What do you do when the government turns evil?

From pardoning drug kingpins to TrumpCoin it's clear that the wrong people are in power.

For that brief respite between the election and Trump’s inauguration I tried to convince myself that the inevitable wasn’t about to happen. I pretended that the the time after the peaceful transition of power would include a lot of blustering and angry social media posts, but ultimately the United States would somehow get through pretty much as it always had. Sure, I would be disappointed in how the government squandered its potential, but I’d made it out of Trump’s first term more or less ok, so maybe the second term would be merely depressing.

Now it’s clear that something is awfully and dreadfully wrong with this country. The rot starts from the very highest echelons of leadership. It’s not just that the president is a convicted felon. It’s that he has surrounded himself with a cabal of grifters, criminals and scammers who care nothing about the future of the nation and instead see this administration solely as vehicle to enrich themselves at the expense of the electorate.

The grifting started hours before he was sworn in when Trump released a crypto meme-coin called “TrumpCoin” (you can’t make this sh*t up) which quickly rose in valuation from $0 to $25,000,000,000 in a matter of hours. The coin transactions are hidden so that anyone who wants to donate to the Trump organization can do so anonymously and without any public oversight.

You read that right: it’s a mechanism to directly bribe the President of the United States.

Then he unveiled 100 executive orders that undermined climate policies, birthright citizenship, public health and…frankly I don’t have the energy to list them all. Read

Heather Cox Richardson

and

Ken Klippenstein

if you want the full rundown.

Besides the bribery and cruelty, the most obvious sign that the Trump administration has evil intentions was the pardon he issued to the Ross Ulbricht, the drug kingpin who founded the dark web marketplace “The Silk Road.” Ulbricht was serving a life sentence for dealing drugs and orchestrating assassinations for Mexican drug cartels and is one of the most prominent cyber criminals of all time. He was active between 2011-2013, long before he could have had any interactions with Trump at all. Trump released him for no obvious reason other than to appease a criminally libertarian crypto-bro base.

The hypocrisy is astounding because he issued it in almost the same breath as he argued that millions of immigrants to the United States are criminals who must be rounded up into camps and immediately deported. He also announced he wants to steal the Panama Canal in a move that mirrors Putin’s policy in Russia than anything the United States has done in at least half a century.

The only word that adequately describes the current administration is “evil.”

That might sound like inflammatory language. It might sound like I’m blowing something out of proportion and comparing the current administration to horrible leaders from history. Trump surely isn’t Hitler. Maybe I have Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

I honestly hope that is the case. I hope that I have blown the whole situation out of proportion and I’m on some clinically diagnosable bender. Because it would be a real shame if my assessment of the events right now are true and accurate to the world as it exists right now.

Unfortunately, with the courts, both chambers of congress and the executive branch all under the control of a convicted criminal, a serial liar and obvious scammer, I have very little faith that ignoring the facts as they are would be the saner option.

So I have to ask you, what do you do when you realize your government is evil?

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