Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

What does the cabinet Trump has picked tell us about who he really is and what he wants out of being President of the United States?

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and have a look at Trump’s first term in the White House. Trump spent nearly a quarter of his time as president on a golf course—usually his golf courses. This entailed flights, both short and long, on Air Force One. Oh, how he loved picking up the phone and telling someone he wanted to play some golf, so warm up the helicopter, and wheel Air Force One onto the tarmac! Donald Trump just loved all the free shit you get when you’re president.

And presidents don’t have to work very hard, either…not when their name is Trump, anyway. He spent his mornings at the White House lounging around in the upstairs private quarters of the West Wing, talking on the phone and having Diet Cokes and various foodstuffs delivered to him. He took the elevator downstairs to the first floor and the Oval Office around 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., where he spent, at most, about four hours doing the “work” of being president, which also involved, according to reports, enjoying Diet Cokes and food from the White House Mess in his private dining room just off the Oval Office, sometimes with friends and associates. Aides attended him there with memos and other stuff that was time sensitive and demanded the attention of the president and could not be handled by anyone else. Then around 4 p.m., he went back upstairs to his quarters for more private phone calls and Fox News watching. The Trump White House, after a while, just stopped handing out the presidential daily schedule to reporters because there wasn’t anything on it. 

Trump enjoyed the trappings of the office. His idea of our nation’s foreign policy was jetting off on Air Force One taking trips to the G-7 or the G-20 where he could elbow his way to the front of photo ops and generally keep his own counsel at the meetings, with the exception of private meetings on the side with other Big Guys—they were always guys—who might be in his favor that week. This included his infamous private talks with Vladimir Putin, whom he apparently saw as his equal on the international stage, and Ji Jinping, the president of China, his other international equal. He was very, very impressed when Prime Minister Macron of France held a big Bastille Day parade down the Champs Elysees, which Trump apparently thought was in his honor. He particularly loved the display of military might and wanted a similar parade but was talked out of it by the kind of nettlesome aides and officials he has sworn will have no place in his second administration, so get ready for tanks and missiles galore on Pennsylvania Avenue.

So, do we really think that Trump believes any of this stuff about the Deep State and shrinking the government and saving money and cutting the deficit? Or does he believe in the things he has always treasured: money, golf, power, and adulation, pretty much in that order?

Donald Trump isn’t picking a cabinet to run a government he has never shown much interest in. He does not have an ideology beyond enriching himself and his family, with himself very much first in that equation. Ironically, Trump committed enough crimes in his first administration—he was impeached twice and indicted federally twice and by states twice—that he was able, because of his own Supreme Court appointments, to get himself handed a get-out-of-jail-free card of presidential immunity that covers anything he did “officially” as president the last time and anything he does “officially” this time. Take a guess at who will decide what is “official” and what isn’t in the Trump White House. If you think his Supreme Court won’t back him up on his decisions about what he’s immune from, you’re dreaming.  

We already know what Trump is going to do about his business affairs this time. There has been exactly no talk of Trump signing the traditional ethics arrangement that all presidents have signed that suspends their private business dealings and puts them in trust while in office. So, it’s reasonable to assume that Donald Trump will continue to do exactly what he has been doing all along: enrich himself. In this scenario, being the President of the United States is not a bar to riches but a boon. Maybe he’ll throw a few crumbs to his pal Elon and his oil and gas buddies, but for Donald Trump, being president is all about him and his wallet. He had to lie to be considered a billionaire before. Wait until you see what he’s worth after the next four years in the White House.

Donald Trump is going to run what may as well be called Trump Inc. from the Oval Office. He will be insulated from mistakes, crimes, bankruptcies, all the niggling shit that caused him to lose his family’s fortune and much of his own fortune. Trump has already made perfectly clear that each one of his cabinet appointees will be expected to be loyal not to the Constitution and the country, but to Donald Trump. They will serve the interests of the American people only so far as they don’t get in the way of the interests of Trump Inc.

So, let’s have a look at how that might work: Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense will be running the biggest department of them all with the biggest budget, spending the most money on acquisitions of every conceivable kind at every conceivable level of spending. There is even precedent for how Trump might fleece the defense budget. Lyndon Johnson, while in office, secretly held an interest through his wife in a uniform company that provided all the underwear and t-shirts to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard. That might not sound like much, but Johnson profited from the sale of tens of millions of t-shirts and boxer shorts, and that went on beyond his leaving office in 1969. It was all done with front companies and secret ownership deals and Johnson somehow managed to launder the money that ended up back in his pocket.

