American Koyaanisqatsi

February 20, 2024

Wind farm in the Goodnoe Hills. Columbia River gorge, Klickitat County, WA

Republicans, Donald J. Trump, and the throes of the big grift

It was 16 months ago, after I’d abandoned television, that my daughter introduced me to HBO’s Succession. It was the next to last season of this dark and tightly-wired serial based, not-so-loosely, on the ethical collapse of the Murdoch media dynasty. The drama was all about power, money, and moral distortion—where even the more sympathetic characters seemed to accept their fate as ruthless strivers—so much so that they would joke about their own willingness to do wrong in order to prevail.

As with the real world versions of the Murdoch and Trump family dynasties, there is no redeeming leitmotif to be seen or heard: no Beethoven’s Ode an die fruede choral, lifted on strings and kettle drums, to proclaim “all men are brothers.” There’s just an iron bubble of amoral ambition and raw power that leaves you aghast for the absence of consequences. The best we get in Succession are the infrequent cameo appearances of the actor James Cromwell (whom my children met as farmer Arthur Hoggett in the 1995 movie about the pig “Babe”). Cromwell, as Ewan Roy, taunts his Murdoch-clone brother, Logan Roy, with the solemn verdict that he is the most destructive human on the planet.

In real-life, Rupert Murdoch had his reputation shredded via deposition in the defamation case that Fox settled—$787.5 million and an admission to airing false statements—with Dominion Voting Systems. Trump and his family business have been found culpable for fraud and defamation with sanctions in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As yet, there have been no successful criminal prosecutions (except against Trump subordinates) and both the Trumps and Murdochs have garnered millions in donations and ad revenues (respectively) by sowing blatant disinformation. Trump, of course, raises millions of dollars in contributions presenting himself to donors as being politically persecuted by corrupt prosecutors. The Dominion discovery showed FOX News executives rightly feared losing market share if their on-air hosts disputed the “big lie” that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump.

“The frauds found here leap off the page and shock the conscience,” Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron in his verdict, last week, in the civil, real estate fraud case against ex-President Donald J. Trump.

To be sure, there are parallels to this sort of corruption in recent American history, including the Nixon era that gave rise to notorious characters like the two Rogers (Roger Ailes and Roger Stone) whose loyalty to a rogue, thuggish version of the Republican Party offered a template for Trumpism. But it is the rise of Trumpism that erases the line between the fiction of Succession and the extant reality that one of the two major U.S. political parties has abandoned democracy in favor of authoritarianism.

This grim metamorphosis has been egged on by a right-wing media crowd whose modus operandi is to fashion “news” coverage and “socialist” demons to fire up the base. It’s a movement that thrives on grievance and outlandish conspiracy theories.

At root it is a grift, just like the whole Trump movement has been a grift—from the rip-off of the now-defunct Trump University, to the bogus real estate valuations that resulted in the $355 million (and counting) New York court sanction last week, to the admitted lie behind Obama “birtherism,” to the misogynistic lie that Trump had never met the woman (E. Jean Carroll) he sexually assaulted in a department store changing room, to the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and to the new $399 golden sneakers that Trump is selling to stay afloat in the gyre of his escalating legal bills.

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