Let’s take a look at the current state of the U.S. government:
Donald Trump, as President of the United States, effectively cannot be sued for anything at all.
Also, Donald Trump, as President of the United States, can sue his own government. For $10 billion. (Or eleventy-trillion. Really, for whatever number fits his mood.)
And he can then direct his Department of Justice to arrange a $1.776 billion settlement, so that the case never goes to trial. That settlement is just a slush fund, controlled by Trump and his lieutenants, providing payouts to his allies and supporters.
And, also, even if this is all blatantly unconstitutional, there are real questions about whether anyone would have standing to overturn it via the courts.
And that’s because, in an at-least-barely functional democracy, the appropriate response is for Congress to initiate impeachment hearings. On paper, that’s the remedy: Congress impeaches, and/or Congress passes legislation forbidding this outright graft and corruption.
But, ell oh ell, this particular Congressional majority would never.
On paper, the remedy for a Congressional majority that would never rein in audacious graft and corruption is to vote the fuckers out of office six months from now.
But, ell oh ell, this particular Supreme Court majority has decided to lock in Republican gerrymanders and forbid/delay Democratic gerrymanders. No matter how unpopular the Republican Party is in November, the election is likely to be very close. And that’s assuming we have free and fair elections. (Which… yeah, let’s hope for the best but plan for the worst, y’know?)
Oh and another thing: to remove Trump from office over the outright graft and corruption requires both a majority in the House and a 67-vote supermajority in the Senate. It is almost a mathematical certainty that Democrats will not have a 67-33 majority after the 2026 election. They would have to win almost every Senate seat, even in the reddest of states.
Which means, so long as Trump maintains control of his own party elites (in Congress and in the courts), in practice there is nothin to stop even the most brazen corruption. Because both the Republican Supreme Court and the Republican Congress have decided to render him immune from the law, and have also rendered each other immune from the electorate.
And, for a corrupt politician who can only be deposed by losing control of his own party elites, it is pretty useful to have a couple billion dollars in a slush fund to reward your allies (there’s the carrot), while simultaneously directing the FBI and DOJ to harass your enemies (there’s the stick).
None of this ends well. That much is obvious. But it also doesn’t end through the normal checking-and-balancing of the U.S. government as it was designed to work on paper. This, too, ought to be obvious at this point.
The frustrating thing is that it also will not end soon. There is no straight line that I can draw from the outrages of this week to the reconstruction that must certainly, one day, follow. We are well and truly off the map. Here be dragons.
And that temporal delay is, among other things, completely exhausting. The appropriate emotional reactions to learning that Donald Trump’s government has settled a Donald Trump lawsuit by giving Donald Trump $1.776 billion to hand out to his friends and supporters are (1) endless screaming into the void until you go hoarse, (2) incoherent sputtering, followed by your choice of self-soothing behavior, and (3) throwing your hands up in disgust and deciding to tune out politics entirely.
Option 3 is, of course, the path to helpless acquiescence. Giving up and tuning out is what they want. And it is much better not to give it to them. Don’t do that.
But also, let’s be honest: we can see the appeal, right? Because this is so corrupt and so absurd, and someone in power surely ought to do something, but the arrangement is self-reinforcing in a way that makes it unlikely to survive in the long-term, but nearly impossible to dislodge in the short-term. And so we are left to ponder when, exactly, the long-term is supposed to arrive, and why, precisely, the people in power aren’t doing more.
The news next week will likely be even more corrupt and more absurd. Empirically, we keep finding out that we haven’t hit rock bottom yet, because if we hit rock bottom then there would be some sort of noticeable recoil on impact.
We will, eventually, rebuild. But it will not be a return to normalcy. Once an institution has been this compromised, once it has been brought down through the uneven application of its own rules, it can no longer be merely restored. It has to be amended and restructured.
In the meantime, we are left to scream into the void. We also use this time to organize, and to prepare for the future. There are more-productive and less-productive ways to live through a collapse. We ought to use this time to as best we can.
But the endless screaming is part of it, too.
It’s the appropriate emotional response.