Trump’s Thin-Air Diplomacy

For some reason we can’t figure out, we Americans elected a psychopath for president. After we saw what he was about the first time around. After the Supreme Court bestowed immunity from criminal prosecution for all official presidential acts. That peculiar favor felon Donald J. Trump immediately understood as having been arranged exactly for himself. He went so far as to thank Chief Justice John Roberts as he readied to make his joint address to Congress March 4, stressing that he wouldn’t forget.¹ Now that he’s taken over again, President Trump’s doubtful dealings have all become official acts:

Installing a Diet Coke button in the Oval Office. Taking Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago weekends to play golf. Flying down Presidential Limousines Nr. 1 and Nr. 2 in an accompanying cargo plane.² Getting his regal presidential weight conveyed from hole to hole in a little golf cart. Hosting Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournaments at his golf resorts in Florida.³ Issuing executive orders that get handed to him in neat little stacks⁴ whenever he cools his heels at the White House near that Diet Coke button. No trace of emoluments, bribery, or quid pro quo can be found in any of his actions because he has subsumed them all as official presidential acts. He’s not a crook, he’s just got a different style of doing business, a style the Supreme Court has acknowledged and said is okay. 

New to emerge since Trump’s inauguration is the revelation that everything Trump wants constitutes presidential policy, that presidential policy is U.S. policy, and any institution, company, or person who does not conform to U.S. policy is a traitor and consequently, subject to disappearance or, barring that, crippling extortion. 

Trump realized he cannot disappear people with his mind — contrary to how he declassifies top-secret documents — so he’s been hard at work using every other means at his presidential disposal for dropping all sorts of entities from existence: two-year-old U.S. citizens, immigrants, student dissenters, federal agencies, federal staff, entire research departments, charitable entities, and all of Africa. Other means are required when it comes to ridding the country of noisome judges and heinous court rulings. For these he uses at times the straightforward arrest technique his loyal FBI head Kash Patel is eager to exercise. At other times, Trump has his DOJ indulge in tortured misinterpretations of court rulings that his cabinet nitwits justify with moronic logic a child could see through but which enables Trump to worm himself out from under the iron grasp of stunned lady law. 

Those empowered to serve our interests and needs — politicians and corporations alike — have, in capitulating to Trump, abandoned us.

Truth to tell, Trump’s maneuvers have left us trembling, frightened, dumbfounded, and feeling helpless. And no wonder. Those empowered to serve our interests and needs — politicians and corporations alike — have, in capitulating to Trump, abandoned us.

In April Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska made the following remark about serving in public office under Trump: “We are all afraid. ”⁵ Pardon me? Are we to sympathize? She’s afraid? Did she or did she not fight to be elected, vowing to defend the rights of her constituents and American democracy? But no. Now we find out that defending the rights of those constituents against someone who is turning out to be a real threat is too scary for her? Should her fear impress us? We’re the ones getting hunted down and swept off the streets for speaking our minds. We’re the ones threatened with losing our social security checks. All of which is happening exactly because she and her fellow lawmakers are too afraid to keep Trump from destroying the federal government. What’s going on? 

We should be grateful to Murkowski. Her confession helps us understand the silence of the others. It has to do with prosperity, and not our prosperity, mind you. Trump has intimidated them. If they say or do anything he doesn’t like, he will primary them. Our elected representatives want very much to keep their prestigious, highly lucrative positions.⁶ If it requires they hang us to hang on to those jobs, so be it.⁷

With our political officials cowering before Trump, we are thrown on the mercy of the wider economic community to sustain us, those powerhouse corporations we helped build. Yet we find they have abandoned us as well. Again it has to do with prosperity, and not ours. Capitalism has thrown us over by advancing that corporate prosperity, which in turn has upended the bedrock of democracy by corrupting the integrity of its several pillars. 

Once upon a time we had what was called a free press.⁸ We relied on it to discover, expose, probe, and analyze political chicanery and keep political contentions somewhat in balance by exposing both sides. We expected it to air our grievances, champion our causes, inform us of our options. We trusted it to ply its trade honestly, with integrity, heart, and guts,⁹ to operate without fear of or interference from the state, and provide us with the accurate and timely information we needed to help us fulfill our role as responsible citizens. 

Censoring editorials and endorsements to favor irascible Trump, Jeff Bezos eviscerated what had been a beacon and harbor for democracy. 

