Donald Trump has always had a problem with numbers, especially those that do not suit his narrative, sense of grandiosity and entitlement. Numbers represent statistical facts that he often finds inconvenient; S.A.T. scores, tax returns, square footage in his garish, gold-plated penthouse in Trump Tower - a building in which he actually lied about the number of stories so in his garrulous boasts he could claim to own the tallest building in midtown Manhattan.
He lies about his height and weight: he’s barely six feet tall in reality, but claims to be 6’3” and 245 pounds - a fact easily disproven by anyone with eyes. Some numbers that he attempts to work around are much more nefarious and criminal, for example his attempts at hiding the initial amount of U.S. COVID infections in the early days of the pandemic (which ultimately led to the deaths of over one million Americans) or at its darkest, attacking thirteen year-olds in Jeffrey Epstein’s East 71st Street bordello.
For a man who never reads books and is basically functionally illiterate by any real measure, Trump has had a lifelong romance with fiction. He used to brag about being scouted by Major League Baseball when he was a military academy student in upstate New York. Boasting as recently as 2013 that he was the best player in the state.
A few years after his fictitious athletic skills did not lead him into professional sports, Trump was lying about having bone spurs to avoid service in the Vietnam War. I often think about how many honest and less privileged young men went in his place after his five deferments - and how many didn’t come home?
Truth itself is an inconvenience for Trump.
It saddens me, as a nation, how far we have drifted from our founding principles.
When I was a child the first story you heard about a President of the United States was a young George Washington being unable to tell a lie when confronted about chopping down a cherry tree. It was meant to illustrate that above all else, honesty was the bedrock principle our nation sought in its leaders. Of course we have strayed from that bellwether before, Nixon and later Clinton come to mind, but now Trump has decided to cut down the whole damn forest and blame it on the other guy.
Trump’s firing on Friday of the BLS Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, was another one of those lines we seem to cross with a frequency that feels like a blitzkrieg. Because in many ways it is; so emboldened has our mad king become that any guardrails or fact checking on his destructive effect on the U.S. and global economy will be summarily shunned and banished from his kingdom.
We used to be a democracy that rightly looked down on the likes of a Saddam Hussein or Ferdinand Marcos - and now we have our own dictatorial leader who is every bit as corrupt and evil, and has the potential to do much more damage to this planet and the people living upon it than perhaps all the other despots of modern times combined.
I do not say this lightly but based on my experience with the man.
Trump may already have - because the failure of the American experiment will have ripple effects across this planet in ways that few can yet imagine. The rise of crypto currencies and his corrupt pay-to-play access - when combined with the disastrous effects of bitcoin mining on the environment - will wreak havoc on our ecology. He is unleashing an army of grifters with no concerns beyond the get-rich-quick schemes of digital destruction; chasing mega-yachts while consuming megawatts.
Folks are already dying in Texas because its strained power grid is under peril from both the electrical usage and the amount of water consumed in cooling data centers and AI infrastructure. ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ will also be the death knell for much of life as we know it if we do not find a way to breathe some sanity back into a sizable chunk of the American population.
The East Coast sweltered under a scorching heat wave earlier this week, followed by flooding - and it seemed to barely register on the nightly news.
My Trump-supporting, ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ flag-flying neighbor rides a diesel-powered lawnmower every day for no other reason than his own entertainment and apparent boredom (he has a professional landscaping crew tend to his property each week as well), and drives gas-guzzling, carbon monoxide-spewing, vintage muscle cars with impunity. A fossil fuel-flex just for the fun of it.
There’s millions of men like him across this land and they are the ones who are most impervious to Trump’s corruption. In their eyes, he has given them the keys to the kingdom.
These folks don’t care about being lied to and they don’t seem to much care for facts either. As long as Trump keeps pointing to a boogie man (or woman in the case of Hillary Clinton) and lashing out at immigrants, they are happy to keep swallowing his bullshit by the boatload.
As I have said before, the guys I knew as kids who turned into MAGA supporters were the ones who came from homes that never seemed to have any books in them. Lots of guns and TVs but no books.
Their mentalities were being pruned by Reaganomics, Rambo, Fox News and a thousand conservative hucksters who sowed anger and xenophobia while rusting their towns and cities from within. Cultivated idiocy - working for the benefit of LBOs, hedge funds and the ‘greed is good’ toxicity that crawled from the sewers of overconsumption and unbridled capitalism - and now has a $250,000-a-plate seat at the table at Mar-a-Lago.
Soon they will be dancing in a brand new ballroom at the White House, or taking in some Branson, MO level type pablum at the soon-to-be renamed Kennedy Center. Trump is turning Washington, DC into another one of his casinos and I don’t need to tell you how those turned out.
