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I suspect Trump’s Truthless Special omits mention of the copious stories in his old home town paper the Times that report on all the grifters in the Trump administration most of whom despite the millions they soak up are close to the Trump family’s take. I see little evidence from the MAGA elite that bothers them much despite Donald Trump’s bold claim that he would clean up the Swamp. There is some concern that the super rich are getting richer but not much that is the fertilizer poured into the swamp by Trump that has metastasized.
I make much of this years history reading and I will again now. I’m now 230 pages into David Nasaw’s 787 page “The Patriarch” about JFK’s daddy Joseph P. Kennedy. It is giving me the context of his life as I expected but I was surprised that his father was not one of the poor Irish who needed not apply for jobs. Jack and his other eight siblings grew up rich and pampered but then their father’s childhood wasn’t half bad either. I’ve found his brief passage into Hollywood interesting and learned about his affair with Gloria Swanson and how Gloria was irritated that Joe’s widow Rose didn’t mention her in her autobiography in 1980 that was scrubbed clean of everything that wasn’t a happy memory. Gloria’s riposte was an Autobiography that made sure to included Rose’s hubby in it.
But what I found really interesting was how Dad Kennedy made his initial fortune in the 1920’s stock market. He did it the way another big book I read this year described it by all sorts of skullduggery and insider trading. I am amazed I didn’t find the book in the bibliography of Andrew Sorkin’s book 1929 (Inside the greatest crash in Wall Street history – and how it shattered a nation. So I looked for Kennedy in the Index and he doesn’t show up until the epilogue which merely adds that he became the first Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Nasaw book describes how FDR put him in charge of drawing up the rules for a graft free stock exchange and convinced me he was little short of spectacular in pulling off that difficult trick. Kennedy said of himself as quoted in the Nasaw Book as an “admission:” “The President had appointed me as chairman of the SEC because he knew that I knew all the angles of trading, that I had studied pools and participated in them and was aware of all the intricacies and trickeries of market manipulation…I had engaged in many a furious financial fight and knew the formulas -when to duck and when to hit.”
One great tragedy of Trump is that knowing how to use the swamp to bribe politicians he did nothing to clean up our politics. He merely threw a lit match in a tank of gas.
