The US has been for sale to the highest bidder for some time, while democracy dies in plain sight. The difference now? How shamelessly transactional the incoming president iseader, I was wrong. So terribly wrong. It pains me to admit this but, back in the distant past , I wrote some very nasty things aboutand his family. Now that I am older and wiser I realise how misguided this was.
What do you reckon … was I sycophantic enough or do I need to lay the flattery on even thicker? I’m asking because, as you’ve no doubt noticed,to the uber-transactional Trump is ramping up now that inauguration day is approaching. Business leaders are breaking records with the amount ofMark Zuckerberg certainly does. Not only has he praised the incoming president as “badass”, he’s rejigged Meta’s leadership to be more Trump-friendly.
in response to the newspaper refusing to publish a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos, along with other titans of industry, kneeling before Trump. While the Post’s opinions editor said the decision to axe the cartoon was solely driven by the fact that they’d already published a column on the same topic, Telnaes seemed to think otherwise. In a substack post she called the decision “dangerous for a free press.” Last year the Post alsoIt’s not just Trump getting buttered up by Bezos.
What other get-on-Trump’s-good-side projects has Amazon got in the pipeline, one wonders? Might Ivanka Trump do a Duchess of Sussex, and create her own. Who knows. One thing that does seem alarmingly clear, as economic elites jostle to get in Trump’s good books, is that the billionaire takeover of the US is complete. We are very much living in an age of oligarchy.
Of course, this isn’t Trump’s doing: his second term is the symptom of a broken system, not its cause. The US has been for sale to the highest bidder forWhat’s different now, however, is how shamelessly transactional Trump is. If there’s a silver lining to the current moment perhaps it’s the transparency of it all. The US has long thought itself exceptional; a beacon of democracy completely incomparable to the likes of oligarchic Russia.