Conmen

 Donald Trump's "campaign" for president involves some really odd stuff. He spends almost as much time hawking merch to his cultists as he does making an affirmative case to be president. To the degree he makes an affirmative case it roughly goes like this: "Biden is terrible of Issue X, I will make it better. The best. The end."

Instead, he's doing things like selling his bibles and golden sneakers. Some of this is his irresistible need to monetize everything. Some of it, I think, comes from the grifters that surround him and that sure seems to be the case with his new embrace of crypto. These guys are so sketchy, even other crypto bros are skeptical of them. Imagine being too sketchy for guys who make fake money for drug dealers.

It is so incredibly tiresome to live in a world with the constant drip-drip-drip of "If any other candidate had said or done this, their career would be over." My wife had me listen to an interview of a Black guy who hated all politicians but thought Trump was "gangsta" and if he voted, he would vote for Trump. He acknowledges that he's a crook, but thinks all politicians are. Someone coined this the Politics of Anti-Politics. Trump is the central figure in this Anti-Politics.

The problem with Anti-Politics is that it leads to terrible and terribly corrupt government. Everyone saying "all politicians are corrupt" is refusing to deal with reality, true, but they really have no idea how corrupt things can be. Among the many fears of a Trump restoration would be the absolute destruction of government into a rent seeking cesspool of every day graft.