no reputable
reputation to ruin so
snatch-and-grab artist

I would love to get out of my category named A New Dark Age.

This blog is supposed to be about witty word play and not so much about current events but when commentary about the current man in office is using some of the most creative word play, what can I do?

The term ‘A New Dark Age’ is taken from Winston Churchill’s Finest Hour speech where he warned of what could happen if the world saw Germany victorious, saying:

… if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

That New Dark Age is where we are now.

In the NYT Opinion piece, Dance$ With Emolument$, Maureen Dowd writes:

Other foreign leaders got the message that emoluments were welcome. In an Oval Office meeting where Trump continued to relish his role as protector of the white patriarchy, the South African president jokingly told the American president, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to give you.” (This might be the line that best sums up the Trump presidency in the history books.)

Trump replied breezily: “I wish you did. I’d take it.”

Trump Inc.’s money grabs were taking place against the background of the president pushing through his “big, beautiful bill” extending his obscene tax cut for the rich while slicing billions from programs that help poor people stay alive.

“The guy promised to make American families more prosperous,” David Axelrod said. “He just decided to start with his own.”

In a galaxy long ago and far away, there was shame attached to selling your office. Sherman Adams, President Dwight Eisenhower’s chief of staff, lost his job and ruined his reputation after he accepted a vicuña coat from a Boston textile manufacturer doing business with the federal government.

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

“I think social media and Donald Trump’s persona have numbed people to the idea that certain forms of behavior are off-limits,” Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer, said. “No institution has been able to rein in Donald Trump. He got impeached twice. Didn’t matter, so Congress couldn’t rein him in. He had all sorts of federal and state prosecutions that ended up going nowhere, so law enforcement couldn’t rein him in. The media has been covering him as close as anyone could ever be covered, and the media couldn’t rein him in. I think it makes people just sort of turn away and accept it as inevitable.”

Trump has no reputable reputation to ruin. He’s a snatch-and-grab artist.

No reputable reputation to ruin.

As Mr. Dylan said, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

We, on the other hand, stand to lose a lot.

estimates by the
joint Taxation Committee
rich come out ahead

There are one million American households with incomes above $1 million a year. Based on estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation, in 2027 they would pay a staggering $96 billion less in taxes. That’s a bigger gift than what the households making less than $100,000 a year would receive, combined, even though there are 127 million of them. That amounts to an average tax cut of $82,000 apiece for millionaires, compared with $750 for the working and middle classes. (That’s bigger as a percentage of income, too. However you slice it, the rich come out ahead.) And for millions of families, those tax savings would be dwarfed by the cost of losing their Medicaid as a result of the cuts in the bill.

From the New York Times Opinion piece, Behold the New Tax Plan: More Complicated, Less Fair, Totally Unaffordable, by Jason Furman.

Mr. Furman, a contributing Opinion writer, was the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, kinda sums it up for me.

The rich, the one million millionaires who will come out ahead if the new Big Beautiful Bill is signed into law.

Mr. Furman ends his article that the only thing going for this bill is that, at the end of the day, it IS legislation that was created in the way we were taught in high school government class that tax bills were created, voted on, passed by Congress and signed by the person in office.

Aside from that ….

So I ask myself, why?

Why do these people fall all over themselves to applaud that feller in the Oval Office in the way minions applauded leaders like Saddam Hussein and Joseph Stalin with each person looking left and right to make sure they were not the first to stop applauding.

In another really good read, Brexit’s Failures Could Foreshadow Trump’s. Just Not in the Way You Might Think, by David Runciman, a professor of politics at Cambridge University and the author of “How Democracy Ends,” I found what think is the penultimate clue to understanding what is going.

Mr. Runciman writes, “Trump’s project is to restore the United States to its imagined past glories, to forge an America indifferent to the wider world, which makes Britain a hanger-on, hoping for a lucky break along with everyone else. Trump has little time for the ambitions of other countries when he is so wrapped up in self-centered fantasies of his own.“

The toadies, for lack of a better and not sure there is a better word, are hoping for a lucky break along with everyone else.

If they support the guy, maybe, just maybe, the guy will smile benevolently on them and reward them in way only a multi-billionaire can.

It’s playing the lottery and hoping for a big payoff and like the lottery its possibilities outweigh any misgivings.

But playing the lottery only asks for you money.

Playing that guy asks for your integrity.

Playing that guy asks for your soul.

Choose wisely.

The rewards may be less and the price may be higher than you think.

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