The Most Destructive Presidency in US History – Leadership by Fear, Cruelty & Hallucination

The Most Destructive Presidency in US History: Leadership by Fear, Cruelty & Hallucination

"America is not just an idea… It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future." 

JD Vance speech at the conservative Claremont Institute, where he denigrated post-Civil War immigrants as not being part of our mainstream culture.

“We are using this [AI] technology already at HHS to manage health care data, perfectly securely, and to increase the speed of drug approvals.”

HHS Head RFK, Jr testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in June.

The United States is now defined by a President addicted to lies, blame and denial, one who has embraced the cruel underlying White Christian nationalist policies of firebrand idealogue Stephen Miller over any other advisor, now caught in the web of Trump’s own past. MAGA sycophants are livid at his deflection of his promise, illustrated by his prior support of QAnon deep state conspiracy theories, but finally unwilling to produce the “liberals as pedophiles” evidence his followers expected. Unable to shake the rising ire of his supporters, Trump has been forced to rely on his Congressional enforcer and shameless lackey, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R/La), to take a bill off the House floor, until September at the earliest, that would have compelled release to the public of potentially incriminating files relating to Jeffrey Epstein. A Trumpian cover-up?

The above photo of Johnson bowing to his King is all you need to know about Trump’s hold on his GOP majority in Congress. Trump’s efforts at distracting his base failed. “Trump has attempted to clean up the mess by implicating MAGA's favorite targets like former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The administration also tried to pass off the blame by saying the conclusion was reached by the FBI and DOJ… But the slight admission that the administration reviewed the files could land the president in hot water with his base, many of whom are foaming at the mouth over the decision not to release the tapes.”

Trump 2.0 is the presidency of whim, chaos, inconsistency and fear. Despite plunging national polls on almost every major Trump issue, Republicans fearing his wrath at the upcoming pre-midterm election primaries, are whipping back and forth between their furious MAGA supporters and their hastily concocted explanations of why they accept and justify Trump’s inconsistences at every (numerous) turn. Texas and Ohio are just two red states seeking to gerrymander enough Democratic seats out of Congress to force continuation of GOP control.

Trump’s domestic policies – from the roiling economic destruction of programs intended to benefit his base but in fact are cut to support tax cuts that mainly benefit the rich to his massive immigration deportation scheme that hardly is removing hardened criminals from the county but instead are aimed at simply “volume deportation quotas” where hard working innocents are really those who face the cruel deportation – are increasing viewed as overkill, ineffective, decimating communities and small businesses. His TACO tariff announcements have just begun to increase consumer prices, even as very few tariff agreements have been set.

Americans are beginning to realize that the latest numbers from the Congressional Budget Office will generate $3.1 trillion in non-offset deficit increases that will require taxpayers to pay some of the highest interest rates (on the supporting treasury bonds) in our history. Budget busters The hard dollars needed to cover all sorts of medical and food insecurity needs are vaporizing; the staffing needed to service the targeted demographics… gone. DOGE did eliminate many programs for Veterans; our former fighting forces are the sacrificial lambs… still the VA costs us 25% more.

That DOGE pledge of using AI to replace warm bodies, reinforcing the notion that the federal government does not need remotely the government staffing of old, is crashing and burning in a world of over-promising and under-delivering. For example, the FDA’s approval of new medications was supposed to accelerate with AI. As the above RFK, Jr quote states, this AI software (“Elsa” is the name) was supposed to analyze the submitted research, seek out readily available supporting or detracting data, and produce FDA approval presentations for formal approval. Thus, the staff cuts that DOGE implemented were fully justified.

But as has been the case in numerous other attempts to substitute AI for expert staff, the relevant AI systems have done what AI is famous for in legal pleadings filed in cases by lazy lawyers: hallucinating (fabricating non-existent studies and research), requiring a vastly more labor-intensive, cite-by-cite vetting. But those staffs are seriously thinned out, as the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to fire hordes of federal workers under his purported aegis.

Inexperienced idealogue Pete Hegseth has purged woman soldiers from military service and ripped away symbols of racial minorities in their heroic contributions to the wars we have fought. He has also participated in the “glorious” announcements of our “obliteration” of Iran’s weapons-grade nuclear enrichment capacity… as Iran remounts its nuclear efforts and resumes funding its regional terrorist groups. National security has also been compromised under his “leadership.”

Our foreign policy has played into China’s hands. As undistributed USAID foodstuffs either rot away or are burned, as medical programs (from AIDS and malaria treatments) are shut down, millions around the world will die. Trump’s failure to see what almost everyone the world already knew, Vladimir Putin’s ambitious land grab applying maximum cruelty, only recently reversed. As 25 nations demand a full ceasefire in Gaza, hundreds (including children, even volunteer staffers) are now starving to death as food deliveries remain stalled under Israeli orders. China is building new bridge and making new inroads to replace American “soft power” wherever it can.

As Trump’s recent legislative “victories” come online, the only people that will be better off are the richest Americans… the Bombastic Billionaires Benefitting by that Big Beautiful Bill.

