Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘If you are a successful grifter, you do not really see beyond the boundaries of the grift. Why would Trump think that he needs to anything besides grift on indefinitely? He has parlayed a set of entertainment skills into the presidency. Why would Vance think that he needs to go beyond grift? He rose to his easy life as angry-straight-rich-white-male-almost-in-chief thanks to a book which women of color helped him to write, and thanks to political donations from a gay billionaire. No wonder he thinks that we can be fooled endlessly.

But at the bottom of apparently bottomless cynicism always rests a certain naiveté. Grifts can only work by consuming resources that are created from outside the grift. The better the grift works, the fewer resources remain. The United States exists thanks to material exchanges grounded in institutional arrangements based in political faith. Trump and Vance create none of this; their grifts consume it all. But from inside the grift they cannot see this. And so they will push on, with ever greater boastfulness and vanity, until they get to the end.

Every country can come to an end. The 250 years of the American Republic, for which Trump takes credit on those banners, is an impressive figure, longer than most states, no doubt. But it is a far cry from forever, and believing in forever, acting is if forever belongs to you, is a certain way to summon doom. Trump and Vance will not learn from Ozymandias or from history.’ (from his Substack)