The guy in the White House is aging, as are we all. The difference being that his degeneration is very public, and causes widespread harm.
Then there’s the issue of self-awareness. Whenever this is lacking in human beings, it’s a shame. But when someone with this much worldly power lacks it, it’s a crisis.
Lately the man has been revealing himself as a gaping abyss of insecurity every time he opens his mouth. It’s astonishing to see him openly admitting, for example, that he’d always resented not getting a Kennedy Center award, so he decided to appoint himself chairman and give himself one. “Next year, we’ll honor Trump, OK?”
Self-owns
Apparently no one has explained to him what a self-own is. Don’t you wonder what’s going on in the minds of the sycophants who surround him? Do they scrunch their toes with embarrassment when he says things like
There’s never been a president that was good at ballrooms. I’m really good.– D. Trump, in reference to the $200 million golden ballroom
But I guess everybody in Trump’s inner circle has already been screened out for toe-scrunching. In his cabinet, the only hiring criteria is malicious incompetence and zombie-like obeisance, enforced by the tireless Laura Loomer.
Thus have we ended up with Fox-News rejects like American-Boy-Doll Pete Hegseth, puppy-slayer Kristi Noem, and wrestling doofus Linda McMahon for the soon-to-be-dismantled Department of Education.
Every one them a walking parody of their job description.
In response to soaring beef prices, President Cognitive Test Passer named Clara Peller as the nation’s first “Beef Czar,” on the strength of her memorable “Where’s the beef?” ad campaign. Peller, who died in 1987, is expected to number among the administration’s most effective appointees.– Shower Cap blog
By Trumpian Law, anyone who could give him honest feedback gets fired. As a result, there’s nobody left who could tell him he’s writing South Park’s material for them.
It’s more a conceptual art movement than politics. — Man applying for a job in the administration, quoted in The New Yorker
Spree of sycophancy
From politicians in general, alas, we don’t expect much. For them, soul-selling is an occupational hazard. With the exception of a teeny tiny few brave congressfolk, our elected officials seem not to have a soul to sell in the first place.
Take J. D. Vance, the crown prince of White House brown nosers, first in the line of succession when the big guy keels over. Sponsored and groomed for power by the sociopathic Peter Thiel, Vance embodies a particularly loathsome faux-populism. He certainly doesn’t vacation like a man-of-the-people. He favors manor houses in the Cotswolds, raising water levels for his kayak, and shutting down Disneyland to allow his family to wander crowd-free among the giant costumed characters.
Even more despicable, somehow, is the fact that underneath his bullshit hillbilly persona, he’s no dummy (indeed, despite their performative anti-elitism, a quarter of Trump’s cabinet went to Ivy League schools). 
Schizoid
This is the guy who, in 2016, dismissed Trump as “cultural heroin.” Yet these days his job requires Vance to defend the intelligence of a boss who boasts, to this day, of correctly identifying animal pictures on a dementia test. It seems Trump is now challenging Democratic congresswomen to cognitive showdowns at high noon.
Poor J. D. has to stand there and nod while this ignoramus announces that drug prices are down, like, ten thousand per cent. He has to slap on that rictus grin and pretend to believe in the economic chops of a president who declares tariffs based on a formula from Chat GPT.
Once they install that TrumpCoin vending machine, we can watch the various heads of state pay their protection money live on Newsmax. Three giant bars spin, slot-machine-style, and land on your tariff rate. — Shower Cap blog
One can only wonder at the damage this job inflicts upon Vance’s head and heart. Imagine the schizoid dissonance that must be operating for a highly-educated vice president to defend a boss who bombs countries he can’t find on a map.
The difference is that back then we had dumb presidents. – J.D. Vance, responding to an interviewer who pointed out the disastrous consequences of America’s other recent wars
Profits Über Alles
With corporate leaders, when they bow and scrape before this clown, we know what their motivation is. We all understand that capitalism is an amoral gig, and these guys are just following the playbook. Movie studios, white-shoe law firms, Coca Cola — they’re like movie mobsters, who say before offing someone, “Nothing personal. It’s just business.”
But has corporate bribery ever been so brazen? Lately, supplicants have been falling all over each other in their rush to debase themselves before the orange king, in hopes of getting him to dismiss any pesky federal regulations with a wave of his tiny hand.
