The Mask Slipped. A Lot.
Why You Might Want To Read This: You don’t have to squint too hard to see how the malignant narcissist in the White House dished out, almost daily, moments in 2025 that gave us, in all the madness, a crystal-clear exposure of the real-life consequences of American Exceptionalism stretching back generations. The Mask Slipped often.
It’s a sure bet that most of my readers in 2025 participated, perhaps daily, in conversations that started “Did you hear what HE SAID?” and/or “Did you see what HE DID?”. And, clearly, 2026 didn’t get the memo about turning the page to a fresh start in the new year.
To put down an immediate marker: the monumental monstrosity of this gang of liars, crooks, sheer incompetents and, it has to be said, cold-hearted idealogues, who seem to revel in actions just for the sake of causing pain to so many, can’t be equally compared to anything in at least the last half century; Russell Vought takes great pride in snatching away the livelihood of 100,000s of people to save, in budgetary terms, a minuscule amount. It’s breathtaking, cruel, destructive, amoral behavior.
Yet, the current chaos fanned by the Mad Hatter is simply an eruption of the Id of American Exceptionalism, a key to which is the reverence over, and promotion, of the so-called “free market”. As my marker above says, it is an infuriating, exhausting and scary time. But, it’s also an expression of the deep rot in the system that has been at work at least since the post WWII-era.
Let’s consider, for brevity’s sake, just three examples.
War Crimes Are Quite American.
Sometimes reality is much more bizarre than fiction, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving—I had already started drafting this before January 3rd 2026 and, presto, I woke up to another Strangelovian moment of war.
Because war and state violence are the American way.
I won’t explore here in detail every U.S. military action, coup, genocide or underwriting of armies across the planet. Suffice it to say that every president in the post-WW II period—and I’m plucking that sliver of time for the sake of focus—used force, violence, deception and lies, very often in direct contravention of the Constitution and international law.
Roll call, not in chronological order nor, alas, not comprehensive: Indonesia, Iran, Guatemala, Honduras, Lebanon, Greece Nicaragua, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq (twice), Cuba, Chile, Korea, Panama and, of course, the long Cold War with the Soviet Union.
What Trump did is just do all this in the daylight because it makes his nine year-old mind feel big and important to take dangerous toys and blow shit up. Most of what really horrifies the vast ring of military sorts is not the military action itself but that it’s being done all out in the open. The disregard for human life, the assassinations, the coups, the undermining of democracy happens virtually every day, every year, every decade, but it mostly occurs in the shadows.
Not with this gang.
A New Yorker cartoon just recently captured this:
And don’t pretend that this is just a Republican cross to bear. The newest Pentagon budget just reached $1 trillion—thanks to $150 billion added on by Congress. In 2023, I detailed the bi-partisan showering of money for the military-industrial complex. Indeed, this Pentagon budget passed the House by a vote of 312-112 and the Senate by an even larger percentage margin, 77-20.
That’s robust bi-partisanship.
Our Mask Slipped point: We live with a bi-partisan, systemic, big-dollar embrace of not only bloated big-ticket programs for bombers and nukes, but also plenty of money to fund drone strikes, global military incursions, support for coups, assassinations and spying.
And, now, the Mad Hatter is proposing… it’s insane to even write this… a $1.5 trillion military budget for the fiscal 2027 budget—yes, floated out there, without shame, at the same time that millions of people lost Affordable Care Act health care subsidy coverage and while the Vought acolytes continue to obliterate programs over, by comparison to the Pentagon largesse, monetary peanuts.
I will predict right now: $1.5 trillion will be negotiated down to “just” $1.2-$1.3 trillion. And with flag pins in lapels proclaiming a patriotic duty to ensure military global superiority, plenty of Democrats, who embrace the thin gruel of centrism and the wacky brew of “abundance”, will make up the bi-partisan majority.
Chardonnay Washes Down Corruption And Tastes The Same in Chappaqua and Mar-a-Lago
An off-shoot of American Exceptionalism is the linked canard of “shared sacrifice”, “public service” and “community”. It’s mouthed non-stop. Deep down, I think more people increasingly think it’s utter bullshit. And the triggered bullshit meters go to the heart of the rumblings of dissatisfaction with the political system—and speaks to the rapid rise of voters choosing to be “independents” and discarding any affiliation with either major party.
