Aborted

A week after the surfacing of the infamous "grab them by the pussy" video, Trump presented himself as the common man's only defense against a vast conspiracy of global financial interests:

"There is nothing the political establishment will not do," he said, "and no lie they will not tell, to hold on to their prestige and power at your expense."

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"For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests they partner with, our campaign represents an existential threat," Trump said.

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Months later, with the self-proclaimed "existential threat" to special interests in office, the "establishment" has it better than ever.

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Tuesday, for instance, Trump signed a repeal of a bipartisan provision of the Dodd-Frank bill known as the Cardin-Lugar Amendment.

The rule was stalled for the better part of six years by a relentless and exhausting parade of lobbyists, lawyers and other assorted Beltway malingerers. It then lived out of the womb for a few sad months before Trump smothered it this week.

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The law was designed to prevent energy companies from bribing foreign dictators. The simple goal was to ensure that the wealth of resource-rich countries would be enjoyed by their citizens, and not converted into obscene personal collections of yachts, mansions, sports cars and Michael Jackson memorabilia – as, for instance, it was when oil was discovered in Equatorial Guinea, and the brutal dictator Teodoro Obiang started doing business with Rex Tillerson's ExxonMobil.

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The oil-and-gas people, of course, pretended the whole time that they didn't want to kill the provision, exactly, just improve it.

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This is why laws like Dodd-Frank end up being unwieldy monstrosities of thousands and thousands of pages: On the road to trying to kill a law outright, lobbyists usually try to weigh it down first by adding exceptions and verbiage.

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Another irony here is that the public perception that nothing ever gets done in Washington is driven by this very dynamic.

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This leads to frustration with Washington inaction. And as we've seen, this leads to political support for big talkers like Trump who promise, hilariously, to cut through the red tape and "get things done."

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Ask Trump supporters about this episode, and many would say they won't weep for the loss of any government regulation.

But they should ask themselves if, when they were whooping and hollering for the man who promised to end special interest and lobbyist rules in Washington, they imagined the ExxonMobil chief in charge of the State Department cheering as the new president wiped out anti-bribery laws. The "establishment" sure is on the run, isn't it? 

  Matt Taibbi

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.