Trump’s Failing Veins, Coca-Cola, And Burning Food

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In every week that completely captured the chaos of authoritarian decline, Donald J. Trump made headlines for 3 surreal and deeply telling causes: his failing veins, his weird declare to have modified Coca-Cola’s recipe, and his administration’s determination to incinerate a whole lot of tons of taxpayer-funded emergency meals meant to feed ravenous folks overseas.

First, the physique betrays the person. Trump’s current analysis of continual venous insufficiency—the place blood swimming pools painfully within the legs as a result of poor circulation—may sound like a secular well being challenge. However beneath the burden of his personal insurance policies, it reads like karmic poetry. This is similar man who, throughout each of his presidencies, gutted Medicaid, slashed healthcare protections, and tried to dismantle the Reasonably priced Care Act. These are actions which have left hundreds of thousands of Individuals one analysis away from catastrophe. Now his personal blood refuses to flow into, at the same time as he continues to dam others from receiving care.

Whereas his ankles revolt, Trump turned consideration to his newest messianic declare: that he personally satisfied Coca-Cola to return to utilizing cane sugar as a substitute of high-fructose corn syrup. The declare, unverified and absurd, performs straight into authoritarian fantasy the place management over one thing as small as soda turns into an emblem of whole dominance. It’s delusion dressed up as dietary reform, and one more instance of Trump rewriting actuality to go well with his personal ego.

However maybe most evil of all is the revelation that his administration destroyed greater than 1,000,000 kilos of lifesaving dietary meals. International help staff lobbied for weeks to reserve it. However in true Trumpian vogue, political optics took priority over human lives. The meals was burned and bulldozed, at a price of over $100,000 to U.S. taxpayers, so Trump might ship a message to his base that “wasteful overseas help” was over.

This wasn’t about expiration dates. It was about exerting energy via destruction. About proving that he can starve the world and nonetheless sleep at night time. That is famine as flex, starvation as coverage, and authoritarianism in a crimson tie sipping Weight loss program Coke whereas the world burns.