POTUS also uses such base level culture as a smoke screen for his criminality and money laundering. I saw this up close working on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ - where Russian mobsters and Hells Angels mingled freely with B-list celebrities and NBC executives. Mark Burnett overseeing it all with a smug and knowing air.
We are in deep trouble as a people - and the generation I grew up with, finding ourselves approaching our mid-fifties, seem to be in many ways at the crux of this issue. You either evolved and accepted science and facts - and empathy as a virtue -or you became hardened in your ignorance and bigotry.
If you succumbed to the latter, you now bray and boast about being openly anti-woke; coal-rolling while collecting guns and ammo as if you are about to take Ramallah.
What Trump has done - and he didn’t do it alone, there are entire industries dedicated to the dumbing down of the American psyche - mostly focused on male toxicity as an entry point to the adrenalized stupidity we now see as commonplace both online and in our streets. This has lethal consequences.
What does it say about a nation that began the week with a mass shooting on Park Avenue, at the very heart of America’s business empire, that it is no longer in the news cycle by the end of it. Pushed out by Trump firing an honest broker of important data - and posting about deploying nuclear submarines to deflect from the Epstein files.
Jettisoning the head of an agency that keeps track of labor statistics will not create more jobs; the revised figures portend to how much economic pain is truly is on the horizon for us if we don’t start to demand action and accountability.
We know the GOP is in on the heist as well - and we can see the Democratic Party floundering and chasing clicks and contributions instead of kicking ass and taking names. We don’t need more text messages, we need real moral leadership and people who are willing to tell us how much danger we are truly in - and how we must all work together do something about it.
It is indeed true that there are no easy answers. The forces we are up against have amassed huge war chests and collected oligarchs willing to deploy all the resources at their disposal to cement their kleptocracy and continue to profit.
We saw that with the absurdity of Elon Musk helping Trump in the final stretch of the last election. The consequences of which is forcing millions to pay with with their lives, as a result of the dismantling of USAID around the globe. Sadly, it’s barely even mentioned now.
The broligarchs cheer Trump’s insanity, addiction and his decades of predation because they know his character flaws help mask their own unbridled greed and destructive intent.
It is no accident the world’s three richest men stood alongside Trump at his inauguration.
Men who all knew better and went anyway, because they are perhaps just as stunted and flawed as their would-be emperor. But no matter how much of a fortune they amass the truth has a way of finding the light.
It doesn’t happen by accident though, it takes work and that job is ours.
May you find a way to illuminate our troubles, and the dangers we now face, while offering hope to humanity. Yours may be the voice that is needed; no action is considered small when it is offered in kindness, humility and genuine desire to better the lives of others.
We have all chopped down metaphorical cherry trees in our lives, the real question becomes what we do next.
How do we rise above instinct and obfuscation to seek out our better angels and those of our fellows. We do that with compassion and choosing virtue over self-seeking. Valor over vice. Facts over frauds.
By choosing love and non-violence in the face of such enormous calamity.
The truth will set us free.
Thank you for your writings, which are so eloquent, intelligent and inspiring. I’ve been a free subscriber for a long while, but for some reason this piece inspired me to become a paid subscriber- I think in part because your consistent ability to put the collective feelings of so many into words is an incredible gift in these very dark times. Thank you for sharing your talent and validating our feelings while also offering us hope and providing inspiration to do whatever small part we can to create a brighter future.
As always, your words hit like a shot of espresso chased with a slap in the face—exactly the kind of truth we need on a Monday morning in the land of delusion and diesel fumes. You nailed it. Trump’s lies about numbers aren’t just about ego or optics—they’re the scaffolding of his entire grift. From fake SATs to fake building heights to fake COVID stats while real Americans were dying gasping for breath, he’s always counted on our collective willingness to look away. But you looked straight at it and said what too many are still too scared to admit: the guy’s a conman with the instincts of a mob boss and the IQ of a gas pump.
And what makes your piece sting even more is that you understand it’s not just about him—it’s about the system of cowardice and complicity that made him possible. The network execs, the hedge fund parasites, the uncaring fools revving up muscle cars while their brains run on AM radio static and rage. You exposed that whole broken ecosystem with the accuracy of someone who’s been in the room—someone who’s seen the handshake deals, the sniveling enablers, the soulless pageantry of power and pretense. Your writing doesn’t just inform—it warns. And if people can’t hear the alarm bells now, it’s because they’re too busy dancing on the White House lawn in their Mar-a-Lago knockoff tuxedos, waiting for a con to save them from the truth.