An Accounting System Built on Lies

  2001 Enron Scandal

Trump’s NY Fraud Trial

 

Easter Bunny

An Accounting System Built on Lies

Stand by for a Dekom oversimplification. “Accrual based accounting” just might be “a cruel based accounting.” Today, it is required of “C” corporations with annual gross receipts of $25M or more over the past three years. Basically, when this method of accounting was created, the clearly inebriated accountant who thunk it up lived in a simpler age. The underlying notion was to match the cost of a manufactured product against the expected revenue generated by that product. The same could said of company operating expenses. An example? The company makes a car in calendar 2025, but by the time it is sold, it’s 2026. Easy, I can fix that, said the woozy accountant taking another swig from that bottle of bourbon in his desk drawer. I’ll just move the numbers around. But that was long before massive mergers and acquisitions, tons of subsidiaries, off-balance sheet financing and all kinds of fun business tricks. Pass the bottle. I can fix that!

The notion was to put income and directly related costs in the same column, which meant you either had to wait till you had both numbers – but Uncle Sam didn’t want to wait for his share of taxes – or project the income you expected to generate in the future and deduct your real costs against that. In short you would accrue expected (future) income, apply your costs against that (OK, it gets more intense when you add depreciation, etc. where an asset wears out and needs to be replaced someday), and you can figure out how much you made.

As the corporate world got infinitely more complex, how you determine what you had to report to shareholders, the government, etc. became a maze of constantly changing variables, often different rules for different industries. In the United States, the required standardization is set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (“Fas-Bee” for short) and is equally impacted by state and federal tax codes, which are particularly weird because rules tend to go to the highest bidder (e.g., effective lobbyist) influencing the relevant legislature as to why his client’s company deserves special treatment. The green eyeshade accountant has been replaced by lots of computing (add AI to the mix) and dedicated software that takes all those rules and accounting changes into consideration, after serious manipulation by the relevant chief financial officer, to spit out the various formats of financial and income tax reporting.

Life sure would be easier if corporations were more like individual families. Mom and Pop tend not to run depreciation numbers and do not take that projected revenue they may earn in the future into account… cause it don’t buy groceries! At least families look only to the hard dollars they receive (or can borrow) and the hard costs of what they buy. The “cash basis” we know and love.

But accrual accounting is what the corporate world lives by, and as I said, Uncle Sam loves to be able to tax monies that are expected to be received in a later tax year, so those projections are not facts! And for some industries, like show biz, those numbers are more wishes than bankable estimates. The film and television industry has a euphemism for those projections: income forecasting. So basically, the feds require most corporations to lie (guess?) about those numbers. The stock market, which often bases share values on those projections (earnings), is yet another reason for corporations to project “earnings”… within “reason.”

The pressure for more conservative estimating rules (e.g., the 2002 Sarbanes–Oxley Act) on such projections came to light when energy giant Enron entered into a complex maze of new deals, holding companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures that allowed the company to project hundreds of millions of dollars of “expected future earnings” from a new business… that… er… wasn’t really… operational yet?! Result: In 2001, Enron filed the biggest Chapter 11 (reorganization) bankruptcy experienced up to that time. Criminal (fraud and related) charges were filed, senior managers went to prison, and… well… here we are. So effective liars and those who can make underlings lie for the them are rewarded?!

So just tell me which President of the United States currently faces a litany of economic failures that he and his sycophants recast as success? Could it be the same President who was convicted of accounting crimes? As Tom Boggioni, writing for the May 18th Raw Story, tell us, Donald Trump thinks a little “legitimate” tweaking of accounting rules might actually make him look good. “As part of Donald Trump's administration's purge of federal employees who are believed to not be willing to support his agenda, there is a new move afoot to make it permissible to fire federal financial analysts if their reports don't paint the pretty picture the president demands.

“According to a report from the Guardian's Robert Tait, government ‘number-crunchers’ may find themselves out on the street if they submit reports that make the current administration look bad… That has led to worries that future reports coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will have been manipulated before they are released to the Federal Reserve and the press.

“As Tait wrote, fears of staffers ‘intentionally subverting presidential directives’ could set the stage for the White House to ‘fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn.’…That, in turn, could lead to efforts by the administration to ‘cook the books’ and deceive the markets and the public…

“Explained government accounting expert Erica Groshen of Cornell University, ‘There are a number of changes to the civil service that make it much easier for the administration to try to interfere with the activities of the statistical agencies and that worries me.’…In a briefing paper she authored, she warned, ‘Bureau of Labor Statistics’ leaders could be fired for releasing or planning to release jobs or inflation statistics unfavorable to the president’s policy agenda,’ adding, ‘By making it easier to remove employees if a president determines that they are interfering with his or her policies, it increases the potential for passivity or political loyalty to be prioritized over expertise and experience.’” What, investors, bankers and corporate planners cannot trust government numbers and have to devise their own substitute metrics?! Gee, we’ve never seen that before.

I’m Peter Dekom, and intentionally lying on official governmental accounting reports is OK… but who goes to jail when caught, the fomenter of the wrongful pressure (the bosses’, bosses’, bosses’ boss, DJT) or the poor schlub who fudged the books as desired?