As 41 million Americans go hungry for lack of food stamps Donald Trump pay for even as judges have ordered him to release the funds, here’s a little food for the vomitory of corruption known anachronistically as the Trump administration.
Last month former French President Nicholas Sarkozy began a prison sentence on a conviction for taking money from the late Libyan despot Muammar Qaddafi in 2007 to finance his presidential campaign. Sarkozy took a few million dollars. He won. He served a five-year term. He’s spending the next five-year term at La Santé, where France used to execute its worst until 1981.
Donald Trump just accepted a $400 million gift from another Arab despot in the shape of a 747. He has raided nearly $1 billion out of the country’s missile defense modernization budget so he can retrofit the plane in gold and gaud. If the secret project is completed before Trump is scheduled to leave office, which is doubtful (both the completion and Trump leaving), the plane will fly at most for a few weeks, then get parked as a re-gift to the Trump library in Miami, on land stolen from the public trust and handed over to Trump at no cost, Qatari style.
The 2.6 acres belong to Miami Dade College. The land is officially appraised at $67 million. As anyone who’s ever looked at property appraiser values knows, those figures are meaningless. Miami developer Gregg Covin has twice submitted development plans to the college for classrooms, offices and a cultural complex on the land, which could have incorporated Trump’s library. He values the land at between $200 to $300 million, or closer to the cost of a Qatar Airways handmedown. “It should have been a giant expansion of Miami Dade College with the presidential library as part of it,” Covin told the Miami Herald.
The Miami Dade board met all but secretly–that is, without proper notice under the Sunshine law–and voted to hand over the land at no cost to the state. Gov. DeSantis offered the land to Trump’s library foundation. Because of the rampant corruption, a federal judge has halted the transfer for now. That stay will get quashed on appeal, as Trump-appointed judges weigh in.
Trump himself made a deal for two new Air Force Ones in 2018. The government–the American government, that is–has a $4.3 billion contract with Boeing to build the two planes (it was originally supposed to cost $3.9 billion). It has already spent $3.6 billion, not counting the $2.5 billion Boeing absorbed as losses it is contractually barred from billing taxpayers. The planes were supposed to be delivered last year. Boeing now says they may not be finished until the end of Trump’s term. He’s fuming. He has reason to. But he’s not without an excellent pair of Air Force Ones right now. Compared to the 707s Ronald Reagan flew, are palaces of airborne excess.
The 707 installed at Reagan’s library in Simi Valley didn’t make it there until 2004, the year of Reagan’s death from Alzheimer’s–it’s not clear whether he’d have approved: he had vanity, not vulgarity–after flying for 28 years and serving seven presidents.
But Trump wants his toys. He’s willing to take the biggest bribe in American history and ignore security risks from the country that hosts Hamas’s headquarters. He is willing to rob the nation’s defense budget to gold-plate it. He’s willing to undercut Boeing, one of the country’s largest companies, with slanders and tantrums. For all that, he may end up with three Air Force Ones for over $5 billion just for a few weeks at the end of his term.
There is no precedent for any of this. Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, Jack Abramoff: all those scandals are feather dust on the scale of corruption and wasted dollars the Air Force One bribe implicates. Any other president would have been impeached and thrown out of office by now. This one continues to be beatified almost as much as Charlie Kirk.
Add to that the defilement of the East Wing of the White House to make room for a ballroom the size and class of a Walmart Supercenter (nearly twice the size of the White House) and paying for it with another $300 million in private bribes, or Trump’s attempt to steal $230 million from the Treasury in damages for harms he allegedly suffered in previous investigations (he claims he’ll donate the money to charity; like his library?) or flying off on a junket to Asia for more private family deals in the middle of a government shutdown over millions of Americans losing health coverage and 41 million losing their food stamps benefits–and that’s just this week’s obscenities.
Congress’s response? Pass the boot for another lick as Trump dumps shit on protesters. What a country, as Yakov Smirnoff still says from his stage in Branson, Maga’s cultural capital. And you thought only liberals suffered from Trump derangement syndrome.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
Pogo says
@P.T.
Every word, the truth — somewhat understated (humor) about the most loathsome individual in US history. The tremors of the unfolding catastrophe that is causing the flu of the soul many now feel is a mere prelude… We are slouching forward — in a circle, and descending spiral.
… God is happy — he plays with us.
— Farah, 1985 filmOut of Africa
Skibum says
The corruption from this man and his family never ends. When he is finally gone after defiling the highest office in the land, after intentionally ignoring his oath and constitutional responsibilities, and after causing so much hurt and heartache to the American public, we should also hold accountable all of the other sycophants who let him get away will all of this damage to our nation and it’s citizens.
We need to name each one, publicly disgrace them for their failures to live up to their oaths of office and constitutional responsibilities, and ensure they NEVER again hold any public office where they could do further harm to Americans. Because our forefathers enacted safeguards that would have, SHOULD HAVE, prevented this American bred monster from doing so much harm and damage had the others done their jobs and stood up to his unconstitutional, unethical abuses of power. But they did nothing, averted their eyes, and watched as he dismantled our constitutional protections, became more and more unhinged, corrupted our federal courts, attempted to rig election results, and spit in the faces of the American people.
And for that America can never, ever forget or forgive the ones who are culpable and responsible for allowing a morally bankrupt, power hungry, dictator wanna-be to enrich himself at the expense of the country this convicted felon president was supposed to serve, not steal from and shit on.
Ed P says
Pierre,
I recognize you are the editor and monitor of the site. Your intelligence and ideologies are transparent to anyone familiar with your work. This opinion piece feels like you intentionally framed it as a factual summary and feels very disingenuous.
Pogo praised it as truth and under stated.
FlaglerLive says
I do not write anything that isn’t factually grounded, verified and demonstrable. Try it sometime. It won’t seem so disingenuous to you if your sniffing sophistry from an Olympus of your fabrication weren’t the definition of disingenuousness.