Here, too, the Mask Slipped courtesy of the malignant Mad Hatter: he’s at the center of a web of endless deals in crypto, construction, golf courses and other business engineered by his organized crime-like family, encompassing sons, son-in-laws and a sycophantic network of bullies and scammers. Their hands can never dig deep enough into a cesspool of sleazy operators and dirty money.
But, the Trump corruption is just more public, over-the-top, unrestrained by embarrassment or the rule of law.
It is the way the system works.
Evidence:
Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar pay package. I mean, seriously, how does one person merit that kind of wealth? In a moral, sane world, the existence of billionaires and an multi-millionaires would be inconceivable and seen as an economic failure, a flaw, an obscenity even more glaring in the face of a $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage that hasn’t changed since 2009. Instead:
The country’s culture celebrates the rich CEO, the “successful businessman”, and, in elite conversations and media headlines, CEOs are bestowed with glory and fame, as if the success of a single business is the end result of one person’s labor. So, of course, in that world, the vast riches handed out to CEOs or company owners are justified.
Not to be excluded from stuffing pockets with cash, the Supreme Court is wallowing in the sludge, led by Clarence Thomas.
This isn’t just a core Republican belief. After all, none other than Joe Biden declared, “If you can make a million or a billion dollars, that’s great, God bless you.” You can see that in policy at the local, state and federal level when careerist politicians, of all stripes from both parties, embrace nonsensical, wasteful tax cuts, tax subsidies and handouts to the very rich/corporations.
Speaking of elected servants and “public service”. With the exception of Jimmy Carter, every president since Ronald Reagan has turned their presidential service into a slot machine. It’s easy to pile on to Republicans but:
The Clintons are vastly wealthy. Their foundation is a public relations money laundering and political power access machine, white-washing either corporate money earned in the most beastly fashion (from banks to Wal-Mart) or millions of dollars in blood-drenched, civil-liberty crushing Saudi dough. Hillary Clinton is so tone-deaf that she could not understand why anyone would think pocketing $200,000 from Goldman Sachs for each fluffy, content-less, hour-long speech was anything but legal political bribery;
The Obamas have converted two terms in the White House into two estates (Martha’s Vineyard and an in-progress castle in Hawaii) and, among other windfalls, a $60-$65 million book deal (trust me, those advances have no relationship to revenue from actual sales) and a Netflix “production” deal for a reported minimum of $50 million.
Our Mask Slipped point: Trump simply illustrates that the American political and economic system is anchored on layers upon layers of soft and hard corruption.
Yes, greedy insurance companies will get richer.
You may recall that when the Mad Hatter blew up health care coverage for millions of people by banding together with the Republican undertakers in Congress to end subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, he bloviated that his plan “would reduce your insurance premiums by stopping government payoffs to big insurance companies and sending that money directly to the people”.
To be sure, the Mad Hatter has no understanding of how health care works. His go-to solution to throw a few thousand dollars at people stimulates the same part of the tiny part of grey matter that thinks to toss a tip at a hooker or casino worker—it’s a token, far short of real money.
But, the entire “health care” industry IS a giant payoff scheme to insurance companies—“health care” is in quotes because the industry’s mission is profit, not keeping people healthy. There’s a reason the “health” insurance industry spent more than $130 million health lobbying Congress in 2025 and the overall “health care” industry (which includes Big PHARMA) spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars lobbying Congress in 2024—astonishing totals that have been increasing for the past 30 years.
My guess is, similar to the military-industrial complex CEOs, the insurance and “health care” mafia CEOs cringed at the Mad Hatter’s verbal spewing because he simply said the dirty truth loudly.
A dirty truth that is bi-partisan. Both the 1990s proposed “health care reform” (colloquially known as “Hillarycare”) and the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as “Obamacare”) left the basic power in the hands of corporations to control a sector that determines whether people live or die—and if they live, surviving too often means financial ruin or living on the edge of bankruptcy.
The Mask Slipped: perhaps more than any sector “health care” shows the utter failure of American Exceptionalism and the “free market”. Forget the morality. Spending 15 percent of gross domestic product on a single sector, while your global competitors spend single digits on comprehensive health coverage for its people, is the dumbest idea in the last century of recorded economics history. But, it speaks VOLUMES about corruption.
So, dear readers: be rightly up-in-arms about the entire menu of violence perpetrated against people and your values. But, use the Mad Hatter’s reign to show every example of how The Mask Slipped. And what must be done.