A missing story thread of the Epstein scandal involves his connection to and service in behalf of Israel. Yes, we know the marketing platitude: “sex sells.” It goes without saying, genocide doesn’t. But there is a connection: The confederacy of pervs of the economic elite’s sense of entitlement includes possessing a proprietary attitude towards all they survey — whether it involves exploitation of the bodies of women and teenage girls or parceling off for profit the real estate of Gaza by means of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Ecocide, perpetual war, for profit Big Medicine, non-living wages, exorbitant rent and housing cost — all have the same root cause: structures of power created for the massive exploitation of the powerless.
Term it, The Epstein Island of Everyday Capitalist Reality.
Seems like yesterday, Trump seemed to thrive in his persona of a pervy creepopathic tub of noxious goo. But the mania attendant to the predilection has, by all indications, caused him to lapse into a doom spiral.
Study his face. There is no amount of fake tan lacquer that can continue to camouflage the rot festering in his rancid soul nor hide the signs auguring that he is nearing a collapse into his corrupt and rotted out core.
Trump is the emblem of the massive animus required to distract from the decaying conditions of neoliberal capitalism and overstretched empire. All nations have bodies buried on their property. But empires are maintained by the mindset, evinced in a collective basis, and, on a subliminal basis, mimicked below by its citizenry, of criminals, from grifters to cold blooded assassins.
Masked thugs intimidate on the streets and demand compliance. Financial malfeasance is the economic order of the era. And the spilled blood of the innocent is the calling card of the state.
Crime pays and pays (obscenely) well. Yet the hyper-vigilance, hubris, and manic cope needed to maintain the rampant criminality will, after a time, exhaust the enterprise. The players will get sloppy, first from overconfidence then from fatigue.
Trump, face to cankles, is an object lesson on the phenomenon.
Trump, character-wise, in regard to his predecessors to the US presidency, is about as odious as a specimen that ever slouched through the precincts of the White House.
Bear in mind, though, as with Trump, the previous occupant, Biden, was an enabler of genocide. Previously, Obama bragged about being an ardent murderer-by-predator-drone and evinced equal zeal in acting as an operative for Big Banks and corporate oligarchs in general. The Bush (i.e., Cheney) administration lied the nation into foreign wars and (and with the help of congressional Democrats) expanded the National Security State. Bill Clinton continued the Cold War after the collapse of the USSR, lorded over racist, police state enhancing crime legislation, and cut Welfare benefits for impoverished children. The geriatric Howdy Doody puppet of the economic elite and war profiteers, Ronald Reagan, following the tentative measures of Jimmy Carter, ushered in, in full force, the Neoliberal Era, as his handlers waged a series of covert, imperialist wars abroad. Richard Nixon initiated the fascist contrivance known as the War On Drugs — an authoritarian campaign waged against minorities and the counter culture, perpetrated a covert war in Laos and Cambodia that caused the subsequent deaths of millions, and there is no need to elaborate on the crimes known as the Watergate Scandal that led to his political undoing.
All of the Executive Office’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells (a quaint term for men responsible for so much death and suffering) actions culminated in the rise of the US empire-undermining, shambling embodiment of The Second Law Of Thermodynamics in (dismal) human form, Donald J. Trump.
As far as odiousness of character goes, Trump faces stiff competition insofar as the succession of racists, corrupt tools of capitalism, war criminals, and enablers and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide who held the office of president before him.
Crime Boss-in-Chief peruses the rogue gallery of his predecessors
Yes, Trump is an ugly man. But the question remains: Is he making the US an uglier place or is he merely exposing what was always hidden in plain sight?
Witness the recent Jennifer Jacobs outage. When the Bloomberg News reporter questioned Trump aboard Air Force One as to whether he had knowledge of incriminating information contained within the Epstein files, he pointed his finger in a threatening manner towards the journalist’s face, and stabbing the air in front of her, snarled the now notorious ad hominem, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy!”
A crucial question:
Did any of the corporate press who witnessed the affront come to the woman’s defense — or even press the Swine-in-Chief to answer her question?
Thus we are presented with an object lesson on the reason Epstein’s et al. criminal activity went on unacknowledged and unreported for as long as it did.
The fact does not bode well regarding whether Epstein’s power-filthy cohorts in crime will ever face justice.
And finally regarding the aesthetics of facial features — who is it exactly that possesses a porcine-adjacent countenance. (No AI enhancement required.)
Swinish over-consumption at the fossil fuel feeding trough:
Trump on climate change at the recent Saudi-US so-called “Investment” conference:
I’m all for climate change… It’s climate change that’s destroying the world, remember? The world was supposed to have been gone two years ago. The world was gonna burn up, but it actually got much cooler. It’s a little conspiracy. We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.
When the sundowner years begin to descend on a lifelong grifter he will be given, to a greater and greater degree, to believe his own grift. Conversely, an accomplished con artist is aware of the realities of the world at large because verisimilitude is crucial to the success of the con; he risks exposure by not being nimble enough to know the difference between the actual situation at hand and his own lies. Between his advancing age, his physical decline and his worsening affliction of gold fever Trump’s deteriorating condition appears to be accelerating at an exponential rate. His mental acuity is dropping at a faster than beaters on the used car market.
Withal, Trump:
My pollsters said, ‘Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and they went for the president, vice president as a combination, you’d be beating them by 25 points.
Trump has always had a hostile relationship with the realm of fact and truth, but as age-related dementia is setting in his talent or grift is losing its ability to ensnare the credulous and even seduce the stupid.
Trump’s state of mind displays both the most the infantile omniscience of toddler and the unhinged rage of a nursing home malcontent. Still in their prime High Dollar hustlers (e.g., a bone saw aficionado Saudi monarch) have discerned he, like an infant reaching for a set of jangling keys, is dazzled by the scintillation of gold. Flattered and bedazzled when gifted with shiny objects, he can be bended to their will.
President Sundowner rises at morning and dispatches the following into his Truth Social Dominion Of Onset Dementia Palaver:
For his political rivals to be dispatched to the gallows and hung by the neck, insisting ”It’s what George Washington would do.”
As events proceed increasingly beyond his raging will and his poll numbers continue to spiral southward, even in the red state south, expect more old man flings his pudding cup at nursing home staff outbursts. Trump’s, like his partner in unfettered exploitation Jeffrey Epstein, time of unaccountability for his action seems to be at an end. Could the Empire Of Endless Exploitation be in the initial stage of foundering?
Tech Oligarch loony muffin Peter Thiel rants any restraint pertaining to capitalists’ proclivity to view the body of planet earth as rife for exploitation in the manner Trump and Epstein viewed the underage bodies of teenage beauty contestants should be regarded as evidence that the Antichrist is guiding the events of the day and The Beast Of Revelations’ ten crowns of blasphemy are cresting the waves of Mayor Elect Mamdani’s New York Harbor.
Although Thiel’s declaration is the crackbrained stuff of fascist boilerplate and borderline psychotic fantasy of the kind that malignant narcissistic personality types are prone to sputter when under duress, the fantasy is revealing: The billionaire economic elite believe any curtailing of their privilege and power would seem like the world coming to an end.
Call me an operative of the Antichrist or a treasonous leftard but I am all in for giving the times a sustained push in that direction.
“The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea,” William Blake
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.