The Big Grift and other thoughts

Looking at another four years of grifting and burning is just tiring.

It’s been hard to write since the election. I feel like we need more reflection than opinions. The dust is still settling and, while the outcome of the election is clear, the reasons for the vote are not. Over the next few weeks, we need to understand who are Trump die-hards and who voted against the status quo. One group is persuadable while the other is not. I look forward to writing more about that.

We also need to understand that the Trump presidency is, among other things, a huge grift. Trump and his cronies are about to plunder the country. They will steal anything and everything, selling off government land and contracts to their pals at bargain basement prices. Look for a bunch of no-work jobs that pay in the mid-six figures. The “red tape” they are about to cut will allow the billionaires who surround Trump to make even more money and explode income inequality even more than it is now.

Democrats and watch dogs need to wear out the phrase “follow the money.” People understand it and even a segment of right-wingers are anti-corporate. Shining a light on the grift and graft might offer the opportunity for some strange bedfellows. People who want to stop Trump need to be more opportunistic than ideological. We’ll likely need new coalitions to prevent some of the worst abuses.

Right now is just tiring. Are we really going to have to keep fighting this nonsense? Eight years of pushing back against a lying conman is exhausting. Watching Trump nominate bad actors like Matt Gaetz, RFK, Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and that Fox News host to cabinet positions is demoralizing. Knowing that he will almost certainly make more outlandish moves in the coming weeks just makes me want to go back to bed for a year or two.

I’m most disgusted with the once mainstream Republicans who have enabled Trump and his band of miscreants and grifters. They let Trump know that he will never be held accountable for bad behavior and the Supreme Court has largely given him free rein to commit crimes while he’s the sitting president. Their main excuse is that somehow Democrats would be worse. They are lying to themselves and don’t deserve respect or deference. They deserve scorn.

I’ve tried to look at North Carolina as a ray of hope. Not only did we elect Josh Stein as governor, but Democrats increased their council of state seats and broke the GOP’s veto-proof majority in the state house. While the whole nation shifted right, North Carolina moved less than the rest of the country. We are still very much a swing state. Democrats can certainly win here in 2026 and 2028.

I suspect that many of Trump’s supporters will disappear once he exits the scene. They didn’t show up in 2018 or 2022 when he wasn’t on the ballot. For a lot of people, the vote for Trump is not a vote for Republicans. The party will likely struggle in the post-Trump era if we can prevent them from rigging the electoral system before he’s gone.

Still, the reality is that all Democrats can do is try to stop bad stuff from happening. They are a long way from being able to reverse the damage that Republicans have done and will do to our country. Digging out of this hole will take decades.

As a country, we are in a dark place. Trump and the people who surround him aren’t just people with whom I disagree. They are bad people with dangerous ideas in a democracy. The Republicans who should have been gatekeepers are now either sycophants like Thom Tillis or neutered like Mitt Romney. There’s little to hold Trump and cadre back but we’ve got to try.