it seems like all of the worst possible precedents are being set by this presidency.
Not for being a kleptocracy, not by a long shot, for anyone who remembers the Dumbya years (which c'mon, it wasn't that long ago). Ideological purgings, cost-plus contracts, bald-faced lying to the
whole world, and anti-intellectualism run amok. Looting the country's coffers for personal gain is old hat. The stories leaking from Iraq about contractor abuse (and they worked quite hard to prevent them from leaking at all) would make anyone with a sense of ethics boil inside out. They set as much as
two trillion dollars on fire, if not much more. We'll probably feel the effects of that for the rest of my life, and that was less than a decade ago. If anything, Trump is kind of reassuring in his pettiness -- not only does he undermine his own moves, he lacks the creativity to do anything as audacious as start a war in the Middle East and send Americans to slaughter purely to profit from the destruction a hundred times over. A banker in his/her psychopathy won't even know you exist as you're ruined financially for three generation to generate profits for a fraction of a second. Trump isn't that. Trump is like a five-year-old who only sees the cookie jar. Evil, perhaps, but almost benign in his own myopic stupidity.
That said, I did underestimate Dumbya in one respect -- his folks did see running the Executive as a
job. An ideologically driven job, with disastrous results, but they did a lot more governing than I gave them credit for. What's new is that it feels like the anti-intellectual wilful ignorance that hampered America like a cancer has finally reached tipping point and is now a major factor in policy decisions. Dumbya's folks, at least, took some things seriously, and they took the Department of Energy's mission against nuclear threats
very seriously (which kind of makes the whole Iraq War even more outrageous, since the DoE
knew Iraq had no WMDs). Today, major bureaucracies like the Department of Education and Department of Energy are largely unstaffed, and what few there are have no idea what the agencies even do -- and don't even want to know. This has real-world implications that should keep everyone up at night, it not for the fact that no one's interested in finding out -- they're too busy demonizing government workers as useless.
The greed is kind of beside the point. There's a floor for incompetence if the greed comes from within. A slumlord will make far more money off you than a burglar, but at least has an interest in keeping the place just short of condemned. A thief is there to grab everything in sight and run; what happens to the place afterward is of no concern. Trump was sent to D.C. not by GOP insiders but as a sort of working class coup, a human Molotov cocktail. Not only will he have no fucks to give if the place burns down, he'll actually look good to his supports if he's the one who strikes the match.
