Opinion

I met David Letterman twice. Once when he first began his show, walking up 53rd Street. Such an approachable guy. And once again, after he’d left, at a Starbucks in my apartment building.

He said he remembered meeting me 30 years ago. Of course, he was kidding.

There is a reason why we can’t stop talking about the “president’s” breathtakingly appalling IRS “settlement.” It is not in the slightest hyperbolic to call it the most scandalous and despicable arrangement in American history. And in the era of Trump, that’s really saying something.

The $1.776 billion slush fund arranged by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch — otherwise known as Trump’s chief enabler — and the rest of the president’s corrupt cronies is a blatant admission that the criminals now have full control of the country we once knew as the United States. It’s now little more than a banana republic.

The United States and the Republic of China (the official name for Taiwan) — one of the world’s most vibrant and functional democracies — have had a formal defense relationship since 1955. Last week, Donald Trump — who’s been withholding since last year two shipments totaling $25 billion worth of US military hardware Taiwan has purchased — said that relationship is now a “bargaining chip” to get what he, his oligarch friends, and his family want from China.

America was founded on the idea that democracy — a form of government that our Founders discovered functioning well among Native American societies, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living — was our north star, the core concept around which all our actions revolved.

Kentucky’s Thomas Massie, a provocateur libertarian and professional pain-in-the-butt to House leadership and Donald Trump, lost his primary yesterday. That was a foregone conclusion given how Trump’s endorsements have won primaries almost across the board.

Those endorsements are going to come back and haunt the GOP in November, but that’s another story for another time.

Once upon a time, a reality TV star with a dubious track record of personal bankruptcy, bad business deals, terrible public behavior, and mistreatment of women — but no experience working for the government at any level — decided to run for one of the most high-profile political roles in the country. He was buoyed by large, right-wing social media accounts, as well as rich benefactors, many with their own connections to reality TV. His entire platform was one based on his belittling his female opponent, mirroring back the hate from the people who were more than happy to platform him. Despite having no policy other than parroting some propaganda, he was normalized by the media and others who turned around any criticism of the candidate to bully his critics.

If you were picturing Donald Trump that whole time, you’d be both right and wrong. Because in this case, I don’t mean him.

Donald Trump flew to Beijing last week and bent his wobbly knee to Xi Jinping, a man who runs a surveillance state, disappears dissidents, and has made no secret of his desire to absorb Taiwan by force.

Trump came home with nothing. No agreements. No concessions. No trade framework. Not a single thing to show for the trip except a declaration that it was an “honor” to be Xi Jinping’s friend.

And now, he’s paving the way for you and me and all taxpayers to foot the bill for the enemies of democracy.

You know how the “president” filed that lawsuit in January seeking $10 billion in damages from the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department for the purported damage inflicted by his tax returns getting leaked? Well, as ABC News reported on Friday, Donald Trump is fully prepared to settle it by creating a $1.7 billion slush fund to pay off his allies, including the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol whom he already pardoned.

They may call themselves the “Pro-Life Party,” but the GOP certainly doesn’t act like it.

They claim to be “Pro-” a lot of other things as well: family, faith, women, and above all else, children.