Well, it’s Monday morning, which should be enough for anyone to wake up to. But today, and for the next three and a half years, I’m waking to Monday morning with Donald Trump. It’s like getting a bomb thrown onto your migraine headache.
I’m also waking up to the fact that I’ve completely missed the boat. I think we all have, because we walk around in our heads, those of us who follow the news and are horrified. The situation in Gaza is horrific. The war in Ukraine is unending. The descent of our country into fascism is undeniable and terrible.
Can I do anything about all this? The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is no. So why am I worrying about all this? Nobody else is—so screw it, right?
For a couple of weeks, now, we’ve been obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Wrong—they’ve been obsessed. I read about Epstein and immediately assumed that he and Trump were just the same—they cared about two things: sex and power.
That meant, in fact, that they only cared about ONE thing—their own personal gratification. That’s probably true for most of us, but most of us can’t be whole without other people. A husband or wife, a family, a church group, friends and acquaintances.
Trump has all of this and none of this. His “family” consists of whatever Eastern-European woman Trump is married to at the time, plus three or four children who can’t stand each other. His “friends” are the people doing him favors, or hoping to get favors in return. His “church” group is a bunch of Christian Evangelicals who wait for the occasional White House “prayer breakfast,” which means that each pastor has to outdo him or herself in assuring us that God is beaming with happiness, knowing that America is being led by Donald Trump.
It's all about Trump, in short.
And Trump is all about sex and power. He’s putting every Hispanic he can find into Alligator Alcatraz not out of principle or even hatred—it’s just expedient to do it. He’s imposing tariffs not because he believes they’ll stimulate economic development but because he wants more money sloshing around the Treasury Department, where he has removed the watchdog that monitors the agency. He has no foreign policy because—well, who cares?
It's all about sex and power, remember?
It was utterly clear to us (the professional Trump haters) that Trump had matched, if not exceeded, Epstein’s depravity. But we assumed that sex for Trump was like sex for us: wonderful and at times healing, but never the end-all / be-all for all things. We have other stuff to do.
Sex and power—remember?
So why is Trump president? Does he have any deep-seated beliefs about the United States and its position in the world? Or did he, perhaps, fuck the wrong person? Not just (note that “just”) a twelve or thirteen-year-old, but someone who had her own agenda, or rather was using her body to accomplish someone else’s agenda.
In 2016 the Steele dossier came out, with its allegations that Trump had engaged in golden showers with prostitutes on the bed that Obama and Michelle had used on their trip to Moscow. Trump derided the report (that we’ve all forgotten about until Trump brings it up again) and I had dismissed it. Nobody is stupid enough to do that in Moscow—right?
Wrong.
Now I think it’s possible, and if the golden showers or the mattress or the prostitutes didn’t happen, it was something else equally, or more likely more, sordid. A book came out stating that Trump had gotten noticed by the KGB when he bought a couple of hundred TV sets for a great price from an outlet that served predominantly a Russian clientele.
Ridiculous, I said. That shit doesn’t happen.
Nobody wants to say what this is, because nobody wants to admit it.
The Russians won.
They understood what we do not. They know that for most guys, it’s about—what was it again?—sex and power.
It took decades but they did it. They invented nothing, but they used whatever they could and ran with it. The United States produced the first oral contraceptive, which was so important that it became known simply as “the pill.” Now, everybody could fuck without consequences. Since the consequences were a lifetime of responsibility for another human being, as well as a couple of decades of hard labor feeding, housing, and educating the child, the pill was a big deal. The Russians had nothing to do with it, but they saw the split it created in American society, just as they saw the divisiveness of the abortion issue.
Education became a battle ground, too. Nobody was sending their kids to a private school in the 60’s except for the rich on the East and West coasts and the Catholics. Homeschooling was unheard of, and unimaginable. Who would want to supervise kids “learning” at home that the earth was only 6000 years old, or that the Biblical flood was historical reality? There was a perfectly good school teaching the truth down the road.
Religion went from being a tepid social affair that despite being utterly toothless was seen as too dangerous to talk about. Still, we all did it in the 50’s and early 60’s. Now, not having a religion is perfectly acceptable for about a third of us.
