Their Last Refuge

When Donald Trump ran for president, most of the big money donors kept their distance. His own Secretary of State has called him a "moron." And Rupert Murdoch -- if Michael Wolff is to be believed  -- has called him an "idiot." But the big money has decided that, idiotic though he may be, he's a useful idiot. They have come to this conclusion for one glaringly simple reason:  He is their last refuge. Chris Hedges writes:

The problem with Donald Trump is not that he is imbecilic and inept—it is that he has surrendered total power to the oligarchic and military elites. They get what they want. They do what they want. Although the president is a one-man wrecking crew aimed at democratic norms and institutions, although he has turned the United States into a laughingstock around the globe, our national crisis is embodied not in Trump but the corporate state’s now unfettered pillage.

Trump is all about unfettered pillage -- his own and the pillage of those who have hopped on his bandwagon -- which now includes most of the Republican Party. There is, of course, a horrific price to be paid for such naked criminality:

The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.

That doesn't matter to the Trumpists. They are partying like there's no tomorrow -- because there isn't:

As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations. Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.

For Trump and his supporters, everything is for sale:

The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.

Trump has been a salesman all his life. And he's also been a serial bankrupt. He and his big money supporters are bankrupting their country. Samuel Johnson was right. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Image: The Reeves Law Group