Of the rich and powerful who’ve been sucking up to Trump, this week’s prize goes to the CEO of Apple.
“Tim Apple,” as Trump has called him (perhaps knowingly, given his penchant for demeaning nicknames), knows that flattery is the best – indeed, the only – way to a tacky-ass narcissist’s heart. Thus his gift of an ugly chunk of desk décor: the glass plaque with a 14-karat base.
The photo op of the tall, ghostly Cook bestowing this token of his esteem was such a creepy exercise in disingenuousness that it just might work, to keep those Chinese children assembling his iphones.
Serial litigant
Of all these profiles in cowardice, perhaps the most disheartening are those of the media. It was bad enough to witness the Washington Post 
bail on its legacy after the takeover of Trumpian tech bro Jeff Bezos, and to see the L.A.Times bow to pressure with the Kamala Harris endorsement.
Now we’re at the point where Disney could pull “The View” off the air because Joy Behar clocked Trump’s jealousy of Obama.
When he’s not banning journalists from the press pool, Donnie likes to sue their employers. Everybody knows that none of these tantrum lawsuits — like the one accusing CBS of hurting his feelings in the way it edited “60 Minutes” — would stand up in court. But everybody also knows that’s not the point.
The companies realize they would win if they fought the suits. But instead of calling Trump’s bluff, they’ve been throwing their reporters under the bus, even sacrificing even hugely popular shows, all in the hope of future favors from the Grifter-in-Chief — who, by the way, gets to personally pocket the settlement money.
It’s a sobering reminder that the fourth estate is not immune to the corruptions of American capitalism (see Pluto and the Media).
High-class cop-outs
So yeah, not a shock.
But what I find most alarming is that the epidemic of selling out has spread to institutions whose whole raison-d’etre is setting the bar for our highest cultural values. Like the Smithsonian Institute, supposedly the crème-de-la-crème of knowledge repositories.
To avoid Trump’s feral toddler rage, recently the storied museum removed from its presidential exhibit all references to Trump’s impeachments.
What’s next, telling schoolchildren the Vietnam War was started by Jimmy Kimmel? – S. Colbert
Wouldn’t you hope that a place specializing in history would have enough perspective to see that holding onto their principles would play better, in the long run, than kowtowing to this melting county-fair butter sculpture of a man? But the bean counters over there must have done a risk assessment, and concluded that the groveling was worth it.
The institute has apparently promised to put the impeachment references back, eventually. Maybe they remembered that this big, scary intimidator was, in truth, just an aging lame-duck president, who wouldn’t last as long as they would.
Ivy Chickens
Then there’s the universities. Even the fancy-pants ones are punking out to Trump.
This seems hard to explain. Isn’t intellectual integrity their key selling point? If they sacrifice that, what’ve they got, in the way of prestige?
Lookin’ at you, Columbia U. History will take note of how you bowed to Trump’s pressure to ship your students off to gulags for the crime of opposing genocide.
The federal government celebrated major victories in their War on Thinking this week, most prominently extorting $221 million from Columbia University, money that can now be spent on gilding any remaining Oval Office surfaces. — Shower Cap blog
In another example of ivy-choked hypocrisy, Columbia recently celebrated the 50-year anniversary of its world-famous campus protests, the ones that ignited antiwar activism everywhere and put the Sixties on the map. The administrators got some bad press back then, because when the students occupied the halls demanding that the school sever ties to the defense industry, the university board called in the cops and brutally shut down the shut-down.
But lo and behold, in the present day, somebody in the PR department had the sharp idea to absorb the protests into the university’s branding. Plaques have now been erected on campus, proudly memorializing the sit-in. They boast about it in their recruitment literature.
First they came for the comedians
Of all these genuflections to the naked emperor, Paramount’s cancelation of Stephen Colbert has been getting the most attention.
When they offered up that nice, juicy sacrificial lamb to Trump to clear the way to get their big merger done, the dealmakers doubtless saw it as just corporate-cannibalism-as-usual. I bet they were surprised it created such a shit storm with the public.
