Right now it feels like the whole country is just phoning it in. Not really doing anything, not at the moment. Not addressing any problems, not reacting to the new scandals that keep scandaling their way out of the White House like roaches. The military is phoning in an entire warârapidly running through the nation's stocks of precision missiles for the sake of accomplishing nothing anyone can quite pin downâand nobody seems to much care.
There's a massive fight underway between U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirroâwhose previous gig was producing rants of dubious sobriety on the Fox News channelâand Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a fight that's almost certainly going to end the Washington career of one or the other of them, because Pirro's office was forced to withdraw the obviously bullshitty indictment of a former Olympian arrested for Touching Trump's Pool, and it was a really humiliating walkback because Pirro was in full Fox News high dudgeon chew-the-scenery mode when she she held her press conference last month to announce the indictment but in the court filings dropping the charges now she had to admit that the nothing her office said was true and that Trump's pool was decaying due to Trump's contractors botching the job, not because a passing tourist touched it.
In those documents, Pirro's office blamed their previous possibly-drunken lying to the judge on Burgum's Department of the Interior, which caused Burgum to melt t f down online because he knew right then and there that Trump was going to have somebody's head for this and it wasn't going to be his:
And sure enough, by Monday Trump was raging against Pirro for, apparently, not being able to fabricate evidence against his enemies that doesn't exist.
The "President" of the United States is deep in the throes of dementia, by the way. That's another thing the nation is just ignoring outright, with everybody instead holding their breath to see if the midterms will somehow fix that and everything else. He is very deep in the throes of dementia, both the forgetting common words part of it and the more alarming regular hallucinations of things that never happened, while a military man sits in the next room with a nuclear suitcase that allows him to end human life on this planet if he wakes up from a nap thinking he needs to do that.
Aaron Rupar
And nobody in Washington gives a shit, no matter how obvious it all is, because everyone is waiting to see whether he'll keel over dead during one of these rants (increasingly likely) or whether they still have jobs after the midterms. And at some point one of Trump's insiders is going to write the book confessing that everyone in the building knew he had dementia and was dangerously unfit this whole damn time, but nobody did anything because everyone was either a gutless coward, too deeply committed to their fascist projects to want to care, or both.
Maybe the midterms will fix it, the nation muses. Maybe we'll elect somebody who gives a shit and somehow that'll patch everything right up.
As an aside, am I the only one weirded out by the similarities between Trump's Pool and the decay of Trump himself? Look at the man's hands, in any photograph from the last six months. He's always got a layer of thick makeup on, sometimes even with an obvious latex patch under it, to hide bruising on the back of both hands that never ever goes away.
Just like Trump's Pool, the world is regularly treated to images of this paint job failing or and/or flaking off. And just like his pool, everyone around Trump insists that there's absolutely nothing wrong, and whatever damage you see on his hands is the result of People Touching It.
That's been the Trump brand all his life, I suppose. Everything looks posh and dandy, so long as none of you journalists or investigators or other peasants try to touch anything.
The most troubling part of our national pause on Caring About Stuff is, of late, the United States Senate. The U.S. Senate has made not caring about stuff into its own creed and pastime, and if a U.S. senator doesn't want to care about something there is no power on earth that will make them care, not morality or dignity or voters.
On Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee, still led by Chuck Grassley's corpse because nobody wants to get their hands dirty pushing it out of the chair, advanced the nomination of wildly crooked Trump lawyer Todd Blanche to be the next Attorney General of the United States. If Blanche gets the position, he will immediately start off as the most corrupt attorney general the nation has ever seenâand that's just from the stuff he's done while waiting for the job. It was a party line vote, despite Blanche being so brazenly crooked that the man can hardly get through doorways, because Republicans like crooks and want the government to be crooked. Period.
Blanche, you will recall, was the one who moved child sex trafficker and Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to a cushy low-security campus after Maxwell obligingly provided Blanche with some obviously false testimony claiming that Donald Trump didn't have nothing to do with all those child rapes, no sir. And that wasn't by itself enough to scuttle his nomination, because Senate Republicans are pretty damn inured to the notion that their president has been credibly accused of raping children.
The Judiciary Committee Republicans were not moved by this or by Blanche's continuing contempt for Epstein's victims as he's moved heaven and earth to try to scrub Trump's involvement with the scandal. The Senate's boldest move to oppose the coverup has been, to date, last week's performative nonbinding resolution announcing that they would be very displeased if Donald Trump pardoned child rape accomplice Maxwell outright. Which is a thing that very well might happen, with Blanche heading the department and in a position to orchestrate as much of an Epstein cover-up as he can possibly manage.
We are already to the point where the Department of Justice, under Trump, is falsely arresting random Americans for crimes like Touching Trump's Pool. We are already at the point where the Justice Department is so politicized and stuffed with incompetent and deeply crooked Trump toadies that all previous department scandals, all of them, vanish into nothingness at the banana-republic corruption of the current version.
And Senate Republicans, to a person, genuinely do not give a shit. Most of them are willing to mouth off with reasons why they think the scandal-orgy is good; the vanishingly few ones who still think Americans might not be fully on board with a Nazi-styled system of persecutions and perversions can barely burp out their excuses for going along with it.
Aaron Rupar
That's outgoing Sen. Thom Tillis, who along with also-outgoing Sen. John Cornyn put on a few little skits pretending at still having ethics before voting to endorse the corruption along with everyone else sitting next to him.
