MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: The Bootlicking Will Continue Until Democracy Doesn’t

By Marc C. Johnson

The gauge the full extent of the rot crumbling American democracy you could do worse than browse the guest list for last week’s White House State Dinner for King Charles III.

Side note: I think the King did a fine job of speaking to the real stakes for freedom, free speech, fair elections, etc., that so many of our fellow countrymen (women) can’t or won’t confront, but I also think it would have been far better for His Majesty to call the whole thing off.

At this terribly fraught moment what a powerful antidote to Trumpish it would have been to see British prime minister Keir Starmer – he makes the call, after all – to just cancel the King’s visit.

The limpet that is the British PM might have cited a half dozen reasons for Andrew Mountbatten Windsor’s brother to stay away: the safety of the British monarch in gun happy America, the senseless war against Iran, the threat presented by the United States to NATO, the wholesale abandonment of Ukraine, and not wanting to have dinner with a convicted felon.

You get the drift.

Starmer doesn’t know, as many politicians, business leaders, and journalists on this side of the Atlantic also don’t know that confronting Trump’s dictatorial ways is always the best course.

You can’t placate him. You can’t make a deal with him because he’s a lying con man. You cave to him and you get what you deserve. Just ask those big law firms that paid Trump tribute or the media companies that caved to his demands.

What did they get? Not an invite to the State Dinner; only diminishment and embarrassment.

Still, the King came and wowed the Congress which will by now have forgotten all the good things he said. Then Charles made off to the White House to offer jokes about a Trump demolished East Wing of the White House, a level of destruction even the British Army didn’t accomplish in 1814.

We live in such a crazy, uncomprehending world that it can be difficult to fully grasp the perversity of how far a once strong American democracy has fallen.

Which takes me back to that dinner list.

Oligarchs have dinner with kings

There were, of course, billionaire “friends” of Trump a plenty, as Forbes noted:

Marc Andreessen: Trump donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worth an estimated $1.9 billion.

Jeff Bezos: Trump critic-turned-friend and Amazon founder, worth an estimated $268.4 billion.

Tim Cook: Another former Trump foe who has developed a relationship with the president during his second term, the Apple CEO, who recently announced he will step down in September, is worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

Pepe Fanjul: Longtime Trump friend and key donor, the Palm Beach sugar magnate and his family control a real estate and sugar empire we estimate to be worth more than $4 billion.

Jensen Huang: The Nvidia CEO, a key influencer of White House artificial intelligence policy, is worth an estimated $181.9 billion.

Robert Kraft: New England Patriots owner and longtime Trump friend, worth an estimated $13.8 billion.

Howard Lutnick: Commerce Secretary and former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO, worth an estimated $7.4 billion.

John Paulson: Trump megadonor and hedge fund manager, worth an estimated $4 billion.

Isaac Perlmuttter: Longtime Trump friend and major donor, the former Marvel head is worth an estimated $5.2 billion.

Steve Schwarzman: Blackstone CEO and Trump donor, worth an estimated $39.9 billion.

In Russia you might call this gang of rich white guys oligarchs – extraordinarily, eye watering rich guys who have pledged personal fealty to the corrupt ruling power in order to maintain their money and privilege. These guys happily sell out friends and country because their money and influence rests not on any real principal or belief.

It’s all about the money and apparently the proximity to power, even if it is personally corrupting to be close to such blatant corruption.

As the writer Michael Tomasky – he’s the editor of The New Republic – says “oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.”

So, of course, these billionaires, each having made an economic pact with Trump, were at dinner with a king, well, one king and one who would be a king.

Congressional toadies

The usual suspects from Congress were in attendance: Speaker Mike Johnson, who usually feigns ignorance about any Trump insult, death threat or undeclared war, but in this case apparently read his invite and showed up. As did Senate majority leader John Thune and his second in command John Barrasso.

Idaho’s James Risch, not exactly in oligarch territory but still among the richest men in the Senate, attended. Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee but you would hardly know it since he’s refused to use that platform to explore why and to what end the country is at war with Iran. As Risch, who served a short stint as a governor before going to the Senate, once infamously noted, being a governor is real work, while being in the Senate was essentially a piece of cake. He had his piece last Saturday night.

The real fake news

Donald Trump likes to talk about “the fake news,” so he had them out in force to check out the King and Queen. Fox News was very well represented with hosts Bret Baier, Maria Bartiromo, Ainsley Earhardt, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingraham and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott all in attendance.

Trump’s favorite newspaper, the New York Post, was represented by editor-in-chief Keith Poole.

And Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy was there. The New York Times called Ruddy Trump’s most reliable supporter in the far right media ecosystem. “In this day and age, people want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” Ruddy said in 2020 and he broadcast lies about the 2020 election being stolen.

Then Times media writer Ben Smith said this of Ruddy:

Nobody I’ve ever covered treats an audience with the blithe disdain of Mr. Ruddy. He has them watching a great story — a thriller, a whodunit — about a stolen election. He thinks they’re stupid enough to fall for it, dumb enough to keep watching even after the fantasy inevitably dissolves, buying the supplements and the books and, crucially, tuning in to channel 1115 in large enough numbers that, eventually, the cable companies will pay him.

Ruddy was a perfect guest for that dinner last weekend. And, yes, millions of Americans have fallen for it and they keep falling.

The Republican Supreme Court goes to dinner

There were no Democrats at the dinner with King Charles, a fact that most accounts of the dinner gave little attention, but which as such things go was widely inappropriate and entirely without precedent.

No “main stream media” figures were invited. No figures from music or culture. Northern Ireland golfer Rory McElroy might have been the only person at this dinner most of us would have enjoyed talking with.

And the six GOP appointees to the Supreme Court were there, but not the three Democratic appointees.

In normal times, with a bipartisan guest list and with a celebration of U.S. – British friendship on the menu, having members of the Court in attendance would be totally normal. But this was not normal.

The American far right’s decades long strategy to create a partisan court has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Trump considers the six conservative judges as extension of his authoritarian takeover of American democracy.

Here’s Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, a student of the Supreme Court:

“The problem here is the symbolism, that these six justices — and only these six — were there. It does nothing to disabuse the appearance that the court is playing partisan political favorites, an impression this court should be invested in avoiding.”

The Saturday dinner only confirmed what every reasonably informed, democracy loving American has long known. Creating partisan courts that provide near total immunity to a president or use a secret “shadow docket” to decide cases benefiting the administration without offering discussion or hearings is classic antidemocratic tactic.

Then on Monday the Supreme Court, right on cue, effectively killed the last important part of the Voting Rights Act virtually assuring a future dramatic decline in Americans of color serving in Congress.

The Court majority’s companion sanction of wholesale gerrymandering, particularly disenfranchising Black and Latino communities, is a truly egregious backsliding of voting rights.

But such a move has long been a fever dream of the antidemocratic American far right. Now, along with overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting many environmental protections and vastly expanding presidential power, that dream has come true.

Imagine being Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito, the author of Monday’s opinion, sitting in the gilded White House among the billionaires, the right wing media media hacks, and the Congressional bootlickers.

They must have felt as though they had finally arrived.

If there is anything of value here please consider sharing this Substack with friends and even your Trump adoring brother-in-law. I’m a pessimist, but everyone deserves a second chance to regain something like sanity.

Cheers. Onward.

It’s difficult to be an optimist in today’s world and I’m not all that optimistic, but I do focus on realism and try to populate my writing with solid sourcing and not merely opinion. I write these pieces to offer a perspective based on history and particularly American political history since 1900.

These essays are free, but a financial contribution helps support my writing and research, including a new book in progress.

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Many thanks.