But the Johnson military underwear scam is, comparatively speaking, chicken feed. Because of his Supreme Court, Trump will be able to do relatively out in the open what Johnson managed in secret. Think of what Trump Inc. could do with advance knowledge of a defense contract awarded to some company in Ohio that produces the bolts that hold together pieces of steel and aluminum in everything from tanks to armored personnel carriers to helicopters to parts of ships to jet aircraft to cargo planes. Do you think the stock might go up when that contract is awarded? Do you think that owning some of that stock before its price skyrockets upward might be rather kind to the pocketbook of anyone who knows what’s coming? 

But if Hegseth tips Trump off, that would be insider trading! Yes, it would, in another universe, but not this one. Let’s have a quick glance at what else Donald Trump is going to control through his cabinet. Oh, yes: the SEC, which frowns on insider trading, might take a rather different view if the trading is being done by the Commander in Chief. 

And then there will be the incredibly compromised Matt Gaetz over at the Department of Justice, who could appoint someone to the DOJ’s Criminal Fraud Section, which handles white collar crimes, who is willing to look the other way when certain white-collar crimes are committed having to do with stock trades by certain companies associated with certain powerful people. 

Hmmm…how about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the infamous immunization skeptic newly appointed to run Health and Human Services. He has promised to clean house at the NIH and presumably any departments that come under his control, which means that he will be installing Little RFK Jr’s in place of those he fires. It will be Little RFK Jr’s who do the buying of new stockpiles of scrubs and surgical masks and ventilators and god-only-knows-what-all the federal government stores away for health emergencies. It will be Little RFK Jr’s who approve new drugs that come on the market, sending the stock of various pharmaceutical companies into the stratosphere. Do you think Trump Inc. might get a tip-off when certain decisions are made that will affect the bottom lines of companies that make everything from vitamins to weight loss drugs to anti-depressants to cancer treatments to surgical gloves? 

How about the Environmental Protection Agency, scheduled to be run by the contemptible Lee Zeldin. Lots and lots and lots of issues for the EPA with dollar signs attached to them. Might someone associated with Trump Inc. want to fill in some previously protected wetlands so the company can throw up whole subdivisions of McMansions, which can be sold for kazillions? Do you think that the Southern Company, a massive real estate empire that builds exactly such McMansion developments all over the South, might profit from a little wetland filling, or the damming up of protected streams to create lakes around which golf courses can be built that can be ringed with zillion-dollar Deep South Taj Mahals? What are the chances that some form of under-the-table interest in the Southern Company might be shared with Trump Inc.? How about all the EPA hoops that have to be jumped through to build condo developments and hotel and golf complexes adjacent to or even on protected federal lands? Do you think that Trump Inc. might want to put the Trump name on some condos and golf courses that Lee Zeldin sees fit to let them build?

How do you think the new Director of National Intelligence, Putin-pal Tulsi Gabbard for crying out loud, and the new CIA director, veteran Trump hack John Ratcliffe, might respond to some arm-twisting by the president they owe their jobs to? What if their boss wants some information about the leaders of countries in which Trump Inc. wants to, say, build some hotels or condos or golf courses—or hey! All three!—who are dragging their feet about local laws regulating foreign investment and where building materials must be sourced from and how many low-wage construction workers from the Philippines or Pakistan could be imported into the country to do Trump Inc’s building? Do you think if the CIA or the NSA has some inside information about how corrupt a certain foreign leader has been, that they might share that information with their boss, and even use the information to let that country’s leader know that if he doesn’t agree to a certain deal on certain terms, that his regular indulgence in under-age prostitutes might somehow come to light?

Trump isn’t assembling a cabinet. He is putting together the capos in a hugely expanded Trump crime family that will have absolutely nothing to worry about when it comes to bothersome stuff like laws that must be followed or business and political norms that must be respected. Hey! He’s the president! When he speaks to members of his cabinet, Trump’s Supreme Court has already ruled that such speech is an official act by a president, so he’s covered by immunity. If in the exceedingly unlikely event that some rogue federal prosecutor somewhere decides to enforce a law that was found crushed under the gigantic treads of Trump Inc., why lookee-here, Jethro! Donald Trump can use his get-out-of-jail-free-card to bestow upon anyone who is charged with breaking a law their own get-out-of-jail-free-card in the form of a pardon!

It’s perfect, isn’t it? Donald Trump appoints a clutch of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil monkeys to the Supreme Court, and they not only exempt him from prosecution for the crimes he committed last time, they set him up with an entirely new Constitution that says, in effect, let’s ignore all that balance of power shit and give Donald Trump all the fucking power he wants to use in any way he sees fit.

As president this time around, Donald Trump can sit back with a can of Diet Coke in his hand and call up his pal Matt Gaetz and get him to arrange for a few babes to be ferried up to Bedminster on a federal Gulfstream so the two of them can just give the finger to the Congress and the courts and the voters and their own wives and have some goddamned fun. Who’s going to do anything about it? We don’t need stinking laws against interstate trafficking for the purpose of prostitution.

We are Trump Inc. and we are the fucking law.