Cornyn and Tillis put on a very cute show of it, looking for the excuse they'd use to cave and support Trump's crookery just like everyone in the nation knew they would. It was a game from the beginning, a going-away show meant to give them a plausible hook for a faux-redemption later if it turns out the midterms or one too many cheeseburgers really does "fix" our problems and everyone who supported the dementia-addled tax-frauding lifelong crook leading a circus of molesters and abusers and full-bore Nazi wannabes needs to explain themselves to a future torch-wielding mob.
But in the end, it was another episode of phoning-it-in. Tillis and Cornyn put on a show of wanting to block Blanche's other most outrageous acts of corruption, a slush fund to pay off Jan. 6 insurrectionists who were violent on Trump's behalf and a government ban on tax investigations for President Tax Fraud so that the IRS would stop looking at the the tax returns that seem to indicate Trump may have engaged in up to $100 million worth of tax fraud.
Oh, they made a very big show of it. For a minute there, possibly two, it looked like Chuck Grassley's corpse might have even slumped over a bit, just from the noise. And then in the end both senators proudly announced that the obviously crooked Blanche had addressed their concerns by releasing a new memorandum clarifying that only Donald Trump would be forever immune to anyone in government investigating his old tax returns.
Oh, and his family, of course. Them too.
Oh, and his businesses. That goes without saying.
Oh, and they announced this supposed breakthrough near-simultaneously with megabank Capital One filing a new court document affirming that they closed several hundred Trump Organization accounts in 2021 because they had found considerable evidence that Trump and his family had been engaging in a systemic pattern of money laundering, during his first presidency.
This, I think, is how you know that the United States is truly a collapsing empire. Substantive evidence that a president was engaging in money laundering schemes while in office is the sort of thing that would have unquestionably set off Senate alarm bells during any previous, actual-functioning-democracy period of time, but because our current Senate Republican caucus is populated entirely by pathetic crime-supporting shitweasels, the lawyers who likely helped Trump engaged in the money laundering get to have cushy government jobs and the Senate gets to announce that nobody's allowed to look into the crimes so Shut Up.
You will note, astute reader, that the supposed improved agreement that allowed Cornyn and Tillis to end their charade of giving a shit is nearly identical to the agreement that had a federal judge blasting Todd Blanche over the obvious corruption of it all. That federal judge made a point of referring Blanche to the New York state barâwhich is already investigating both Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward for previous accusations of corruptionâand of noting that as far as she could tell, the "agreement" was quite possibly a criminal act itself.
The only concession Tillis and Cornyn were able to swing is that this new agreement does not mention the proposed federal slush fund to pay off Trump's Jan. 6 rioters. Doesn't promise it, doesn't promise to not do it. It just promises to immunize Trump from IRS audits probing all that tax fraud and money laundering, just like the last version, and that was enough for these two clowns to prance around a bit pretending like they weren't themselves whoring for the corruption.
Aaron Rupar
Listen, asshole, you're a U.S. senator. If you don't think being a U.S. senator gives you any power to rein in tax fraud and money laundering on the part of a fascist president then what the fuck did you think the job was gonna be. Were you in it for the cafeteria? Were you just there to file travel reimbursement forms?
No, John Cornyn is just phoning it in at this point. So is Thom Tillis. Chuck Grassley's corpse will be in that chair, unmoving, from here to the midterms, and Sen. Mitch McConnell will remain lost in the spirit realm, neither alive nor dead, until next January when his replacement is sworn in.
Assuming the midterms fix things, of course. All of this is assuming that the midterms somehow fix things, and that the money laundering tax-cheating court-proven rapist accused of also raping children does not declare that the midterms were rigged and therefore invalid.
It very much feels like everyone, whether the White House aides trying to cover up Trump's dementia to the Pentagon attempting to not fight a war except when Pete Hegseth comes in and everyone suddenly has to look busy to the hopelessly corrupt human bags of sin and alcohol masquerading as the U.S. Senate, are trying very hard to not do a damn thing while the nation crumbles. Not because they don't care, and not because they don't know it's happening, but because every last person wants somebody else to come in and fix the problems so that they can sit on their asses, collect their usual pay, and have nothing to do with it.
That is how you know that we are an empire not in decline, but in full-scale collapse. Because no matter how far up and down the chain of leadership you go, there is nobody who still thinks any of this is their problem. Nobody who thinks that a decaying and hopelessly crooked leader and his gang of "rabid, incompetent idiots" causing the simultaneous collapse of public health, entire agencies, and international power is something that they, personally, have to stand in opposition to, because as things get more and more catastrophized there will surely be somebody else, somewhere, who will take that stand instead.
After the midterms, maybe? Or after the corrupt rapist's dementia advances to the point where he can no longer burble out new threats of retaliation?
Wherever it happens, we know it will not happen in the Senate. There has never been a more gutless political body; it is a place where you can be a potted plant or a genuine corpse and it will make no difference.
It does feel like the rest of the country has given up on reining in Trump's corruption, too. There are raging fires, now. The consequences of ignoring the climate for a half century are here, right now, today. Gas prices are obscene, you can't buy lettuce without risking life-threatening diarrhea, and around Washington the statues are being gilded one-by-one and Trump's Pool sits, still drained, and will probably not be filled again.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.