American freak show

Some people may want to discuss the story of how RFK Jr. dumped a freshly dead bear cub in Central Park in 2014, while trying to make it look as if it had been killed by a bicycle.

In the video, Mr. Kennedy appears to be seated in a kitchen as he casually tells the actress Roseanne Barr about the ordeal. He says that he was driving through the Hudson Valley when he saw a woman in a van hit and kill a young bear.

“I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear,” he says. “It was very good condition and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”

This episode of Germany’s Most Disturbing Home Videos gets weirder from there.

RFK is nothing much more than a very unfunny political joke, but somehow his bizarre personal pathologies seem of a piece with the weirdly corrupt flavor of the Age of Trump in America.

Speaking of which, we’ve now reached the stage where literally nothing Trump does has the slightest shock value any more. For example, he’s going around offering completely open, on the table bribes, to various plutocrats, offering to sell them pieces of the administrative state overseeing their activities, in exchange for contributions to his presidential campaign:

For Trump, the 2024 presidential campaign is an existential project. If he wins, he surely will direct the Department of Justice to drop two ongoing criminal cases against him—one involving his retention of classified information after leaving office in 2021, another involving his role in the January 6 insurrection. He could, as president, also pardon himself and several key witnesses who might otherwise be tempted to testify against him to avoid jail time or reduce sentences. To keep those cases from advancing, and ultimately kill them, Trump needs to win the 2024 election. To do that, he needs money—lots of it.

In recent weeks, one strategy for raising money has become clear: Trump is going to wealthy donors and interest groups and offering to cede policymaking to them—in exchange for massive campaign contributions. Last month, The Washington Post reported that Trump gathered oil executives at Mar-a-Lago and made a pitch: For the low cost of $1 billion, he would, as president “reverse dozens of President Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted.” The pitch reportedly “stunned several of the executives in the room.” But it is nevertheless in keeping with Trump’s larger program. Despite promising during his first run for office in 2016 that he was, as a rich person, incorruptible—and that he would use his inside knowledge of a corrupt system to benefit his voters—Trump has always dispensed with subtlety and flaunted his corruption. Here, he is advertising his willingness to take a bribe: Give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.

And less than two weeks after that Post report, Trump made even more promises to oil and gas executives at a campaign fundraiser. He reportedly ended his speech by saying, “Be generous, please,” and was rewarded with more than $25 million in donations.

That’s not all. In late May, an interesting item appeared in a New York magazine profile of billionaire casino magnate—and part owner of the NBA Finals–bound Dallas Mavericks—Miriam Adelson. Adelson, a long-standing donor to right-wing Republicans and a staunch supporter of Israel, is expected to be Trump’s largest donor in the 2024 cycle. But her money comes with strings attached.

“One can assume she’ll press for the unfinished items of Trump’s Israel agenda from last term,” New York’s Elizabeth Weil wrote. “Top of that list: Israel annexing the West Bank and the U.S. recognizing its sovereignty there.” That would mark a dramatic shift in America’s policy toward Israel—and would make ending Israel’s destructive military campaign in Gaza significantly harder. But Trump is advertising that he’s open for business, and he has never shown any interest in Palestinian rights; it’s fair to assume he would see supporting annexation of the West Bank as a small price to pay for millions in campaign contributions. Last month, moreover, Trump promised donors that he would set back the pro-Palestinian movement by “25 or 30 years.” One easy way to do that: Allow Israel to annex the West Bank.

There’s little doubt that if Trump returns to the White House, he’ll again speak favorably of Putin and likely even support Russia’s annexation of Ukraine. But if so, it will be because Trump is fond of autocrats and disdains America’s alliances, rather than because Putin holds some kind of leverage over him. And yet, if Trump as president also does everything in his power to enrich the billionaire donors who have contributed so generously to his campaign, it will be hard to believe it’s because of a fondness for billionaires. Rather, he will simply be returning the favors that, for all the world to see, he promised them this year.

As so often is the case with him, this isn’t a scandal, because according to the rules of political journalism in America, a scandal requires some sort of hidden truth to be revealed by intrepid journalists. Trump’s bribery of the plutocracy is right out in the open, so it isn’t a scandal.

Nor is it a scandal that he’s praising Vladimir Putin for kidnapping Americans and then ransoming them for Russian criminals:

“I’d like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal. Did you see the deal we made?” Trump told a crowd of supporters at a campaign rally in Atlanta on Saturday as he criticized the Biden administration for its handling of the swap.

This is of course just classic fascistic kidding on the square. Trump is supposedly being sarcastic, but the in-joke is that he really isn’t: another thing that he’s been completely open about is his deep admiration for Putin and his methods. He really does admire Putin for kidnapping Americans so they can be ransomed for Russian killers in western prisons, and his only objection to any of this is that he believes he could have gotten a better deal himself, because he’s such a great negotiator.

That Trump is openly bribing billionaires by promising to sell them the government and that he’s praising Putin for kidnapping Americans is at least getting a little bit of media attention, although hardly anything commensurate with the enormity of these acts. By contrast, at the end of his rally Saturday night Trump asked Georgia’s governor to intervene to drop the criminal case against him in that state, and this isn’t even being reported, because apparently that’s just Trump being Trump, plus there’s the dead bear cub that RFK was going to eat, and Simone Biles fell off the balance beam, and stocks are way down this morning so maybe you should rebalance your portfolio, and on and on and on (puts on Sinatra and starts to cry).