There were changes in media and media consumption as well. Whatever the differences between Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley / Frank Reynolds seem trifling to us today. All four of those guys were old white men who saw the world essentially the same. None of them would have dared to suggest that the events of January 6, 2021, were anything but an attempted coup.
There was a lot of trust, then. My mother sent us all out to play shortly after breakfast on summer mornings, and all she cared about was getting a little peace and making sure we didn’t slam the door on the way out. So we disappeared for eight hours and that was fine. If we needed anything, there would always be someone around to help. Now, of course, all strangers are potential or maybe even likely pedophiles.
Things fell apart, in short, and in some cases that was good. A lot of that shit should have fallen apart, or was going to anyway. But a lot of time, there wasn’t anything to take its place, or what did was inferior. The loveless marriages of the 50’s and early 60’s endured, since getting a divorce was socially unacceptable. Now we have a generation of “latchkey” kids who have grown up in single-parent homes—often poorer and less stable than traditional homes.
I can go on and on, but you get the point. The Russians didn’t start the fire, but they certainly stoked the flames. And it must have been a cheap investment to take a healthy interest in a young, ambitious, morally bankrupt and yet indefatigable man like Donald Trump. America was an open society, and the Russians cast a broad net. All they needed was the right guy, and to be in the right place when he came along.
And they needed, as well, to keep their strongest weapon safe. They needed to stay cynical, and to make sure everybody else became cynical, too. They had to keep telling us, and themselves, that the dream of a democratic, pluralistic, diverse society was…well, a dream. It could never be a reality.
They had to believe that, in the end, it comes down to…
…what was it again?
Right—sex and power.
And what is power (since we all know what sex is)?
Money, of course.
They were right: money IS power. But not all power is money, and there are some things that money cannot buy. Trust, loyalty, honor is unaffected by money. But if you can convince people that a man’s worth is measured by his bank account, and that anything a person may do to grow that account is fair game, then you have a perfectly lovely situation.
So they strung Trump along, and why not? He might have been being led by the nose, but there were plenty of Russian oligarchs needing a gaudy apartment on 5th Avenue during the day, and plenty of Eastern European models of indeterminate age to heat up the nights. Of course the Russians told him that Red Square would soon host a Trump Tower. They also told him that a great nation—like the US or Russia—could never be successfully ruled by a democracy. A strong hand was needed.
They kept their eyes on the main thing: sex and power. One of the countless young, ambitious, unscrupulous men they were grooming would step up and be the leader that Moscow wanted.
They must have been astounded by Trump, since a cynical eye is barely required to see that Trump is a complete fraud. In fact, he’s gone beyond fraud to being a parody. In the last year alone, he’s launched a cryptocurrency, a bunch of playing cards that are NFTs, cheap watches and tennis shoes at inflated prices, and of course the never-to-be-forgotten Trump Bible. He has grifted off of everything, and still does. It’s cheap, really, to buy a United States president. You can, for example, simply give him a jet, and let him figure out how to retrofit it into Air Force One. Or you can just give Trump’s son-in-law a couple billion bucks and tell him to go outside and play in Saudi Arabia.
And the rest of us, who actually care about the damn country?
We’re inconsequential, since…have I mentioned this before?
Sex and power.
It didn’t take much for Trump to get elected. And in fact, it was his sheer “unelectability” that was his success. He has a genius for pissing people off, but also for making them afraid, and making them angry. The fear and the anger was all that it took.
We liberals believed that if we just explained to the American people that maybe a guy selling a Naugahyde bible was not a good man, that a man running a fake university had no interest in education, or that a man who staged a coup had no respect for the rule of law.
Everything we hated about Trump they loved.
We went down like a preacher’s daughter, to use an old tired phrase. American democracy lasted less than six months.
And so I sit in a room, every morning, which has three or four Trump supporters and a retired KGB officer by the name of Dmitri. I sit in the room and I hear the message. But I no longer eat breakfast with members of the group, nor do I even hold hands in a circle and say the serenity prayer, which is the only truly non-denominational thing about AA.
I limit—often severely—my contact with Christians and conservatives, which at this point are the same thing. I smile and stay silent. In fact, smiling and staying silent are the only two things I can give my group, or my world as I know it. That’s what happens when you live in a world with only…
…sex and power.
