F**king Mondays: Inauguration Blues, Trump's Shitcoin, Hostage Release, and MLK's Birthday

Not a happy edition of the F**king Mondays column.

POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Welcome to another edition of F**king Mondays! In the roundup today:

The inauguration I didn’t watch

It is official: Donald Trump is president again and we are set for another four years of utter chaos and insanity. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the inauguration and still find it hard to comprehend how he could have won again. But this is what America voted for and we have to accept the will of the people — at least for now.

To give you a sense of what is in store over the coming months, consider the fact that that the raft of executive orders Trump plans on signing immediately includes pardoning Jan. 6th insurrectionists and ending birthright citizenship.

Without effective opposition Trump will reshape the country in ways that might not be reversible — so that means building an effective opposition as quickly as possible.

The reality is that Democrats failed to hold Trump to account and they failed to beat him at the ballot box. As painful as this might be to acknowledge, it has to spur a real change in the Democratic Party’s culture and infrastructure. It should never have come to this and the party needs to figure out how to oppose Trump effectively, and soon if the country is to survive the next four years.

Trump’s shitcoin scam

The term “shitcoin” is used to define meaningless tokens or “meme coins” for crypto projects that have no real purpose. You could use the term to describe all of crypto, but there are many interesting projects ran by very talented people (side note: I have an interest in crypto so am reasonably well versed in the space).

Most of crypto is genuinely is a scam though, and every four years the price of these digital assets — regardless of whether they have value — starts to skyrocket due to cyclical expansions in global liquidity.

We are at the beginning of one of those cycles right now and every grifter, scam artist and criminal is busy figuring out how to make as much money as possible. So of course the new American president, a convicted felon, rapist and notorious conman, has used crypto to make himself one of the richest people on the planet overnight. Reported Axios:

The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn't exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump's net worth….

After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump's crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough -- with his other assets -- to make him one of the world's 25 richest people.

The coin has no purpose other than to make Donald Trump and anyone who speculates on the “asset” wealthy. When you look at the token distribution plan, all becomes clear. According to the coin’s website: “There are 200 million $TRUMP available on day one and will grow to a total of 1 billion $TRUMP over three years. Each group's allocation are released on their own schedule over 3 years.” The chart below explains how the tokens are distributed:

80% of $TRUMP is held by Trump-controlled entities under a 36-month vesting schedule. In other words, it’s a giant scam the US president is using to print money while in office. Perhaps more worryingly, the coin creates a new mechanism through which anyone can “invest” in order to curry favor with Trump. This is almost certainly in violation of the emoluments clause, but because Trump has almost unlimited immunity granted to him by the Supreme Court and new bosses SEC and DoJ, no is going to stop him.

Because the Trumps are shameless grifters, Melania Trump got in on the action too, creating her own crypto currency two days later named $MELANIA. The release of both coins created real alarm in more serious crypto circles. Many of the people who voted for Trump seemed to realize they had been conned:

The Melania coin was so poorly received that it wiped out much of the value of $TRUMP in a matter of minutes:

I have to confess, even though I have spent the past 10 years screaming from the rooftops that Trump was a criminal grifter, I did not think he would do something this brazen this early on. But then that is what Trump does. However low you think he can go, Trump will always go lower.

Such a nakedly greedy, unethical move was almost certainly by design. Trump wants everyone to know he’s in this for himself, that the rules don’t matter, and that he can do whatever he wants without any fear of repercussion. The crypto community might have supported his campaign, worked hard on Twitter to “own the libs”, and placed all their faith in him, but Trump could not care less.

It’s the perfect example of what we should expect over the next four years and a sign that we are in completely unchartered territory. There are no rules any more, and those who voted for him are going to have to own the chaos and destruction that will ensue.

Snoop Dogg and the culture shift

In 2016, the rapper Snoop Dogg called any black musician willing to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration a “Jiggaboo ass niggas” and an “uncle Tom ass nigga”. Fast forward to 2025:

Whether this makes Snoop Dogg a “sellout” or not isn’t for me to say, but his performance at Trump inauguration is symbolic of the radical culture shift we’ve seen in America over the past four years.

By January 7th 2021, Donald Trump was a pariah. He had killed hundreds of thousands of Americans due to incompetence during the pandemic, committed multiple crimes while in office, then led a violent insurrection on the capitol in an effort to overthrow the election. He was reviled by the black community, despised by women, Latinos, the LGBTQ community, and even his own party. Americans saw him as a racist conman who would almost certainly go down as the worst president in history.

So what on earth happened? I wrote about this in an essay just before the election and argued that the American public has been subjected to probably the biggest right wing psyop in modern history. Through platforms like Twitter and right wing media outlets like Breitbart and Fox, the public has been brainwashed into forgetting about 2016-2020 and believing Joe Biden and the Democrats are responsible for all evils in the world.

Trump’s image has not only been rehabilitated, but turned into a symbol of resistance against “The Deep State”. The psyop has been so effective that even iconic rappers like Snoop Dogg now count Trump as one of their own.

My guess is that Trump will eventually burn every bit of goodwill this Goebbelsian disinformation campaign has generated for him, but good lord is it scary to watch.

Peace in the Middle East (for now)

This was a hugely positive development in the Middle East. From Reuters:

After 15 months of collective grief and anxiety, three Israeli hostages left Hamas captivity and returned to Israel, and dozens of Palestinian prisoners walked free from Israeli jail, leaving both Israelis and Palestinians torn between celebration and trepidation as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took hold Sunday.

The peace deal means that over the next six weeks 33 Israeli hostages will be released by Hamas, nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners will be released by Israel, there will be a pause in fighting, and fuel and aid deliveries for Gaza will be increased.

This does not mean the war is over, but it does give respite to residents of Gaza who have gone through unimaginable horror, and it proves that both sides are now willing to negotiate seriously. Both sides accepted pragmatic realities: Hamas moved before a Trump presidency could weaken their position, while Netanyahu yielded to mounting public pressure over the hostages. Will it last? Given the weakened state of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, it is real possibility this time around. Fingers crossed.

Martin Luther King Day

If you are feeling depressed about Trump’s inauguration, it’s probably good to a) not watch it, and b) remember Martin Luther King instead. Today is a public holiday remembering King’s birthday, and a time when Americans celebrate a leader who stood for everything Donald Trump despises

King was a community organizer, a champion of the poor, and unifying figure who used his charisma to enact profound and lasting change in America. His efforts made America a better, more equal place and his life is a reminder that progress can always happen no matter how dark things get.

Have a great week, all things considered.

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