Essays
On Power, Plunder, and the American Problem
I miss when being American was merely embarrassing. When we were just the loud tourists, the gun-obsessed cowboys, the shallow consumerists. Selfish, boorish, rude. A bad reputation, sure, but a manageable one. And to be fair, one we mostly deserved.
But these days I am mortified to be an American.
It’s not just the petulant nepo-brat that was somehow elevated to power, where he just farts around each day, playing out a new performative embarrassment displayed on the world stage.
It’s not just the open corruption and quid pro quo because everyone expected that. Trump is and has always been a grifter, and his simpleton’s playbook is obvious and the moves are always telegraphed.
And while watching a 34-time convicted felon openly looting America from the Oval Office as his completely unqualified sycophants applaud does turn my stomach, at the end of the day, it’s just the actions of a pathetic, feeble octogenarian still chasing his dead father’s approval by hoarding the very dollars he’s actively devaluing. Surrounded by other entitled lickspittles, all trying to cash in by prostrating themselves to a demented old man with nothing left but applesauce for brains.
Of course this is no accidental confluence. It was inevitable.
The Powell Memorandum was the blueprint, institutionalized by Reaganomics, and now under Trump and Project 2025, its final form has been unleashed.
All those lies that started in the ‘70s and ‘80s have crumbled all around us. Trickle-down prosperity, deregulation as freedom, corporations as people, all of that bullshit has metastasized into terminal-stage capitalism. America gave corporations the same rights as humans (arguably more, considering they can’t be jailed and don’t die).
And once enabled, they bought the ability to write the tax code, to gut labor and consumer protections, and to neuter antitrust enforcement and competition.
At this point, the American Dream isn’t deferred; it was foreclosed on, bought by private equity vulture capitalists for pennies on the dollar and stripped for parts.
After forty-plus years, it is painfully obvious that wealth didn’t trickle down, it only geysers up, leaving the vast majority of Americans fighting over crumbs while being told it’s our neighbor’s fault for wanting a crumb too.
Which finally brings me to my point.
Trump is just a symptom. The real disease is the thirty-some percent of Americans who are somehow his true believers. The ones who somehow justify each and every one of his continued assaults on the American people.
The ones who have made hate their entire identity. Pro-Trump, pro-greed, pro-cruelty. Anti-empathy, anti-decency, anti-everyone-not-like-them.
Anti-human.
And I am ashamed that I share a passport with them.
These are the people who truly sicken me.
Their misplaced rage has been cultivated by the very billionaires whose contempt for little people is written into every policy they've bought, the same ones who convince a third of this country to be grateful for the privilege of being exploited, telling them their struggles come from below (immigrants, minorities, the disenfranchised, the different, the weird) but never from above (the oligarchs who strip-mine their labor, their communities, their land, their health, their futures).
And they’ve swallowed the lie whole.
But the cognitive dissonance is staggering, because it is a historical fact that America was built by immigrants in a stolen land. It has always been a project of pluralism, however imperfectly executed. This “melting pot” was the only way the experiment could work.
To now claim that one group of immigrants (the “whites”) has rightful dominion over everyone else, while conveniently ignoring their own Ellis Island ancestry.
That’s not just historically illiterate, it’s morally bankrupt.
So here we are, the mask has come off. The billionaire class doesn’t even hide the plunder anymore. They run the government just like a hostile takeover, extracting value, selling off assets, gutting protections. And a third of the country cheers because they’ve been convinced that their neighbor (the one picking fruit, cooking food, or more egregiously… speaking a different language) is the real threat.
I refuse to normalize this.
I refuse to “both sides” this.