I suppose I should do it once, before I go on to more important things.
Because 50,000$ in cash isn’t really that important, in the grand scheme of things. I’d like it, of course, and I’d take it, if you wanted to give it to me in a paper bag. Tom Homan did, if you believe The New York Times:
The news broke Saturday night, and was briefly everywhere. But the next day was Charlie Kirk’s funeral, which was attended by thousands, covered extensively in the media, and ended with Trump telling everybody that he hated his enemies.
The New York Times broke the story and applied all the usual caveats, whether out of journalistic integrity or fear of being sued. Homan wasn’t a public official at the time he took the money—can he still be charged? Nor had Homan made a specific promise to do anything in exchange for the money. The FBI handed him the 50,000$ in a bag from Cava, a supermarket chain, and he gave them the promise that he’d keep them in mind if the Trump administration hired him (again). Since Homan had worked for the first Trump administration, and since he was saying things like this…
…if "Trump comes back in January, I'll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen. They ain't seen shit yet. Wait until 2025." On July 17 at the 2024 Republican National Convention, Homan called Biden's immigration policies "national suicide" and told "millions of illegal aliens" to "start packing". Homan said that drug cartels would be designated as terrorist organizations and that Donald Trump would "wipe them off the face of the earth."
Homan had been around; he was the architect of the family separation policy that split parents from their parents. Since the parents weren’t around, something had to be done with the kids. So he put them in cages. You remember photos like this, from a time when we woke up every morning and felt proud to be an American:
In November of 2024, Trump was already promising that if he were elected, Homan would be his border czar. He was a man of his word, and The New York Times went on to say:
After Mr. Trump took office this year, Justice Department officials shut down the case because of doubts about whether prosecutors could prove to a jury that Mr. Homan had agreed to do any specific acts in exchange for the money, and because he had not held an official government position at the time of the meeting with undercover agents, the people added.
Homan fell into a trap set not by the FBI but by his own stupidity and cupidity. The FBI, according to the Times, was investigating somebody else, who told them that the palm to grease was not his but Homan’s. So that’s when they dropped by to see whether 50,000$ was all it took.
It was, but why Homan took it is a mystery. He hadn’t done badly for himself in the interregnum: he had been one of the authors of Project 2025 and had started an organization called Border911, to educate people about what having a safe border could do for folks. He had also, according to the Times..
He also opened a consulting business that has worked for companies seeking immigration-related contracts, including those poised to benefit from Mr. Trump’s policies, The Times reported in January. At one point, he was paid between $100,000 and $150,000 to lobby in Texas for Fisher Industries, a construction firm that last year secured a $225 million contract with the state to build a section of border wall.
Exactly! Forget the bags of cash—that’s for amateurs. The real money, of course, can’t be stuffed into a plastic bag. It will arrive more stealthily, and in far greater sums than a grocery bag can hold. That quarter of a BILLION-dollar contract to build a “section” of the wall has plenty of money for everybody, and everybody will pay the hand of the person who opened the doors and got the contract.
If the contractors on the wall don’t come through, there are other sources as well. Homan got a gig on Fox News, he joined the Heritage Foundation, and lastly, according to Wikipedia:
Homan received at least $5,000 in consulting fees from GEO Group in the two years before he joined the second Trump administration.[32][33] GEO Group is the largest prison operator in the United States, with facilities including for-profit private prisons and immigration detention centers.
It has to be said: the tip of this iceberg is already impressively big.
Prisons are big business in our new world—since when I was a kid, grown men were sort of squeamish about making money by locking people up. Prisons were necessary (sadly) as much as schools (happily). But nobody made any money out of teaching kids or locking them up in later life. It would have been unseemly.
You know, like making money off of health care.
Wikipedia has heard of the GEO group as well, and doesn’t have much good to say about them. They’re worth 2.4 billion dollars: since it costs between 35, 000 to 40,000 dollars a year to house one prisoner.
The point isn’t what Homan did, the point is what we’re not doing. We are eulogizing Charlie Kirk, a guy who was brutally murdered in broad daylight in front of a crowd of college kids. His death is horrific, and whatever part of his life is worthy of praise should be eulogized.
It’s easy to eulogize a man you don’t know, and on whom you can hang your political / personal views. What’s harder to do is to examine all the crooks that Trump has gathered around him. All the contracts he can bestow. All the little ways—from using lesser-quality materials (or fewer of them) in building contracts to employing illegal immigrants to build the prisons to house…
…illegal immigrants.
These people are crooks, and the only ones supporting them are cowards who fear losing out on the money that’s slushing around. Susan Collins? Lisa Murkowski? Wringing their hands and telling everybody they’re scared doesn’t cut it.
Trump is building a ball room on top of the White House Rose Garden for nobody but his rich friends, and you can be sure that each bag of cement comes with a buck or two slipped into Trump’s pocket. Or Trump’s friends’ pocket.
This isn’t ideological, or if it is, it’s only coincidentally so. Government contracts come with lots of red tape: environmental impact statements, labor regulations, inspections, and finally inspectors general who take a look at the thing once it’s all done and try to make sure that nobody grifted too badly.
Trump has gotten rid of many of those things. He can build shit fast—the ice-skating rink in Central Park comes to mind—but how good is it? What damage did it do, along the way? And whose pocket got stuffed?
So Trump is building a ballroom, and short of doing a séance with Albert Speer, the thing couldn’t look more Third Reich. But it’ll be nice to have, since we won’t have a presidential library. Why should we? The dude can’t read.
So it’ll work out nicely. After this mess is done—and it’s nowhere near over—we can convict Trump and all his cronies. Building cages, as we’ve seen, is child’s play.
Then we can put them in it, and let the president and all his men find solace in the Bible (which was the only book they gave to Abrego García down there in El Salvador). There’s much to reflect on, in the Bible, and the hours will fly by. No time to look at all the gawdy gold drippings flung against the wall…
…as seen through a chain link fence.
