Splitsville CASH ON THE BOBBLEHEAD

The Young, Even Childlike Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT

Years ago, probably around 2012, a friend of ours who is a successful Wall Street-type guy asked who we thought was the richest person on Earth. We could tell it was a trick question, but we played it straight and answered to the best of our limited ability: Bill Gates? Warren Buffett? The Sultan of Brunei? Those were good guesses, but not good enough.

“It’s Vladimir Putin,” our friend said, waiting for us to faint.

We didn’t faint, but we must have looked mighty puzzled. It was the first time we’d heard that Dictator Putin was rich. After all, we had seen him, and heard about him, in a number of specific contexts—dictator, world historical villain, autocrat, scumbag—but never as rich guy. Unlike Donald Trump, he didn’t seem to flaunt his wealth. So it was an aspect of him that took us by surprise. It was like being told Tom Hanks was the world’s best Monopoly player.

Plus look at Russia itself! It was a poor, if big, Third World country. It “lost” the Cold War. It manufactured nothing that the rest of the world wanted other than vodka, caviar, and various petroleum products. Its people, from what we could tell, were still in bedraggled-Soviet mode, except for the small cadre of Putin-licking oligarchs who appeared to own everything worth owning.

The key to understand Putin’s wealth, our friend said, was to understand that while those oligarchs looked and acted like echt capitalists, the country upon which those enterprises sat and within which they did their business was essentially owned by Putin. It might have been poor, but it was an entire country, and a country is a big thing to own. Oligarchs who didn’t pay obeisance—and copious rubles—to the big-boss-owner man were liable to experience an unfortunate plunge out a sixth-floor window or an inexplicable encounter with a deadly neurotoxin.

Was our friend right? Was Putin the World’s Richest Man, and is he still? We have no idea. An article last December in The Week suggests that, if he once was (at the time our friend brought it up), he is no longer. Current estimates put Putin’s fortune at a paltry 200 billion dollars—miles behind Musk’s estimated 330 billion. For what it’s worth (heh), Musk’s wealth is mostly on paper, in the form of stock in Tesla and Space X. Whereas we think Putin’s is more actual and less theoretical, in the form of cars, real estate, houses, yachts, and cash in the (highly secretive Swiss) bank.

But whichever is the richest, there’s one thing we can all agree on: Donald Trump relentlessly kisses up to both of them, hoping some of that splosh rubs off.

The question that many right-thinking—and even a lot of wrong-thinking—people have been asking since January 20 (and, really, for the past half-century) is: Why does Trump do the things he does? The simple answer is: To get money. Sure, running for president again was a path to keeping himself out of prison; sure, the only actual emotion he feels is hatred and a desire for revenge; and sure, there’s his ego, his sociopathology, his creeping mental decline, and his underlying insanity. But his prime motivator, always, is money.

We must give him credit for finding the ideal way (for a lazy, stupid person) to get money without working: by being the president of the United States of America. Where does the money come from? We are not the CIA, or even Hunter Biden, but we can see and, as we’ve said before, what we see is that whether or not Trump is technically a Russian agent, for decades he’s been doing the most successful Russian-agenting ever. And now he’s promoting the causes of The World’s (Second?) Richest Man as well: shilling for his cars, pushing NASA to buy his rockets, and no doubt trying to figure out how to force the government to dig train tunnels and implant computer chips into people’s skulls whether they want them or not.

Aside from their help in electing him—flooding the zone with money and fake news—what’s in it for Trump? We have a hypothesis.

First, of course, there is the matter of Trump’s upbringing at the hands of a nasty, racist son of a bitch, followed by his apprenticeship to one of the most vile people in American history. That’s who and what young Donald needed to please, that’s the kind of adult he grew into, that’s the kind of father he became, and that’s the kind of figure whose approval he craves. Trump just doesn’t feel okay, doesn’t feel like a man, unless he sees himself as a member in good standing of the International Shitheads Club, along with Putin, Duterte, Orban, Bolsonaro, Kim, and Xi.

But the approval of monsters only goes so far. If Trump is to allow Musk to damage and cripple the Federal government to his, Musk’s, economic advantage, while Putin smiles and applauds from afar, there has to be something in it for Donald. And everybody knows what he wants.

The Richest and Second Richest Men in the World, we hypothesize, are paying Trump a weekly salary of $10 million a week. Sure, it could be more or less than that: we’re hypothesizing. But ten million a week! To quote the late Everett Dirksen, “pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Do you think we’re crazy for hypothesizing such an absurd sum?

Let’s do some arithmetic.

If the two of them together are worth half a trillion dollars ($500,000,000,000)—likely a conservative estimate (despite Musk’s ongoing Tesla-stock debacle)—that half-billion a year ($10 million a week times 52 weeks) represents around .1% (that’s point-one-percent)—one-thousandth— of their net worth. A rounding error. For which Putin gets to see the dismantling of the USA as a global force for truth, justice, science, and democracy; and for which Musk gets to feel like a big strong man and reap the profits of his various enterprises.

“But Donald Trump would never sell out his entire country and bring suffering and death to millions just for personal financial gain!” we hear absolutely no one say.

Oh, and get this: While we were writing this very newsletter, Trump announced his plan for comprehensive, disastrous tariffs on everything not nailed down. Experts fear (or predict) this will lead to a recession, if not an actual depression. The excellent Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, says that the president does not have the power to impose tariffs. Only Congress does—which means, once again, that Republicans will have an opportunity to restore sanity to American public life and, out of greed, stupidity, or cowardice, will fail to do so. (They won’t even try.) The contraction of the US economy might not be great for Elon Musk, but it’s Putin’s wet dream.

There is, as usual, an irony: Trump’s boundless avarice, turbo-charged by his stupidity and mental deterioration, may very well result in such catastrophe that the popular uprising it triggers may embolden even Republicans to turn on him. The resulting stress, anxiety, and rage he’ll experience might detonate a heart attack or other fatal response. Which means that he could drop dead before getting to spend all that money he’s raking in. Yes, it’s a wah-wah ending that even O. Henry might think is a bit much. But we’ll take it.

In any case, here is yet another example of why the US is Splitsville, which we define as a condition in which two separate “nations” co-exist within one geo-political boundary. It’s a more lopsided kind of split than the one we usually yammer on about. In the two nations of this split, one consists of hundreds of millions of people who want to preserve the United States of America. In the other, we have a handful of people who want to destroy it for personal gain. They want to sell it down the river—the Volga River.

As everyone in the free world has been informed, The Split is now available as a handsome, three-dimensional, analogue, paper book. Here is its handsome cover right now:

To purchase your own personal copy and to treasure it always, go here:

www.exasperatedmedia.com