Trump’s ‘philosophy’ is simple: Gimme money!
He isn’t trying to change the world – he’s trying to fill his pockets
Donald Trump is not a philosopher king. He’s a mob boss.
He’s not even doing politics. He’s running big-bucks scams by political means.
I feel the need to clarify this because some people insist on pretending there’s some overarching ideological bent to Trump’s behavior, that “America First” is a real doctrine, that Trump is the reincarnation of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson.
Trump’s motivations came up in an NPR interview last January. Host Scott Detrow asked Atlantic reporter Ashley Parker an embarrassingly naive question: “Do you have a sense of what you think Trump’s end goals are? Is it, I want to tear down democratic norms, or is it something more straightforward of, I want to be a notable, famous president, or is it even more moment to moment and topic to topic than that?”
Sure, Scott. Trump just wants to be “notable.”
Parker answered: “I don’t think he has a particular pointed desire to tear down democratic norms … He wants to do what he wants to do unconstrained by laws and norms in the Constitution.”
Kind of a weird answer. I think she meant Trump doesn’t have a political philosophy. But he does have a one-word personal philosophy: “Gimme.”
Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than indulging his predatory appetite in all things, especially concerning money but also when it comes to the abuse of women.
One of the biggest issues he ran on in 2024 was avoiding foreign wars, yet now he’s desperately trying now to escape from a war of his own choice with Iran.
He’s long talked about balancing the budget, but he runs huge deficits.
He’s successfully exploited the immigration issue, spreading hatred about newcomers to this country, even though he married two of them. But even then, he’s making an exception for white Afrikaners from South Africa in an attempt to please racists like Elon Musk.
To Trump, issues are tools to attract donations, win votes, and amass power – not to benefit the public. Here’s what he really cares about:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche unilaterally gave Trump and his family immunity from tax investigations. That’s outright theft from the U.S. Treasury while people like us pay our taxes.
Trump urged the public to buy Dell computers, and the Pentagon gave the company a $9.7 billion contract. We later learned that before those actions, Trump bought at least $1 million in Dell stock.
Trump reduced threatened tariffs on imports from Vietnam after the country fast-tracked a $1.5 billion Trump Organization resort there.
Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, helped out a Trump family business and got a Trump pardon in a money-laundering case.
Trump approved the sale of American AI chip technology to the United Arab Emirates after a UAE sheik secretly bought 49% of a Trump crypto business.
I could go on and on with examples like this, but you get the idea.
For Trump, control over the U.S. government is not an opportunity to shape a nation’s destiny. It’s a way for him to cash in on his power. And he’s certainly done that, with profiteering that netted him and his family $4 billion in the first year of his second term, according to the New Yorker.
If Trump cares about anything other than money, it’s not the public welfare – it’s his pet projects to build European-style throwback monuments and splash gold paint on things. That’s not a philosophy or even an aesthetic. It’s an unhinged old guy playing with toys.
Yet despite the obvious grifting and bizarre distractions, Trump backers still pretend there’s an overarching vision.
Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used the stupid phrase “Donroe Doctrine” to cast U.S. military aggression in the Americas as a well-thought-out strategy. The Monroe Doctrine, of course, warned European powers to stay out of the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Hegseth said the new Donroe Doctrine, in which the Trump regime bullies its neighbors and steals Venezuela’s oil, is “an incredible reinforcement of the Monroe Doctrine.”
But it’s not a philosophy. It’s just a smash-and-grab.
Meanwhile, University of Florida professor Walter Russell Mead has compared Trump to a different president, Andrew Jackson, citing the MAGA leader’s “ideological, rhetorical, and cultural links to the Jacksonian tradition in American life.”
I suppose there are similarities. They both abused their power, uprooted people from their homes, and showed disdain for the courts. But it’s not a shared philosophy – it’s just (in the words of Ashley Parker) that “he wants to do what he wants to do.”
To me, Trump is best described with the words of the 20th century Chicago philosopher Al Capone:
“A crook is a crook, and there’s something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But any guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician.”
This week’s media atrocity
Trump’s Justice Department approved the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery, a move that would give the pro-Trump Ellison family control of CNN. The nightmare scenario is that Bari Weiss, who is in the process of ruining CBS News, would be given authority over CNN to ruin that network, too.
Consider a paid subscription to Stop the Presses
After nearly three years of being free-only, this newsletter is launching a paid-subscription tier. All subscribers get the weekly newsletter, usually on Mondays, but paid subscribers also get access to bonus features and exclusive content. If you can afford it, please help COURIER, which sponsors this newsletter, in its campaign to spread fact-based news and defeat disinformation.
Great article and I believe we don’t know even half of the total grift of the Trump thieves.
Another parallel between Trump and Jackson: corrupt and opportunistic real estate deals. From a book by Steve Inskeep of NPR "One titanic land grab shows how Jackson operated. It was the seizure of the Tennessee River Valley, where the great river bends in what is present-day Alabama. While serving as a U.S. Army general, Jackson wrested control of the valley from Cherokees, and turned it into an explosive real estate opportunity. Jackson and several friends made off with a breathtaking 45,000 acres, colonized the area and even founded a new city. They then established multiple cotton plantations run by enslaved laborers just as cotton prices were reaching record highs. All told, Jackson both created and scored in the greatest real estate bubble in the history of the United States up to that time."