I see the times we’re living in as a “mask off” moment, at least politically speaking. The current occupant of the White House is a lifelong grifter and con man who is very predictably looting the country for his own enrichment. The seemingly endless barrage of stories detailing his grifting and double-dealing might feel like something new to most people, but it doesn’t to me. I’ve been paying close attention to our legislators’ self-enrichment schemes for a couple of decades now. The galling thing is that none of it is illegal, and it’s never been limited to one party.
This is the system that our legislators created for themselves. Here, watch Nancy Pelosi tell you herself:
She and Dianne Feinstein both miraculously married financial geniuses. Both of their husbands brilliantly managed to outperform the stock market. During her tenure in Congress, she and her husband have managed to outperform the S&P 500 by 559%. Genius! Dianne Feinstein’s wealth accumulation was a little less subtle. Yes, her husband also managed to beat the S&P 500 year after year, but then, he shrewdly got into the defense contracting business. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, his firm was apparently uniquely qualified to get hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts. There’s much more to how Dianne Feinstein enriched herself, but that’s all too long for me to go into in this post.
You get the point, though, right? Nothing the motherfucker in the White House is doing right now is new. The only new part is his lack of fuck’s to give about how it all looks. He did, after all, correctly proclaim that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue without losing any supporters. Guess who else didn’t lose any supporters over their robbery of your ability to achieve a modicum of financial security? Feinstein, Pelosi, and the hundreds of other thieving members of all three branches of our government.
They all benefit from the fact that, at any given time, only half of the electorate will care about their individual corruption, which enables them to create the rules that make whatever they do legal, or at least, not illegal.
All Trump is doing is taking the mask off the corruption.
In the past month, we’ve had another mask-off moment. It happened when establisment democrats lost their shit over three candidates in NYC winning primaries against their establishment opponents. The mask had actually come off a couple of months before that primary election, when establishment Dems piled onto an insurgent senatorial candidate in Maine, but I will circle back to that later. Jamie Harrison, former head of the DNC posted an angry rant demanding that people who didn’t like the democratic party get out of his sandbox. Never mind the fact that, under penalty of death, he couldn’t get a democrat elected during his tenure as chair of the DNC. Who needs to win elections! The status quo must be maintained at all costs! And then James Carvill put out an angry, red-faced rant in which he proclaimed that he couldn’t possibly be in the same party as Darializa Avila Chevalier. The democratic tent just isn’t big enough for her! Some of us couldn’t help but notice that the tent was never too small to accommodate The Joes, Manchin and Lieberman or John Fetterman. Actually, I noticed that at least 16 years ago, when I wrote my very first blog post. I’m genuinely thrilled that a significant part of the democratic electorate can see it now.
I’ve said this hundreds of times: the democratic party would rather lose 1,000 elections than lose one corporate donor. Everyone seems to be catching on now.
Now back to Maine. Graham Platner has taken the state by storm. He has generated unprecedented excitement for his candidacy, so it’s curious that the democratic party establishment has done nothing but try to blow up his candidacy. I’m particularly flummoxed by the fact that the same people who defended Bill Clinton in the 90s, and lionized him for the nearly 30 years since he left office, thought that leaking text messages about Platner’s extramarital sexting would sink his campaign. These are the same people who defended actual penetration. Did they think that sexting was going to be a deal-breaker? They conditioned their voters to condone the penetration of a intern for fuck’s sake. Since Janet Mills had to drop out of the primary, she’s touring Maine with Susan Collins to appear at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, birthday parties, block parties, and any other event she can attend with Collins. After Platner won the primaries, several establishment Dems said that they couldn’t vote for him.
That’s super weird, since they claim to want to take back the Senate. There is precisely ZERO chance of democrats taking back the Senate without Maine. None, nada, zip, zilch. It can’t be done. Mask-off. Once again, people are noticing this time.