I think we can believe their apologia that Honest, folks, we did it purely for financial reasons. In framing their explanation that way, the company clearly expected Colbert’s viewers to share its own assumptions: that the value of any cultural product reduces to the bottom line.
Certainly that’s the way we’ve all been bludgeoned into seeing things, as American consumers. We live by corporate logic every hour of our lives. Yet, in this case, something else kicked in.
Great numbers of us felt the move to cancel Colbert as not only a knife in the back of free speech, and a cynical capitulation to a bully, but also as a threat to rob us of much-needed healing laughter.
Colbert is sure to find a home elsewhere. But in an era that inflicts sanity-death by a thousand cuts, Paramount’s decision to shut down this show was a significant milestone. It woke up a lot of people to the urgent necessity of intelligent satire — especially when twinned with belly laughs– and how powerless we feel if we do nothing to stop this tyranny.
Appeasement
What’s curious is that, in the long run, things don’t work out well for ass-kissers. There is a fatal short-sightededness to selling out. 
It only encourages the perp.
When we look at history – even very recent history — we see that capitulations like these tend to backfire. In Hungary, for instance, every time a politician or organization tried to make nice with Orban and cut a deal, it came back on them.
Appeasing bullies isn’t just demeaning. It doesn’t work.
Under the bus
I think most of us know this from the childhood playground. Or from reading about Neville Chamberlain. Or from crime dramas where a hapless schmuck tries to pay off a blackmailer.
It is odd that Trump’s toadies don’t seem to realize this. Surely they’ve noticed what has happened to Giuliani, Cohen, Bannon, Bondi, and too many others to count. The only predictable thing about working with — or marrying —Trump is that he will eventually humiliate, scapegoat or fire you.
It’s lamentable to see these guys shredding their personal dignity for nothing. But even worse is the impact that self-betrayals have on future victims. When one politician or company or media network gives in to Trump, it makes all the others more afraid to stand up to him.
Karma’s a-comin’
Saturn (karma) is the planet that balances out societal dysfunctions. Right now it’s making its presence known at the bottom of the US chart, along with Neptune. There are ominous rumblings under the foundations of the American psyche (discussed in this podcast).
Case in point: the Paramount cave-in. Immediately after Colbert was fired, that notorious South Park episode aired, skewering Trump far more viciously than Colbert ever did. You can almost hear Saturn chuckling down there, under the floorboards.
Trump’s intimidation tactics may have 
temporarily rid him of Colbert — a polished comedian whose anti-Trump jokes were actually quite gentlemanly – but he didn’t even get to enjoy his spiteful little victory lap before being mercilessly eviscerated by Parker and Stone.
As an extra karmic sting, the fact that South Park’s jokes are grade-school juvenile seems particularly fitting. Parker and Stone wield the kind of childish, humiliating humor that Trump understands. There can be no doubt that their jabs are getting under that puffy orange skin far more painfully than the sophisticated mockery served up by Colbert.
Not to mention that South Park’s ratings are soaring, probably making the Paramount dealmakers feel quite smug right now. They did what the fat man wanted, and are now sitting pretty in a five-year contract with a cash cow.
If the end of the republic can’t move these companies, perhaps the profit motive can. – Pod Save America
As for Colbert, have you watched him recently? Since announcing his cancellation, the man is on fire. His writers have taken off the gloves, as if revitalized by a new sense of purpose. With nothing to lose, the show is waxing brilliantly ruthless.
Colbert is serving as an unlikely role model here. He’s providing an object lesson in how to respond to a bully’s dare: with courage.
Wait for the memo
Granted, not everybody is a professional comedian with a staff of trenchant writers. Not everybody is in a position to influence thousands of people. But we can recognize and champion those who are.
We can throw our support behind those journalists who refuse to be intimidated, behind the courageous judges who have stood firm, and behind the public servants who dare to call Trump out (thanks, Gavin Newsom). Agents of sanity exist, and we need to pump energy their way.
Moreover, on an individual level we all have the power, each of us in our own way, to resist what is wrong. We each have a sense of integrity (Jupiter), an inner warrior (Mars) and a voice (Mercury). We each have a nose to sniff out decay (Pluto).
Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until an actual memo to that effect. Wait for the memo. – Carole Cadwalladr
