The Fuck You President

Hello.

This just in from my friend Buzz Burger:

“I'm sure you're aware of the Trevor Milton pardon. This upsets me more than it probably should. I mean, it's trivial compared to so many other of Trump’s recent actions. But, it's such an in-your-face arrogant ‘fuck you,’ IMO.”

Hey, Buzz:

I somehow missed that story, what with the daily cavalcade of other cretinous crap, such as the collapse of the world economy because of Trump’s kindergarten-level misunderstanding of global trade. But the case you mentioned is both not surprising and a splendid, instructive example of the philosophy of governing that Trump has embraced. He is the Fuck You President. He does things because Fuck You. You can trace virtually all his official acts to this bold and decisive managerial doctrine. It has serpentine tentacles, with many subcategories. It owes much to an appreciation of Mafia culture.

Trevor Milton is a billionaire who was convicted in 2022 of securities and wire fraud for his criminal mismanagement of The Nikola Corporation, would-be builders of electric and hydrogen-powered trucks. Shareholders besotted by the promise of a breakthrough in alternative energy vehicles lost $660 million in the company’s collapse and bankruptcy this year — for some, prosecutors say, it was their life savings.

The government proved that Milton had persuaded non-professional investors to buy shares of the corporation by making false statements in social media and in interviews about Nikola’s financial health and technical achievements. Some were outrageous deceptions. He once published a video that seemed to show an enormous prototype hydrogen-driven semi truck smoothly skedaddling along a desert highway, but it was shrewdly shot and edited. The truck apparently lacked gears and a motor, and was actually rolling down a hill, powered only by gravity. Milton was sentenced to four years in prison — he’d probably only serve one — and ordered to make $168 million in restitution to his victims.

Milton was scheduled to begin his sentence right about now — but late in March, Trump pardoned him. The pardon means that Milton no longer owes money to his victims. They’re screwed.

See, that’s where the Fuck You comes in! Shortly before the election last November — with his sentencing looming — Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to Donald Trump’s money-thirsty presidential campaign. The quid pro quo is screamingly obvious, and entirely transactional. It was an anticipatory bribe. By March, the stench of corruption was overwhelming — but Trump didn’t care. Pardoned him.

Why?

Because, “Fuck you, injured creditors. Fuck You, prosecutors. Fuck You, media moralists. I’ll just sign this here piece of paper.”

I call it the BIC pen corollary, a vital underpinning of the Fuck You Doctrine: Why did you do it, Donald?

Because

I

Can.

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Many presidents have issued ethically questionable pardons, of course, but they were vastly more defensible and less obviously sleazy than this one. They were not in return for personal bribes: Joe Biden pardoned his son to much public criticism but for reasons that are the opposite of selfish — it scorched him, personally. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, to public revulsion and Ford’s ultimate political dissolve. Bill Clinton pardoned Mark Rich, whose ex-wife was a major financial donor to Democrats, but not to Clinton himself. The cheesy pardon was thought to be mostly a suck-up to Israel and the powerful Jewish lobby in the United States. Not for tangible personal gain.

But the biggest distinction, of course, is that with Trump, this is not a singular, one-off matter. Trump trowels the Fuck You Doctrine over nearly everything he does. He shakes people down — enforcing omerta, the demand for utter loyalty under threat of inflicted pain.

As I see it, the Fuck You Doctrine has a Reciprocity Rider. It is based on an infantile New York City tough-guy response to a perceived affront: “Fuck ME? Fuck YOU!”

Through punitive, primitive, pinpoint-focused executive orders, Trump has gone after law firms financially only because they had once dared to work on legal cases against him; this has impelled a few lawyers to kneel in shame and repentance and make tribute payments to him. So this all comes under the general Reciprocity Rider of the Fuck You Doctrine, but also involves a special incidental subsection I call the Tamerlane Tenet: humiliation of the conquered by the conqueror. Tamerlane was a 15th Century Mongol leader who defeated Sultan Bayezid (“The Thunderbolt”) in the Battle of Ankara, and then, it is said, kept him in a cage and forced him to watch his wife serve dinner naked to the the conquering army.

These are the many appendages snaking down from the Fuck You Doctrine. Consider:

Trump’s publicly eulogizing Herman Cain, the hard-right buffoonish pizza magnate but ignoring the death of the great John Lewis because Lewis failed to attend his inauguration? That’s Reciprocity, as exercised by a guy I call America’s Chief Petty Officer. Trump is willing to exact punishment for the most trivial of reasons — nothing is too small for him to take umbrage at, and seek vengeance.

Trump’s blatantly dog-whistle racist approach to dismantling DEI initiatives? Pure Tamerlane. These actions are clearly about putting forth the humiliating assertion that women and and people of color are unqualified for their jobs, promoted to positions of power only because they’ve been given advantages not available to white men.

Trump’s pardon of the worst January 6 felons? Mostly BIC but partly Reciprocity; their prosecution, as Trump sees it, was a proxy war against him, a slap in his face that he could not tolerate. And, hey, a good Mob boss takes care of his gunsels.

Trump’s jettisoning of NATO and embracing of tyrants? Simple Reciprocity. He knows he is held in contempt, and privately ridiculed, by enlightened Western leaders. He hates them for it. (He hates everyone for everything, actually. Does he have any friends? Have you ever heard of any, other than his famous imaginary friend, Jim?)

Trump’s unapologetic war against science, the arts, higher education? That’s classic defensive FuckYoouism, powered by BIC. Those intellectual institutions are the ones that most encourage critical thought, of which Trump is rightly terrified, and which provides perhaps the greatest threat to his famiglia regime.

Trump’s bold appointment of a cabinet of crisply saluting, grotesquely unqualified and incompetent zealot ideologues? BIC. Try and stop me.

Trump’s war on international development and compassionate foreign aid? Pure BIC, also. He famously disdains Shithole Countries. So he’ screwing them Because He Can.

This all brings us back to tariffs and the plummeting stock market, of course. Does Trump’s stunning malfeasance fit into the Fuck You Doctrine, and its assorted tentacles?

Actually it epitomizes the Fuck You Doctrine in its arrogance, its petulance, and in the the fulminating anger and resentment behind it: Fuck you, all other countries that take advantage of us. Fuck You, you pointy-headed intellectuals who gravely cautioned against this. Fuck You, all you non-billionaires with money in the stock market. Fuck you, Americans.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll

That’s it for today.

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And finally, just personally, my overwhelming current sentiment, even greater than fear:

Grrrrrrrrrr.

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