My disdain for the democratic party grew exponentially in 2020 when they demonstrated that they don’t have any more use for democracy than republicans do. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to the primaries, shall we? Bernie won the Iowa caucuses. Platitude Pete came in second, Amy Klobuchar came in third. Biden came in fourth. That is such a terrible showing for a former VP, that he should have dropped out then. Next came New Hampshire. Same results, except that Elizabeth Warren came in 4th, leaving Biden in the dust at 5th place. Now, Biden did manage to get second place in Nevada, but not without Bernie lapping Biden’s total vote count. LAPPING. Bernie received 41,075 votes to Biden’s 19,179 votes. Platitude Pete took 3rd place. Next came South Carolina. Biden finally managed to win his very first primary state after three presidential runs. That’s right, Biden ran for president three times and didn’t win a single state until the fourth contest in his third attempt. What happened next shocked the fuck out of me. After South Carolina came Super Tuesday. Every single democrat but Bernie dropped out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday, after they had all made their ad buys, and endorsed Joe Biden. I guess that all of that losing made them that much more confident that he was the one to beat the “existential crisis” that is Donald Trump. Cory Booker and Julián Castro forgot all about the concerns they had raised about Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Huh. Sadly, so did that democratic electorate. They ignored what their lying eyes had shown them about Biden’s mental faculties during those primary debates and did what their party told them to do.
Did I mention that no poll exists on planet earth that has Trump beating Bernie?
Democrats were fucking lying when they said that Trump was the biggest threat to democracy both in 2020 and in 2024. They weren’t lying about the statement; they were lying about their desire to beat him. A friend of mine door-knocked for Kamala in PA in 2024. I don’t know how many of you have door-knocked for a candidate, so I will briefly outline how it works. First, you’re not knocking on the doors of anyone who is registered with the opposing party. The point of door-knocking isn’t to change minds; it’s to fire up reliable and semi-reliable voters. As you’re knocking on reliable and semi-reliable doors, you make notes about your conversation with that voter if they’re still unsure. Those notes are then sent back to the national campaign apparatus. My friend said that she knocked on a whole lot of doors, where Gaza was a big problem for Kamala. A few weeks into the campaign, the volunteers were told not to bother with the feedback about Palestine. The campaign wasn’t interested in that information.
No, really. That’s what happened. I have other friends who started volunteering later in the campaign. They were told not to provide any feedback about Palestine that was given to them by voters.
So, to recap the past 2 presidential elections, first, democrats coordinated a mass drop-out of candidates in the race to endorse a serial loser with cognitive decline in order to stop the clear winner from running away with the nomination, and then, they chose to ignore an issue that subsequently cost them 19% of the total votes they could have gotten.
In both instances, they were protecting their donor base at the expense of potentially losing presidential elections. Fortunately, the electorate has changed a lot since 2020. I do not believe that this electorate would forget the cognitive decline they witnessed with their own eyes, so that they could do what the party says they should do.
Personally, I love these mask-off times we’re living in. I don’t love reading about how Trump handed his pool guy millions of our dollars to fuck up the reflecting pool, (probably) just so that he can get free pool services for the rest of his miserable life but I love the clarity that this communicates about the system of government we actually have. We have a bona fide banana republic and everyone is starting to realize that.
If you’re angry with Trump over his grifting, you’ve missed the point entirely. You should be angry with the system that makes space for this. If you’re consuming media that directs your anger at Trump, you’re being intentionally misdirected. You’re being misdirected so that you can allow yourself to believe that things will go “back to normal” after Trump. You’re being misdirected so that you can’t see that “back to normal” has always been this. You’re being misdirected so that your longing to put the mask back on puts you in a situation where you want to vote for the standard, establishment politician whose stock portfolio outperforms the S&P 500 by 559%.
Why do I seem to focus on democrats in this post? Two reasons: republicans haven’t promised their base anything but hate and division for over two decades now, and they’re delivering; democrats make a myriad of promises to lift up the working class, and they’re constantly (and deliberately) failing.
I’ve still managed to hang onto my sunny optimism, despite how bitchy both parties make me on a daily basis. I want to believe that these mask-off times are sparking an awakening in the electorate. So far, the democratic primaries are pointing in that direction.
I don’t know who the democratic presidential nominee will be in 2028. I to know with 100% certainty that it won’t be Kamala, Platitude Pete, or Gavin Newsom because 2 years from now, millions more people who have borne the brunt of neoliberalism will be eligible to vote. I suspect that it might be someone who doesn’t currently have a high profile. I absolutely wouldn’t be so sure, were it not for the great unmasking that we’ve been living through.
