence of oligarchs. All the super rich (and super entitled) tech bros, from Jeff Bezos (worth $239 billion) to Mark Zuckerberg ($211 billion) to Elon Musk (might soon be the world's first trillionaire) looked on lovingly at Trump (except for Zuckerberg, who seemed more concerned with Lauren Sanchez's chest.). Other tech giants taking in the festivities included Google co-founder Sergey Brin ($154 billion), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ($1.1 billion), and Apple CEO Tim Cook ($2.2 billion). This sickening spectacle reminded me of those moments during televised pro football games, when the director all of a sudden orders the cameras to show the reaction of the team owner in the stands. Those camera shots always serve as a not-so-subtle metaphor of who really owns America.
As I watched the oligarch fiesta, I wondered what Bill Gates ($115 billion) might have been thinking: "Hey, I'm a tech bro! I should be there too! What do I have to do to get on Trump's good side?" Well, he finally figured it out: Tell "Three tough truths about climate" which toned down almost everything he had said about climate change for the last 20 years. Gates released his missive right before the start of the COP30 conference, ensuring that the UN Secretary General's warning that humanity faced "devastating consequences" from lack of sufficient climate action would get lost in the media firestorm over a billionaire's change of heart.
Climate scientists were not thrilled with Gates' about face, but you know who was? You guessed it: Donald Trump. On Truth Social he wrote: "I (WE) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue." Of course Gates admitted no such thing, but he wrote his piece in such a way so that a bad faith actor could easily portray his "shift" in the worst possible light.
So congratulations Mr. Gates, you finally got Donald Trump to hate you less. Who knows, maybe if you make a big enough contribution to the Ballroom construction you might get invited to what's left of the White House.
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| Somehow Bill Gates calculated that by undermining his own well established views on the climate, he would be taken more seriously by the tech bro oligarch enabler in the White House. Good luck with that. |
