The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

When I ask my MAGA buddies what it is they like about the guy they voted for, they invariably say they want a biznessman in charge. They don’t care one pronoun about Woke stuff, DEI stuff, touch-feely B.S. — they want a capitalist, a captain of industry, a corporate magnate to steer the ship of state. They couldn’t care less if he’s been bankrupt a few times. They don’t give a damn if he left his contractors holding the bag. They don’t mind that he’s a chronic liar, a convicted felon, an egotistical womanizer or … well, much of anything, really, beyond the fact that he’s a billionaire. It goes without saying, without analysis, that if he’s filthy rich, he must be a savvy entrepreneur, exactly what this country needs.

The wealthy just want a fellow 1%’er to lower their taxes, get rid of burdensome regulations, cut the government down to size and protect their interests. The bizness of America, they will gladly tell you, is bizness, pure and simple. If they get richer, if more of us get rich, the money will trickle down to everyone. Sure, they’ll get more but fair is fair. Government needs to get out of their way!

A good biznessman, most folks will tell you, hires excellent people to surround him. Experts. Professionals. Trump gets rid of these people because they aren’t Yes Men. His people, sycophants all, are there to do his bidding and to flatter him endlessly. He is, he thinks, the smartest guy in any room. He listens to his gut. That right there is his genius.

This week he put blanket tariffs on nearly every country on earth, even some with no populations unless you count penguins or migrating birds. The price of nearly every imported product will be going up. Inflation will go up. A recession will be coming up too, more than likely now, if not, worse case, a full blown world Depression. The Dow and the S&P and the NASDAQ plunged, his advisors are calling each other morons and worse, the real bizness CEO’s are running around social media with hair-on-fire five alarm incredulity.

And my buddies are now desperate to get their retirement money out of the stock market which is a roller coaster ride every day. We’re going to find out soon if we elected a biznessman. Or just a tennis shoe salesman with dreams of grandeur.

“I hear so many times, ‘Oh, I want my people to be smarter than I am.’ It’s a lot of crap. You want to be smarter than your people, if possible.”

I’m guessing that half of the American people voted for Trump hoping that a businessman, a CEO, a job creator, a billionaire entrepreneur, a captain of industry, might lead them out of the Valley of Death, or at least the ravine of income inequality. I figure they think the head of Boeing or Amazon would be the sort of bright, can-do person who could turn this country into an economic machine. So they held their noses over Donald’s, let’s call them his idiotsynchrocies, and cast a vote for a real estate developer turned reality TV host.

Why not? Some folks actually believe the country is going down the sewer. They see the world shape shifting faster than you can say Virtual Reality. They feel left behind, culturally, economically, politically, socially, you name it, they’re watching the future speed past them before they can even get a hitchhiking thumb out. Not that it would matter with self driving cars coming up from behind them. They want to make America great again. Meaning, they want America to be the myth they have in their heads, the one where they liked Ike and Beaver, that loveable white kid out in the suburbs who was always getting his ass in trouble, but in the end, he learned some valuable lessons and went to bed happy that in the morning his cereal bowl of processed and sugared grains would be waiting once again to fill his belly with empty calories.

Five months into this Presidency they still hold out hope that the Mogul of Manhattan will turn D.C. upside down and shake these swamp denizens until the loose change in their bulging pockets clatters to the base of Lincoln’s monument, then rolls down the marble steps and finally into their own bank accounts. If he lives up to his myriad promises, they’ll have free cable TV by Christmas. Yes, Virginia, there IS and he lives in the White House! When he’s not at Mira-de-Lago.

I happen to be one of those cynics who believes CEO’s are paid a hundred times too much. Call me an infidel and take away my passport, but you can’t tell me stockholders aren’t idiots for paying some yahoo in an Armani 50 million bucks to run their corporation. Course, it’s their money and they can fritter it away on mega-talent, but in the end, all of us pay for that, stockholder or not. The real price, though, is that we are fast becoming a society of peasants and princes.

We’ll see soon enough if the real estate developer king was worth the price. We’ll find out if America should be run like a corporation or a real estate office, if we can lean on the unions, bribe the politicians, coerce our enemies and bluster our way to greatness once again when the man at the top declares publicly he wants only inferiors beneath him. Little wonder he hasn’t filled all those hundreds of vacancies in his government. Hard to find folks that dumb.