The Vampire Squid Diaries: Goldman Sachs Exec To Head Trump Treasury

Success would legitimize Trump’s whole mad gamble to be Prince of Playboy Mountain. It would be the final sick irony in a political universe full of them, if this hustling rube from Queens actually accomplished progressive goals in a fit of half-assed, half-improvised strategy. It would show that all of the calculation, all of the gaming, triangulation, and think-tanking, really were as useless as they appeared. I don’t know if political science has a term for when a functional illiterate achieves something that countless grad school theses have only speculated about.

But if Trump’s administration is simply a collection of dime-bag leftover schmucks who stopped being ready for the GOP Primetime decades ago, then the Trump Administration will be another Republican presidency, but more heavy-breathing and dull-witted. It will be crippled at its birth, like all of the other far-right-wing doctrine in the history of world.

Left to its own devices, zany modern conservatism will eat itself. Climate change will continue to over-run everything we’ve built, while scores of well-scrubbed Trump family retainers inform us that icebergs were always going to betray us by melting at the most inconvenient time for the economy.

Practically everybody who voted for Trump thought he was going to take the bolt-cutters to the big-wheel financial institutions. Yet those of us who watched him switch tracks during the long campaign were reasonably certain that the King of Orange had no strong beliefs. Like the crown of Alexander the Great, Trump would go to whomever was strongest.

It was always clear that Hillary would appoint a Wall Street drone to the highest spot of the Treasury, but for Trump, who bows to the last person talking in the room, it was still kind of a guessing game. Would the Donald lift a Bible-college yearbook editor to the seat of Alexander Hamilton? What role would Tila Tequila have in monetary policy? As far as the financial imagination was concerned, it was a Wild West of possibility.

Now the way is clearer: pretty much nothing will change. What does the law matter, when Goldman Sachs can screw over the peasants without any fear of being slapped down by the watchdogs of the state? Business as usual is terrible news for the country, good news for his opponents, and dispiriting for his supporters.

I suspect that a secret desire to watch the Tangerine Messiah sink teeth into the financial barons was more widely shared, even among Hillary voters, than anyone could admit. A Sachs ass-kicking is a long time coming. Maybe it’s a consequence of the Wall Street folks having free reign since the Eighties to do whatever they pleased. The collapse of the Soviet Empire made them weirder or drunker than usual; the fall of the Red Star drove them to froth at the mouth. The reign of Clinton and his terrible years of triangulation were boom times for the plutocracy. And now, apparently, those days are back.

For if a populist like Trump won’t take an ax to them, and the Democratic Party refuses to dump its leadership, then who, really, can bring the guillotine to Wall Street? As I write this sentence, the call of Trump beckons up and down the concrete canyons of Manhattan; I envision greedhead lords descending from their terrible stone crypts, leaving a scent of rotten fruit and blood in the air, lingering like a racial slur someone shouted in a smoke-filled back room.

If only we let more wild curs fight in the streets of New York’s banking district, these people might’ve been hidden up in their attics whispering sweet nothings to their shotguns. Instead, they’re trading toxic assets and probably jetting off to hunt tigers and serfs on hidden Pacific islands. What kind of show are we running in this country? Elected officials come and elected officials go, but Goldman Sachs’ term in office never ends.