Rather than a free press, newspapers have been bought up by corporate giants intent on expanding their size and increasing their revenues. In that pursuit, they have been eager to garnish their portfolio with knickknacks like newspapers and media channels, relegating what was a bastion of democracy to a minor balance sheet item. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to preserve the freedom of the press as legions of independent newspaper owners and editors have done in times past, Jeff Bezos took to censoring editorials and pulling endorsements in his Washington Post to favor irascible Trump, thereby eviscerating what had been a beacon and harbor for democracy. 

Other media, too, have discovered their mandate not in providing honest news to nourish the lifeblood of democracy, but to exploit it as a conduit for greater profit. 

In other venues, the same trend is blighting our landscape. With venal Trump as head of state, major law firms have buckled to his extortion schemes, exposing the sad truth that their raison d’être is not justice but revenue. For many leading universities, the same reality was exposed. As Masha Gessen regretfully explained: “Most prominent American universities . . . measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment . . .”¹⁰ This betrayal would draw the harshest condemnation were the public as woke as it is accused of being.¹¹

For moral inspiration, we can turn to the unlikely figure of four-time Grammy-winning hip-hop star Macklemore, who exposed the moral poverty of the illustrious legal and academic institutions we had hoped were guiding the country. While major law firms have subjected their invaluable pro bono work and universities their academic programs to the whimsical oversight of Donald Trump,¹² the rapper is standing up fearlessly for Palestinians. It was not a choice, he said. His actions were nothing more and nothing less than “humanity advocating for the most marginalized.” His friends warned that the Trump administration would come for him if he said anything “around” Palestine, that he would get canceled. Embracing the defense of Palestinian rights as a moral obligation, Macklemore was undeterred. Shaming the American law firms and academic institutions who sold out to Trump, Macklemore insisted: “I’m done playing this game of capitalism . . . I don’t care about a brand deal.”¹³ 

It is our undoing that corporate America still does. 

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1. To mitigate the ostensible embarrassment Trump’s expressed gratitude might have occasioned the chief justice, Trump posted on Trump Social the next day that he had been thanking Chief Justice Roberts for doing such a good job at swearing him in on Inauguration Day. Certainly, Trump would never forget that great job probably because Roberts had been so chill as to refrain from pointing out that Trump’s hand came nowhere near either of the two Bibles held out for that purpose by his devoted wife throughout the time he was administered the solemn oath. ↩︎
2. Limousine Nr. 1 is to convey Trump’s girth securely to his golf club, and it usually succeeds in the ponderous endeavor. Nr. 2 cruises along ready to take over should Nr. 1 fail. ↩︎
3. These exceedingly lucrative events — lucrative to the sporty Trump himself — are not emoluments, but official presidential acts through which Trump conducts in the most gracious manner the most unique, innovative, slick Middle East diplomacy any modern leader could possibly imagine. ↩︎
4. The Project 2025 team has been more than helpful in supplying President Trump with these impressive orders. Each and every one requires Trump’s signature and his signature alone to make it the law of the land. It’s a super rush that Donald has become mildly addicted to. “The Gay Executive” explains it all most succinctly. ↩︎
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/us/politics/lisa-murkowski-trump.html ↩︎
6. To mention just one less-than-squeaky-clean perquisite, their stock portfolios perform on average far, far better than those of the typical citizen who must get along without the timely, clarion insight to which our Congressional members are privy. ↩︎
7. To disguise their cowardice, they pretend a hideous enthusiasm for Trump’s corrupt and cruel misdeeds. ↩︎
8. For reasons not entirely flattering to the industry, we now refer to it as “mainstream” media. ↩︎
9. Sort of like what Al Jazeera has been doing in Gaza since October 7, 2023. ↩︎
10. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/trump-higher-education.html ↩︎
11. This betrayal of the people by corporate America is eloquently expressed by King Henry V when he discovers his closest advisors to be traitors: “Wherein you would have sold your king to slaughter/His princes and his peers to servitude/His subjects to oppression and contempt/And his whole kingdom into desolation.” So gladly and easily does Facebook and Amazon and a host of the richest corporations of our time and country conspire to sell us out and ransack the entire world for their gain. Where is our rage? (Henry V, Act II Scene 2, by Willy the Shake) ↩︎
12. Surprise! Trump’s not satisfied with that. He’s got another idea, a greater something the law firms and universities can gift him — and if it’s too much to ask, great! That’s exactly what he intends to do. In fact, he’s going to make his ask much too big to be acceptable because he knows only when they agree to that, will he consider it a fitting demonstration of their allegiance to him. ↩︎
13. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/28/macklemore_the_encampments_gaza_columbia ↩︎