The Life in My Years

The question was posed to writer, academician, and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College, Tom Nichols, “What is Donald Trump’s agenda?”

Nichols answered, “Trump is going through and he is kind of checking boxes and paying dues, you know, of Yeah. If you help me get in, I’ll set up all these schemes. You guys can, I mean, Trump, in a way, I, I don’t want people to attribute too much purposefulness to this, because I think what he’s really doing is saying, I achieved the thing I needed to achieve. You and I talked about this after the inauguration. I’m not in jail. Right. I’ve defeated all my legal cases. Thank you all. You may all now indulge yourselves. Just go do what you want. And I think that’s what’s happening. Hey, can you give us a crypto reserve? Sure.” (emphasis mine)

It was never a dark secret that Trump’s goal in running for president, and winning, was ultimately to stay out of jail. Everything else, including, grifting, gaming the system for profit, and bilking the taxpayers was gravy. And of course there was retribution. 

Donald Trump has no domestic plan for improving the lives of all Americans. Nearly two months into his presidency, it’s clear that he has no cogent economic policy, as he’s whipsawed on tariffs to the point that investors are frozen in confusion and fear, and as a result the market is cratering. He’s not a deep thinker when it comes to geopolitics. In fact he’s not a deep thinker when it comes to anything. I believe that he’s not even a deep thinker when it comes to fraud and grifting. And in that regard he’s the idiot savant. Swindling and racketeering simply come naturally. He’s the flim-flam man in whose head inspirations of double-dealing sprout organically.

Donald Trump is a lazy man, uninterested in the job of being president. His negligence and disinterest was well known and well documented during his first term.

During that first term, his staffers coined the phrase, “Executive Time” to describe Trump’s unstructured stretches of private time that included non-presidential ‘duties’ such as tweeting, calling friends, and watching Fox News. White House staff reported that during a three month period Trump spent 60 percent of his waking hours in some form of “Executive Time” (297 hours of “Executive Time, 77 hours in meetings—less time than his travel (51 hours) and eating lunch (39 hours) combined. Source, Vanity Fair, Leaked Documents Confirm the Worst-Kept Secret of Trump’s Presidency

And of course there was golf. One report suggested that during the four years of his first term both Trump and the taxpayers paid; Trump paid 285 visits to golf clubs and the taxpayers paid $142 million dollars to finance those trips.

White House staff noted that Trump tuned out important presidential duties such as meetings, and intelligence briefings, while seeming uninterested in the minutiae of policy. Because if you have no real policy besides enriching yourself what interest would you have in national policy. Years later, in a second term would one reasonably expect a 78 year old sloth to suddenly become industrious?

---

Now, in his second term, Trump has even less motivation to be engaged, as a staff of right wing zealots began writing his instruction manual, Project 2025, in April of 2022. During the election cycle when Donald Trump was confronted with the unpopularity of Project 2025, he disavowed it, despite the fact that members of his first administration helped author that screed which actually has origins that date back 50 years. Once elected, Trump, as should have been expected, unleashed Project 2025.

Historically, presidents have launched programs based on their vision for the future and the betterment of the nation. FDR had the New Deal; Truman, the Fair Deal; Eisenhower, the New Look; and LBJ, the Great Society.

Trump, lacking any capacity for or interest in developing a forceful program of his own is relying on a paint by the numbers program based on hate, division, regression, racism, nationalism, right wing Christianity, jingoism and authoritarianism, all concocted by a company of unelected fascists and oligarchs. The President of the United States is in fact a pawn of radical right wing ideologues.

Freed from the specter of jail and given an un-American script, Trump is free to seek two goals. The first of course is retribution and for that he’s marshaled two bootlickers; Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel

The second goal is to join the authoritarians club. Trump dreams of being a Vladimir Putin or a Xi Jinping or a Kim Jong Un. But Trump is at heart a weak coward and he can never be their authoritarian equal. Trump is the clod who wants to be one of the cool kids, something he knows he will never be. It’s left to be seen if Trump will join Putin and Xi in carving up the world, but of the four, Trump will always be the envious, insecure lesser. He will always be the less proficient bench player.