Paper Bags and Banana Republics: The Trump Show Rolls On

The Trump administration has long excelled at the vulgar display of power, but has now outdone even its sleaziest past.

This starts with Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar who has managed to be both a crook and a clown.

Homan, amidst snarling about the sanctity of American law and wickedness of foreigners, was caught last year--like a child grabbing and running away with a sack of Halloween candy--accepting a cava store bag stuffed with fifty thousand dollars in cold, crisp bills.

FBI agents say they recorded Homan in the act of bribery on-camera. And what happened?

Nothing.

We learned this week that the Trump Department of Justice dropped the case like a bad habit, leaving Homan not disgraced but promoted, his slobbering loyalty to Trump rewarded as if it were a medal of honor.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who seems to measure achievement by her own capacity to pander, is hailing her Justice Department’s success in indicting former FBI Director James Comey.

Comey allegedly lied to Congress when he denied leaking classified information about the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.

Trump’s DOJ 1.0 investigated this in 2019 and found no evidence the Comey information was classified and thus declined to prosecute.

But now, with a U.S. Attorney in Virginia who has never prosecuted a case in her life. Attorney General Bondi has her Comey indictment. Oh and this attorney has been on the job a whole week.

Mind you, this only happened after the previous Trump appointee resigned rather than move forward with the Comey prosecution farce. Which didn’t deter Bondi from laughably tweeting out, “no one is above the law.”

The hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness are being performed with all the subtleties of a marching band in a funeral parlor.

Regarding Comey, even the pundits and hosts on Fox News–Trump’s favorite propaganda network, are calling the indictment flimsy. Saying it will collapse under its own pretense.

Fox News legal analyst Andrew McCarthy said, “I don’t think there is a case.”

Fox News host Howard Kurtz said, “let’s not mince words here. I say this as a former Justice Department reporter: this was completely and totally orchestrated by President Trump.”

In other words, witnesses, evidence, and the law, the poor things, have been abandoned like a Trump-bankrupted casino–forgotten, rusting, irrelevant.

The same abandonment of the rule of law applies to Tom Homan’s alleged bribery. Here was a man who postured as granite incarnate—the steely defender of borders, the scourge of migrants, the prophet of “zero tolerance.”

And yet, faced not with a caravan of asylum seekers but with a shopping bag bulging with cash, he melted into jelly. His stone jaw dissolved into the greasy grin of a slot-machine addict watching the cherries line up.

The border czar, it turns out, is not a sentinel of virtue but a slovenly street-corner hustler with a Trump White House badge.

The grotesque symmetry of the Homan and Comey investigations is an unprecedented moral tableau.

On the one hand, Homan, a federal official literally takes a bag of cash without fear of consequence. On the other, a feeble, politically convenient prosecution of Comey is celebrated as a heroic DOJ victory.

It is government reduced to a hideous and utterly ridiculous theater. Our nation that once valued law and integrity has now become a carnival freak show filled with bribery, cowardice, and naked partisanship.

The stench of corruption is everywhere and the scent of decency is entirely absent.

Many of us are asking how can our nation endure such moral decay?

The answer is that rot thrives in the open air of incompetence and cronyism.

Homan’s paper bag, Bondi’s self-congratulation, and the Trump DOJ’s selective zeal for prosecution are not anomalies. They are the Trump administration’s entire operating procedure.

In this spectacle, the absurd becomes normal, the corrupt is celebrated, and the honest are mocked or ignored.

To be clear, America has certainly faced high-level public corruption before.

During Teapot Dome, Warren Harding’s crew stuffed their pockets with oil leases as if they were prize sausages. There was Boss Tweed, strutting around Tammany Hall in suits so finely tailored they could barely contain his bribe-bloated carcass.

Yet Harding’s crooks at least had the decency to operate in whispers.

Homan’s degeneracy, by contrast, was performed blatantly and with no shame. He was caught in a sting so obvious it could have been scripted.

Then, it was all whitewashed by a Trump Justice Department more corrupt than the criminals it is supposed to catch.

Trump, of course, treats all of this with his customary shrug. In his theology, crime is no sin, provided it is committed in the cathedral of Trumpian loyalty. What, after all, is a little bribery among friends?

The Republic may falter, the laws may be mocked, but the one inviolable commandment is obedience to the Great Orange Man. To be Trump’s man is to be untouchable. To oppose him is to be hounded.

It is a system of justice recognizable in any banana republic, though even banana republics occasionally jail their thieves.

In Trump’s America though, the thieves are people with black or brown skin, as well as all who oppose Trump.

If Tom Homan had been an immigrant caught with a forged twenty-dollar bill, he’d be rotting in a private detention cell before sundown.

One can only hope that Homan and Trump will be prison mates someday, and that Democrats step up to make this happen.

Until then, history will record that the Trump administration was a government that substituted loyalty for honesty, noise for reason, and shameless corruption for the common good. James Comey’s legacy (checkered as it was as FBI director) will be different.

It’ll be that he eventually fought Donald Trump, faced ridiculous administration payback, and humiliated the Trump DOJ in court. (Look for a jury to quickly find Comey not guilty if a judge doesn’t dismiss the charges first).

Tom Homan’s legacy will be of cowardice and cash.

A Trump border czar undone not by invaders from abroad, but by a grimy grocery bag stuffed with cash. And pressed into his pasty, trembling hands by an FBI agent who must have struggled not to laugh.