CSotD: Enter Through the Gift Shop
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Weyant kicks off today’s commentary with a salute to the obvious: Donald Trump is for sale.
There are cynics who say he ran for a second term to avoid being tried, convicted and jailed for things he did in his first term, but that’s not true. Most of the charges he was trying to avoid happened either before or after his time in the White House.
Besides, the Supreme Court declared that things you do in the White House aren’t illegal, a theory Dear Leader appears to be testing as we speak.
Most of his efforts consist of filling his pockets as quickly as possible, which may, in fact, be why he returned for a second chance to spin the wheel and make big money. He returned from his Middle East junket having concluded a number of deals for his family, and boasting of official deals for the country, most of which were actually the work of Joe Biden.
The other money deals just happened without his help or knowledge, given that he has stepped aside from the family business and left its operations entirely in the hands of his sons, Uday and Qusay Donald Jr and Eric.
He explained this to the press at the start of his first administration, offering extensive documentation in the form of stacks of manila folders which the nasty press unpatriotically reported appeared to be filled with blank sheets of paper.
But that was then and this is now, and Karoline Leavitt explained that, while it would be unethical for Trump to take money in his role as president, he is certainly entitled to do so on his personal time.
Presumably he stores the loot at Mar A Lago and not in the White House, with no intention of spending any of it until he has left office.
This explanation assumes that bullets which bounce off Superman would kill Clark Kent, and that it would be improper for the President to accept a jet from Qatar, but it’s okay for the Air Force to accept it, as long as they don’t give it to Donald Trump while he is still president.
They can give it to him once he is Clark Kent.
Markstein explains the rigid, impermeable door that isolates President Trump from Citizen Trump and that all purchases must be fully concluded before that door can be unlocked.
It is an ethical process known as “Enter Through the Gift Shop.”
Dear Leader showed his capacity for exercising authority in ordering Walmart not to raise prices despite their cost of doing business going up because of the new tariffs he was instituting on imports.
This required Trump to admit that Walmart would be paying those import duties, while miraculously maintaining his eccentric, conflicting theory that tariffs are paid by the exporter:
Dear Leader’s grasp of tariffs and of the economy in general reminds me of a time in 1991, during the era of glasnost and perestroika, when I spent a few days in the company of 28 senior managers of timber industries from the Soviet Union, who were here to study free-market economics.
They were in their 40s, all very intelligent and capable, but had lived all their lives in a Communist system, so they had to bend their minds around some baffling concepts.
For instance, following a lecture on free-market planning, one fellow groused that he couldn’t see how a system could be said to work if businesses were permitted to fail. Another thanked the professor but said “You have neglected to explain the role of the central government in setting production goals.”
Which essentially meant, “Start over.”
As said, they had the excuse of never having lived in nation with a free-market economic system, and while party members in those days enjoyed a few extras not available to the average Soviet, they knew they were not living in a land of milk and honey.
In fact, part way through the visit, they asked the university to cut back on the offerings at the buffets because it bothered them to see food wasted, a response based on the shortages and suffering they had seen back home.
By contrast, Citizen Trump’s utter lack of knowledge of how normal Americans live, his thinking that “groceries” is an exotic word and his bizarre belief that people must show photo-ID in order to buy bread are examples of the arrogant isolation of wealth.
Jerry Ford drew praise for getting up in the morning and fixing his own English muffins, but there’s a good chance Trump has never bought groceries and wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had.
And, unlike those Soviets, he doesn’t seem curious and eager to learn.
He’s never lived under a system in which the central government tells enterprises how to operate, but now it seems that’s the system Comrade Trump wants to impose on us.
Which makes sense, if he expects to both impose tariffs and lower prices, because it would require a Communist program of futile five-year-plans that have to be re-calibrated regularly, though you’ll note that the Soviets never made that system work.
And don’t expect pushback from the GOP, given that, while Dear Leader thinks trade imbalances are a plot to cheat the US, his fellow party members are proud to be adding to the national deficit with their Big Beautiful Self-Serving Bill.
Which reminds me of an old Soviet story about Breshnev, who decides to visit a collective farm and show himself a man of the people.
Someone raises a hand, and Breshnev asks his name and question. “I am Sergei Andreivich, and I want to know, What has happened to our tractor? We were promised a new tractor!”
Breshnev promises to get to the bottom of the problem, but when he returns a year later to the same farm, the hand shoots up again. “Ah! Sergei Andreivich,! Another question?”
“Yes! What has happened to our tractor? We still haven’t received it!”
Brezhnev promises to solve the issue, but when he visits the farm a year later, a different hand shoots up:
“What has happened to Sergei Andreivich?
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