Eric the Blue

One thing about our president, he’s a hard working guy, always several boiling pots on the stove. What with the extra-judicial killings (sometimes referred to by the non-romantic as “murder”) on the high seas, his demo project at the White House, the subsequent construction of a tastefully understated “ballroom” that will of course need a lot of the president’s attention, and his petition to be paid $230 million by his “Justice Department” as compensation for the disappearing legal troubles that once discomfited him, it’s a wonder that he has time to golf or post AI-generated vids of himself flying a fighter jet and dropping fecal matter on Americans. Perhaps someone even more clever than he assisted with the tech-y aspects of that project.

The president has said that he’d donate the $230 million to charity but I think there are some Supreme Court justices who deserve a piece of that action. Also, the last charity he ran–the Trump Foundation–was dissolved by court order after having been adjudicated a fraud.

Through all this fog I’ll admit to being intrigued by the guy who the president says has “donated” $130 million to keep paying our soldiers during the shutdown. By “intrigued,” I mean I was skeptical about his actual existence, and I still am, though now the Pentagon has confirmed receipt of the gift. The president says the donor will remain anonymous, as he does not want to be “recognized.” Again, however, the non-romantic among us might suspect that anonymous munificence could be explained by a desire to “win” government contracts, or have mergers or acquisitions approved, or maybe by other doings that a little person like me cannot even imagine.

If the concern is corruption, I continue to believe that the best defense is that the whole story is a lie. Run the numbers. I think there are about 1.3 million active-duty military, but let’s round down to a million and pay everyone just $40k per year. The product of those two figures, divided by 24 pay periods in a year, means that $1.66 billion is needed every payday. The amount of the alleged gift is a little less than 8 percent of that, and there’s another payday scheduled in two weeks. Maybe a simpler approach is just to point out that $130 million divided among a million recipients nets everyone $130. A sentence in a Politico story–“Trump previously ordered the Pentagon to take $8 billion in research funds to pay service members their mid-month paycheck”–tends to confirm that my envelope calculations are very conservative, and that the amount of the alleged gift isn’t going to solve anyone’s problem. Except maybe the donor’s, assuming him to be corruptly anonymous instead of a complete phantom.