Like others in this neighborhood, I struggle to find the right words to explain what we are going through — straining for the terminology to describe Donald J. Trump.
Of course, he’s an “authoritarian,” and a Vesuvius of corruption, but that doesn’t quite capture the man in full does it? He’s a narcissist and Putin-wanna-be, but, again that fails to capture his uniquely cartoonish menace; or the many and varied cruelties, stupidities, malice, and gaudy sleaze that is Trump.
He’s a character familiar to history, if only history were much dumber, more vulgar, and written in ALL-CAPS.
So, I offer a digression.
Instead of thinking of Trump as a Mango Mussolini, or Hitler, or a Putin-knock off, think of him as President Biff.
I suspect it helps if you’ve actually seen all of the Back to the Future Movies (especially Back to the Future Part II), because the character of Biff Tannen was actually based on Donald Trump and eerily foretold our own dystopian timeline.
This is not a new idea.1 Trump was Biff long before he descended the golden escalator.
A bit of background: In the original movie set in the 1950s, Biff is the town asshole; a crude and decidedly stupid bully who ends badly.
In the sequel, though, we seem him in a very different timeline set in the mid-1980s. In this alternative timeline, the young Biff has been given a “Sports Almanac” by his future self, and uses it to gamble his way to massive power and wealth. He spends his money on cars and women — forcing his wife to get breast implants — and starts up his toxic waste company known as BiffCo.
Biff built a casino hotel in Hill Valley (at least twenty-seven stories high), named "Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise Casino & Hotel", on the site of the former Hill Valley Courthouse, upon legalizing gambling in 1979. He also helped Richard Nixon remain President of the United States until at least 1983 (while seeking a fifth consecutive term) by covering up the Watergate scandal.
Biff's effects on history affected the whole world….
As the Daily Beast later noted:
In the movie, Biff uses the profits from his 27-story casino… to help shake up the Republican Party, before eventually assuming political power himself, helping transform Hill Valley, California, into a lawless, dystopian wasteland, where hooliganism reigns, dissent is quashed, and wherein Biff encourages every citizen to call him “America’s greatest living folk hero.”
There’s a very specific analog between Biff Tannen, the bully and bad guy in almost every timeline in Back to the Future Part II, and a certain political figure who is rather popular in the United States right now. He’s been handed the keys to fortune, he’s unrepentantly used that fortune exclusively for himself, and he’s even become a public advocate for plastic surgery for women in his family.
It is not hard to put two and two together.
So Gale was asked: was this just a coincidence? As he watched Trump come down the escalator to announce his candidacy was he thinking about Biff?
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” he says. “You watch Part II again and there’s a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there’s a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there’s one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.”
“Yeah,” says Gale. “That’s what we were thinking about.”
Exit take: This is what happens when we elect Biff Tannen president of the United States.
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Elon Breaks Bad on The Donald
So ends a beautiful friendship. The biggest, most beautiful friendship ever.
“I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it,” Mr. Musk said in an excerpt from an interview with CBS’s “Sunday Morning” that was released late Tuesday.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Even seasoned practitioners of Washington pay-to-play have been startled by the new rules for buying influence. In December, a seat at a group dinner at Mar-a-Lago could be had for a million-dollar contribution to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that serves as a war chest for the midterms. More recently, one-on-one conversations with the President have become available for five million. The return on investment is uncertain, a government-affairs executive told me: “What if he’s in a bad mood? You have no clue where the money is eventually going.” Another lobbying veteran described the frank exchange as “outer-borough Mafia shit.”
Trump has sold influence so briskly that the political machinery cannot keep up. After he was offered a four-hundred-million-dollar gift from the government of Qatar—an airplane so opulent that it was dubbed the “palace in the sky”—Dan Pfeiffer, a former White House communications director, called it “the most brazenly corrupt move by any President in U.S. history, and it’s not close.” Less than a day later, a crypto venture owned by the Trump family auctioned off a dinner with the President at one of his golf clubs. The family profited from the crypto auction twice over: from fees, which have so far netted them and their partners three hundred and twenty million dollars, and from their own stash of Trump-branded coins, which had grown in value to $4.1 billion even before the auction was complete.
Mr. Walczak, a former nursing home executive who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes days after the 2024 election, submitted a pardon application to President Trump around Inauguration Day. The application focused not solely on Mr. Walczak’s offenses but also on the political activity of his mother, Elizabeth Fago.
Ms. Fago had raised millions of dollars for Mr. Trump’s campaigns and those of other Republicans, the application said. It also highlighted her connections to an effort to sabotage Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 campaign by publicizing the addiction diary of his daughter Ashley Biden — an episode that drew law enforcement scrutiny.
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“The guy’s an asshole,” Chuck said about Trump and the Truth Social post on Memorial Day. “And he’s intentionally an asshole.”
Chuck’s point is this: Trump intentionally seeks to divide the country — even on remembrance days like Monday. Because he thinks that doing so is to his political advantage.
“He intentionally doesn't want to govern for half the country,” said Chuck. “This should be disqualifying, right? The American president shouldn't be this divisive, intentionally divisive. We've had divisive figures, but he goes out of his way. He wants to be divisive. He doesn't even want to try to bring the country together. He wants this.”
I think that’s right. Trump sees the entire world in black and white terms: You are either for him or against him. He rewards the people for him and attacks the people against him. It’s that simple.
U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that Trump’s order was unconstitutional and blocked the government from enforcing it, becoming the third judgethis month to side with a law firm that had challenged the president’s orders.
We aren’t the first society to come unglued. We almost certainly will not be the last. But right now, each day in America for those of us who do not favor the president or hold to the MAGA worldview feels like we have been sent to some dilapidated asylum by mistake, like the protagonist of a pulp thriller.
Nothing is working as it should. No one is speaking in sentences that add up to anything sensible.
We are throwing the most advanced health science research system into the sea and have turned over our public health infrastructure to quacks and crooks. We are destroying our prosperity to sate the president’s desire to play at 19th century political economy. We are blithely ignoring the potential for war with former allies as Trump crows about annexing Canada and Greenland.
In a rational world, we would already have seen markets balk at Trump’s trade policies, investigations into the mismanagement of our health services, and impeachment proceedings against a man who continues to menace treaty allies for nothing but personal ego.
But it isn’t a rational world, at least not this American corner of it.
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Wednesday dogs
One of these boys is about to get MUCH bigger (Eli and Auggie in 2020.)
The main story on the New Hampshire Union-Leader’s front page on Monday compared Donald Trump to Biff Tannen, the villain from the “Back to the Future” movies.
The op-ed written by the newspaper’s leader slammed Trump as an “insult to the intelligence of Republican voters.” It included pictures of Trump and the movie character Tannen.
“Trump has shown himself to be a crude blowhard with no clear political philosophy and no deeper understanding of the important and serious role of President of the United States than one of the goons he lets rough up protesters in his crowds,” Union-Leader publisher Joseph McQuaid writes.
“He reminds us of the grownup bully ‘Biff’ in the ‘Back to the Future’ movie series.”
Trump - as conman - is rather unique: He’s not charming; he’s incoherent as opposed to persuasive; he’s unmanly and childish, a grade school bully; he’s a proven business failure. I just don’t get it.
Read the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis entitled, "It Can't Happen Here." He describes Trump perfectly in his fictional President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip.
Trump - as conman - is rather unique: He’s not charming; he’s incoherent as opposed to persuasive; he’s unmanly and childish, a grade school bully; he’s a proven business failure. I just don’t get it.
Read the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis entitled, "It Can't Happen Here." He describes Trump perfectly in his fictional President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip.