How to Succeed in Trump's America: Rape a Teenager, Kill Some Fishermen, Monetize the White House and get Yourself A Johnson.
The Powell House Press: This Week and Next
The circus came to town this week. Who am I kidding, its Congress and their back…
Fresh court documents revealed that the teenage girl Matt Gaetz allegedly paid for sex was a homeless high school junior working at McDonald’s, saving up for braces. Four hundred dollars at a house party in 2017. The House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” of statutory rape, prostitution, and illicit drug use—the kind of findings that would once have ended careers before the lunch buffet closed.
By January, Gaetz had a prime-time show on OAN.
You know—OAN. The network that makes Fox News look like PBS. The channel your uncle watches after Fox became “too woke.” Where journalistic standards are…
Five nights a week at 9 PM Eastern, the disgraced congressman auditions for Florida governor while railing against the deep state. The girl with the braces watches him fail upward into cable stardom like a grotesque helium balloon shaped like accountability, drifting ever skyward. Trump, naturally, cheered: “Matt has a wonderful future!”
Sure. And the Hindenburg had a bright future right up until New Jersey.
There is no bottom anymore. We’ve drilled through the bottom, hit bedrock, kept drilling, and discovered an entirely new geological layer made of pure shamelessness. Scientists are calling it the “Trumpozoic Era.”
The Attention Economy Comes for Everything
Kris Jenner turned 70 with a party so precisely calibrated for Instagram that NASA could have used it to test satellite targeting systems. Every angle optimized. Every moment content. Pure Kardashian spectacle, which is to say, pure 2025, which is to say, God help us all.
Her late ex-husband Robert was an attorney—USC, law school, the bar exam, actual credentials. You know, the old-fashioned way people used to achieve things, back when society valued boring concepts like “qualifications” and “knowing what you’re doing.”
His daughters took one look at that tedious path and said, “Hard pass.” They went straight for fame itself. Kim’s sex tape wasn’t a scandal to overcome but rocket fuel, monetized into a billion-dollar empire built on a radical premise: you don’t need to be good at anything except being watched.
It’s the American Dream, reimagined for late-stage capitalism: Why develop a skill when you can develop a following?
MTV’s The Real World cracked something open in 1992—let’s call it Pandora’s Box, if Pandora’s Box were filled with hot tubs and strategically created drama. The show declared that ordinary people’s lives could be entertainment. Not people doing extraordinary things. Just people. In a house. With cameras. The culture ate it up like gas station sushi, and we’ve been sick ever since.
Then came NBC’s The Apprentice in 2004, selling America fourteen years of fiction about a casino bankrupter playing master businessman. Never mind the graveyard of stiffed contractors and failed ventures. On television, he looked like success. “You’re fired!” became lexicon. The fiction ran for president and won.
Turns out you can bankrupt a casino—literally, a business model where people hand you money and the house always wins—and still convince half the country you’re a business genius. It’s like crashing a car into a parked car and getting hired as a driving instructor.
Dynasty 2.0: All the Monetization in the World
The president’s eighteen-year-old granddaughter has 3.2 million TikTok followers, brand deals with TaylorMade, and a name-image-likeness valuation of $1.2 million.
Her primary athletic achievement? Finishing dead last at the Sage Valley Invitational, twenty-two strokes behind the second-to-last competitor. Twenty-two strokes. That’s not losing—that’s being lapped by someone walking the course backwards.
But competence has never been the Trump point. Competence is for suckers still operating under the quaint delusion that merit matters.
This week Kai made her LPGA debut at The ANNIKA in Florida. Odds of making the cut: 750-1. Vegas wouldn’t give you those odds on a three-legged horse. Her handicap is +0.5—excellent for Saturday morning at the municipal course, approximately 7.5 strokes away from professional caliber. Elite amateurs turn pro with handicaps of -7 or better. She’s as ready for the LPGA as I am ready to fly into space, which is to say, I’ve seen Apolo 13 and I’m very confident.
The invitation came from a tournament owner desperate for publicity. The Trump name generates clicks the way her grandfather’s properties generate tax incentives and mysterious loans from Deutsche Bank.
The White House photoshoot was the tell. Not illegal, technically—nothing’s illegal anymore if you squint hard enough and hire the right lawyers. Just a photogenic teenager in $130 designer activewear (looking very much like Travis Kelce’s merch) converting public office into private profit, filtered through aspirational lifestyle branding. It’s the grift meets girl-boss aesthetic. Lean In meets Cash Out.
She won’t make the cut this weekend. It won’t matter. She’s already won the only game that counts—where attention converts to influence, influence to deals, and deals to deposits. Tiger Woods spent decades mastering golf. Kai Trump mastered Instagram. Guess who made money faster?
The Drag Show Nobody’s Talking About
The Republican Party spent the months obsessing over transgender Americans with the desperate intensity of someone trying to figure out a Rubic’s Cube with red-green color blindness.
Trans people are the latest scapegoats in the oldest demagogue playbook: demonize the vulnerable, win elections, refuse to address actual problems. It’s like clockwork. Gay people, immigrants, Muslims, trans people—there’s always someone new to blame for your failed economic policies.
But the irony is so thick you could spread it on toast like a certain (maybe “ex”) Dutchess (who knows how long that title will last - just ask Mr. Mountbatten-Winsor).
While railing against gender fluidity and non-conformity, MAGA’s leading ladies have undergone such extensive cosmetic transformations they’ve become unrecognizable. Kristi Noem. Melania. Kellyanne Conway. Kayleigh McEnany. Laura Trump. Kimberly Guilfoyle. They’re walking contradictions—railing against artifice while drowning in it, embodying the very gender performance they condemn.
They’ve had more work done than the Bay Bridge. If drag is performance, these women are Broadway. If gender is a social construct, they’re constructing it with industrial equipment and venture capital funding.
The GOP has a rich history of anti-LGBTQ crusaders whose careers ended in men’s airport bathrooms and pages’ text messages. Dennis Hastert. Larry Craig. Mark Foley. Roy Ashburn. Today’s moral panic is just the latest chapter in a playbook so old it should qualify for Social Security. Do we still offer that?
The Extraction Machine
While Kai sells $130 sweatshirts—let that sink in, $130 sweatshirts—corporate restaurant chains are quietly strip-mining American communities with the efficiency of a Victorian coal operation, except the coal barons occasionally built libraries.
Take Red Lobster—now owned by creditors including Fortress Investment Group after bankruptcy. Nothing says “fine dining” like “owned by people who foreclose on things.” Or consider Darden, Yum! Brands, Restaurant Brands International, Inspire Brands. These chains negotiate tax breaks that local businesses can’t get while paying workers $10-15 an hour. The living wage in Pennsylvania? $23.15.
So you’re working full-time and still can’t afford to eat at the restaurant where you work. It’s like performance art about late-stage capitalism, except it’s just called “employment.”
The math is brutal. Of money spent at chains, only pennies return to local communities—and only to the wealthiest residents through stock ownership. Locally-owned restaurants recirculate 2-4 times more revenue locally. But the chains have the lawyers, the lobbyists, the campaign contributions, and the politicians on speed dial.
Trump promised to restore single-breadwinner prosperity—you know, the 1950s dream where Dad’s factory job paid for the house, the car, the family vacation. It’s mathematically impossible. The economy has been fundamentally restructured around wealth extraction by corporations and private equity. The factory’s been replaced by an Applebee’s paying $11 an hour.
And Trump knows this. The CEOs doing the extracting are Mar-a-Lago members. They’re probably in the dining room right now, laughing about it over $400 steaks while their employees choose between rent and groceries.
At least Bethlehem Steel had the decency to actually die. The chains persist while paying starvation wages, like corporate zombies shambling through American towns, consuming everything, creating nothing.
The Body Count
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spent the week doing what he does best: ignoring rules with the confidence of a man who’s never faced consequences.
His résumé reads like a rejected Veep subplot: a 2017 sexual assault allegation (settled for $50,000—the price of a mid-tier sedan!), severe alcohol problems (his wife hid in closets and developed an escape plan, which is definitely the foundation of a healthy marriage), chanting “Kill all Muslims” while drunk (always a great look for the Defense Secretary), and bankrupting two veteran organizations (impressive—those were specifically designed to help people).
His first move as Secretary? Fire Chairman of the Joint Chiefs CQ Brown, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, and all three service branch top military lawyers. You know, just eliminating anyone who might ask annoying questions like “Is this legal?” or “Should we maybe follow the Geneva Conventions?” Pesky lawyers, always going on about “laws” and “constitutions” and other bureaucratic nonsense.
Then came the Caribbean strikes. Seventy-five deaths from 19 military operations between September and November. No congressional authorization—who needs Congress? No legal basis—who needs laws? The administration claims all victims were “narcoterrorists” but provides zero evidence. No drugs displayed. No affiliations proven. Just vibes and a very sincere promise to trust them, bro.
Colombian officials say fishermen were killed. Constitutional and international law experts call it murder. But what do they know? They probably went to law school, those elitists.
Six warships are now deployed near Venezuela. Military buildup underway. Hegseth’s entire career taught him that rules don’t apply if you’re shameless enough. He’s now applying that lesson to international law—with deadly consequences and absolutely no accountability, because why start now?
It’s like giving the keys to a tank to someone whose main qualification is “has never successfully followed a rule and feels great about it.”
Meanwhile, Let Them Eat Air
The Supreme Court halted full SNAP benefits this week. Forty-two million Americans go hungry. Speaker Mike Johnson calls it “faith.”
It’s not faith. It’s temerity masquerading as fiscal responsibility while Kai Trump hawks designer loungewear and Matt Gaetz collects a cable news paycheck. You can practically hear Marie Antoinette slow-clapping from beyond the grave.
The Epstein files saga devolved into predictable Washington psychodrama, which is French for “nobody will face consequences.” The House dumped 20,000 pages, including emails where Jeffrey groused that Trump “knew about the girls” and had asked Ghislaine Maxwell “to stop” recruiting at Mar-a-Lago.
Let’s pause on that. “Stop recruiting at my property” is not the moral high ground one might think it is. That’s like asking the mob to please conduct their murders somewhere else—you’re not against the crime, you’re just concerned about property values.
Trump, who campaigned on transparency about these very files—remember that? feels like a thousand years ago—now works the phones to stop a bipartisan discharge petition. Survivors plead for justice. Washington turns their trauma into partisan chess. And somewhere, Jeffrey Epstein isn’t killing himself, because he’s already dead, which remains the most suspicious thing about this entire story.
The Swamps of 2025
One wants to believe there will be consequences. That the LPGA will realize sponsor exemptions based on surname demean the sport. That voters will tire of scandal-as-credential. That someone in power might care about truth or hungry children or homeless teenagers exploited by congressmen.
One wants to believe this. One would be precious, naïve, adorable even—like a golden retriever puppy expecting the mail carrier to play fetch.
The Romans had their decline, complete with lead pipes and orgies. We have ours, complete with TikTok and private equity. At least the Romans had the excuse of not knowing lead was poisonous. We’re poisoning ourselves on purpose and calling it freedom.
Except our decline is filmed, edited, optimized for engagement, and available now at premium prices from the family that turned reality television into a governing philosophy. You can buy the merch. The sweatshirts start at $130.
Somewhere, a teenage girl who needed braces watches a powerful man fail upward into prime-time television. Her attorney told The New York Times: “Power imbalances can be age, but they can also be financial.” Which is lawyer-speak for “he bought her because he could.”
Somewhere, 42 million people wonder where their next meal comes from while the Supreme Court explains that helping them would be fiscally irresponsible. (Tax breaks for corporations? Totally fine. Food for children? Sorry, the budget’s tight.)
Somewhere, 75 families grieve loved ones killed in illegal military strikes that will never be investigated, because investigations require someone in power to care, and caring is so 2015.
And somewhere, Kai Trump’s TikTok analytics tick upward while Matt Gaetz prepares his monologue, and Pete Hegseth orders another strike, and the machine keeps grinding, and the circus music plays on.
Welcome to the fever swamps, where scandal isn’t a career-ender—it’s a career accelerator, the body count doesn’t matter if you’re loyal enough, war crimes are fine if nobody’s watching, and the sweatshirts start at $130.
The circus never leaves town anymore. It’s become the permanent condition of American life, except circuses are supposed to be fun, and this is just a horror show with better lighting.
And the tent just keeps getting bigger, which would be impressive if it weren’t so utterly terrifying.
But hey, at least the analytics are good.
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