It was back in the spring of 2016, though it seems like a century or two ago.
Donald Trump was on the campaign trail in Montana. And like a prophet of old, he stood on the edge of a dusty plain and foretold our future. “We’re going to win,” said our six-foot-four, zero body fat golden messenger of God. “We’re going to win so much. We’re going to win at trade, we’re going to win at the border. We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning, you’re going to come to me and go ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore.’ You’ve heard this one. You’ll say ‘Please, Mr. President, we beg you sir, we don’t want to win anymore. It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.’” Trump said. “And I’m going to say ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to keep winning, winning, winning, We’re going to make America great again.”
Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it? I’ll be honest with you, thinking about it, I personally shoot right past moist tear ducts and straight on to some good old fashioned Biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. All that winning. All that damn winning.
What did we do to deserve so much winning?
Of course, with all that winning going on, it is only natural to ask ourselves: Who is winning the most? He told almost exactly nine years ago about winning at trade and winning at the border. He told us we would be saying “we’re sick and tired of winning.” And we are.
There are so many winners it’s impossible to list them all. Even if we don’t focus on the first term and all the winners it produced (morticians, for example, Russian oligarchs, Trump’s lawyers, Trump’s family… even Melania, his wife, has to be considered a winner all those times he was traveling or working and thereby out of her hair), it’s still daunting. So, let’s just take Trump’s first 100 days.
To be sure, very few ordinary Americans were among the winners. Not yet, anyway. But, surely, the mortgage you took out on the last carton of eggs you bought will pay off soon. Those eggs will be a good investment—if only because after a while they will give off that faint scent of sulphur that will remind you of our president. But for now, with costs rising and government services being pared away and our rights being whittled away it doesn’t feel like winning yet. Same for our companies whose costs are skyrocketing because of the trade wars we shall surely soon begin to win and our schools that are being shut down and censored—for our own good, of course.
Someday soon they will be winners. Once the stock market turns around. Once students realize how much easier school is when so many books have been banned and topics for discussion forbidden.
And our friends and allies around the world may not yet consider themselves winners. What with our efforts to obliterate our alliances, support our enemies, destroy the global environment, and undermine democracy, the rule of law and peace worldwide. It doesn’t feel like a win right now in Ukraine or among our NATO allies, to those who were depending on USAID to provide them with medications and food essential to their survival. They’re not sick of winning quite yet, even if they do seem rather sick.
But there are winners. So many winners. Take each of the Trump kids. Take their cyberscam buddies. Take Melania’s couturier. Take Putin. Take Orban. Take Netanyahu. Take Erdogan. Take Modi. Take Millei. Take every member of the global axis of enthno-nationalist authoritarian states who now have at their side the U.S., a country that used to be—until very recently—the very richest, most powerful and most respected in the world. Take the billionaires in Trump’s cabinet. Take Elon. Take billionaires everywhere.
This is as Trump promised, a golden age for them, a golden age for the people with all the gold.
Take all the Jan. 6 rioters who have been pardoned. Take all the corrupt politicians and con artists and traitors and right-wing Supreme Court justices and Russian spies and right-wing domestic terrorists who will soon be pardoned. Take Jeffrey Epstein, whose truth is forever buried. Take the Trump lawyers (again). Take all the concentration camp profiteers from Bukele to And the morticians (again)…who must daily light a candle to the grim reaper’s man on earth, RFK, Jr.
As the late great Jacob Cohen might have said, “Yes, take them all, please.” (His stage name was Rodney Dangerfield and let’s be honest, he and the other 110 billion people who had the good fortune to pass away before Trump assumed office also have to be considered winners.)
There are other winners too, of course. Winners who the Prophet Trump may not have imagined would win but winners nonetheless. You know, the kind who Trump has made stronger because he gave them the opportunity to oppose him and his crazy dangerous policies. Mark Carney is surely a Trump winner for channeling Canada’s deep antipathy for Trump. Harvard is a winner. The law firms that stood up to Trump are winners. The Democrats who have learned to speak plainly about the Trump threat are winners—from Pritzker to AOC, from Bernie to Jasmine, from Booker to Van Hollen.
And of course, among all these winners, someone has to have won the most. Oddly, though, as of 100 days into Trump 2.0, the big winner is neither Trump, nor his family, nor his cronies, nor his sponsors in the Kremlin, nor the maker of his many pairs of man spanx. They’ll all do just fine, of course. But someone has done much better. Someone is winning by standing up to Trump and will almost certainly end up winning by cutting a deal with Trump, someone is winning because they are gaining stature at home and because they are gaining stature abroad. They are winning because almost every move Trump makes—from his trade wars to pulling out of international institutions, from betraying our allies to supporting our enemies, from attacking science and research in America to gutting American education, from switching off the beacon of democracy to eliminating our soft power influence, from the consequences of putting nitwits and lizard people in charge of our government to the long-term implications of ending our ability to attract the world’s best and brightest minds.
No, there is no question. By far the biggest winner of all the winners Trump has made is Chinese President Xi Jinping and by extension all the people of China.
China was making great progress in the world on its own, innovating, growing and leading. But Trump is proving to be China’s second Great Leap Forward, someone who will personally make 1.4 billion Chinese citizens more prosperous and who will accelerate China’s ability to assume an ever-greater global leadership role.
That’s apparently what Trump meant by “so much winning.” That’s four times as many people winning thanks to him as would’ve been if he had done the thing many presidents have tried to do: help Americans.
But he’s smart that way. He’s an innovator. He’s a deal genius. And the result is that yes, yes indeed, just as he predicted, I’ll bet that here you are, just 100 days into Trump’s second term, and you’re feeling pretty damned sick of winning already.
The post Opinion: Naming the Biggest Winners From Trump’s Disastrous First 100 Days appeared first on The Daily Beast.
