The president’s new ballroom showcases a new form of government for the United States. Ours is now a privately run nation governed by the rich from their unelected perches in their gated communities, yachts and private islands.
President Donald Trump is transferring America’s 250-year-long culture of public government into a political culture dominated by the private, aristocratic billionaire class. The rich are building this ballroom, and they will expect to have access to it when they want because it appears to be their government now. It is a good investment for them because they know that Trump does not plan to leave power at the end of his present term. As he said before, an election for the presidency will not be needed in 2028 because all our problems will be so well “fixed” that the people will clamor for him to continue on!
However, make no mistake, the president still has his hands on all the public dollars raised by the federal government. He recently raised the national spending limit significantly to pay for all kinds of other personally run programs he has in mind. However, he is not consulting the people’s representatives about these programs because the people no longer have any say in the policies governing their lives. Their job is limited to financing the government run by America’s new tyrant king.
The people’s tax dollars no longer buy programs to benefit the people like food, affordable housing and health care, but rather programs to benefit the priorities of billionaires, like oil and gas drilling, war in Latin America, private schools, space programs, AI, and every other kind of policy that can be turned against the middle class and the poor to limit their economic potential and their political rights.
In the late 1800s, President Grover Cleveland was so frugal with taxpayer dollars, he was called a “one-man government.” He had one private secretary. He wrote personal checks to cover White House expenses. He put the presidential yacht into dry dock, paid his own expenses on vacations, and paid for hay for the White House horse carriage barn. He often answered the White House phone and door himself. He wrote an inaugural address lasting 25 minutes and delivered it from memory. He had no use for speech writers. They cost too much money and put out a lot of propaganda.
Today, our president passes up no opportunity to use his government power to enrich himself and his family. Many of those opportunities are called “emoluments” in the Constitution and are prohibited. No matter. He accepts a half billion-dollar gift of a jet from the King of Qatar, uses his famous name to grow a family business in crypto and plans to develop real estate in Gaza.
Along the lines of all this personal aggrandizement, the president wants taxpayers to pay him $230 million in damages for the Russia connection investigation and the classified documents case.
The president is also making policy to either help out his friends in foreign governments or hurt his enemies in foreign governments, even when it hurts people who work the land at home. Ask farmers about Argentina and China.
One manifestation of the powers of the new aristocracy is that today wealthy lawmakers are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their lawmakers. They are doing this through immoral and illegal redistricting initiatives at the behest of our powerful president. This way they can ensure that billionaires will never be out of office ever again in the future.
As far as the war already underway against Venezuela, the president’s apologists say that we have huge standing armies all over the world, so why use them any longer to keep the peace, when we can do the opposite? We can initiate war wherever we want and take whatever we want when we win, like oil reserves in Venezuela. We need to use the world’s largest aircraft carrier, as the president says, to “kill people” rather than save people.
Others say that is exactly why the Founding Fathers and Mothers required that the Congress should initiate all national war-making: so the interests of the people should rule rather than the interests of the wealthy military-industrial complex that Republican President Eisenhower warned against.