Wouldn’t wanna be ya

Could YOU serve as one of the mad king’s courtiers?

No sooner do I write about how nuts Trump has gotten that he ups the ante.

His “press conference” Tuesday was more like a rant ‘n’ rave (albeit a low-key one, more of a yap ‘n’ crap, owing to his mental and physical decrepitude) in which he wandered from topic to topic, from his alleged potential as a major league baseball player to how the father of Renee Good, the woman slain by ICE, “loved Trump” to how the people he fired from the federal government were happy he did it because now they’re making more money to a monologue about the binder clip that held together his Book of Accomplishments. Oh, and also racism.

Just listen to any random minute or two of that video. He’s gaga.

There’s plenty to say about that, but I want to focus today on a separate and instructive phenomenon: the people around the senile old tub-o-guts — the people who we see day after day at his elbow nodding and smiling and chuckling and acting like his shit is ice cream (or at least smells like it).

We talk a lot here about the Prestige Press’ kowtowing to and sanewashing of Trump. This remains a very consequential and scandalous source of misinformation that elevated Trump in the first place and continues to insulate voters from his insanity (though polls suggest the insanity’s getting though despite the media’s malfeasance).

But think about why the Prestige Press is that way. With internet propaganda platforms, micro and otherwise, eating their lunch and siphoning their audiences, they were left desperately hanging onto two things: 1.) the portion of the geriatric viewers who had stubbornly stuck with Network News but hadn’t converted (as many had) to a diet of Fox News bullshit; and 2.) access. Keeping the first demanded they act like Trump’s insanity was normal — because after decades of conservatives working the refs, any pointing out MAGA madness, however justified, would be read as liberal bias aka Fake News. And keeping the second also required they normalize Trump. You weren’t going to keep your seat in the press pool if you said things were not normal! (And in many cases they didn’t anyway.)

The result is the worst of both worlds — a kept press that can’t be trusted by anybody. Even after today’s debacle we still got stuff like this:

And THAT guy’s from the BBC! (The American version, per NBC: “Trump defends ICE tactics and complains about NATO and Norway at White House briefing.” Not as fun and even more cowardly!)

But maybe for the people in the inner circle it’s even worse. Think of Howard Lutnick grinning his ass off on TV — or Scott Bessent, smarming ditto — as they tell ridiculous lies on Trump’s behalf. Think of all the cabinet members who have to sit at that big table while the cameras roll and make up stupid shit to publicly praise him with. Think of Kristi Noem, who produced one of the crazier of those encomia, actually crediting Trump with stopping earthquakes, and not only fronting for Trump’s secret police in an increasingly Nuremberg-worthy manner but also pumping her face full of filler so Trump won’t one day notice her, grunt “ugh, hagged out” and replace her with a cheerleader.

I ask you, friends: Could you do it? Yes, it’s all well and good to giggle and josh about the money and how it would take the sting out of it. But by the very fact that you’re reading this periodical with its highly satirical and thus moral standards I must assume you hold to standards similarly exalted yourselves. With Trump, it’s not like getting very highly paid to eat dogshit, which is a morally valueless act — it’s more like profaning one’s ancestors, or spitting in the face of God, or otherwise violating whatever might be your most sacred trust.

It puts me in mind of this week’s The Atlantic profile of Pam Bondi, surely one of the more evil specimens in Trump’s herpetarium. I could only see a bit of prologue before the paywall intruded that ended, “But here she was in a Senate hearing room in October, a person who had once seemed so mild, so warm, so kindhearted that she’d earned the nickname ‘Pambi’...”

Barf, said I, reminded as I was of the recent Politico profile of Bari Weiss and how all her old pals just couldn’t figure out how such of wonderful, moral person could go so horribly wrong. But The Atlantic reporter, I found by reading the thing later, was not herself fooled — though many old Bondi buddies apparently had been.

In the profile we see these people telling tales of how self-sacrificing young Pam could be — making copies when mistaken for a secretary, holding the hand sanitizer bottle for a local state attorney pressing the flesh on a receiving line, etc. Like much of the fawning and fleering of Trump toads, these actions may at first seem, as Bondi’s early friends found them, displays of modesty and loyalty. In many cases, these can be seen as positive qualities. But less sympathetic observers will realize that, like the flatteries of the Trumpkins, these acts by Bondi were only selfless insofar as they were self-abasing, and self-abasing only for purposes of self-exaltation — that is, lifting herself to proximity to power, grabbing hold, and hanging on for dear life.

And what kind of exaltation is it, really? All the Trump troops must keep up their supplications endlessly, never faltering, never even sneaking in a dig for the sake of self-respect lest the famously thin-skinned shitbag sense it and cast them into outer darkness. Senator Bill Cassidy is finding this out now as, even after he disgraced himself and his medical degree to make RFK Jr. HHS Secretary, he finds Tubby backing his primary challenger. Most likely Trump heard Cassidy’s recent, feeble demurrers against Kennedy’s performance — involuntary spasms, I must assume, of the Senator’s nearly-dead conscience — and took them as grounds for humiliation.

Imagine being eternally on tenterhooks lest such lightning strike you! These people are famous and well-compensated, yet as utterly dependent on the whims of the tyrant as any medieval servant. Only the most morally vacant and depraved pawn could stand it. I’m no plaster saint, but I’m not even fronting when I say that no amount of money would make that worth my while.