Corruption Has Gotten Way Too Lazy

“President Donald Trump dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service on Monday in exchange for a settlement deal to launch a $1.8 billion fund to pay claims made by his friends for purported unfair prosecution.” — Mother Jones

This used to be a proper country. One where people acknowledged a difference between right and wrong, and agreed that if you wanted to do wrong, you had to do it in a dimly lit backroom full of cigar smoke. Now, when I, Richard Nixon, look up at the United States from my fiery torture chamber in Hell, I see a level of laziness, stupidity, and petty corruption I never thought possible. And I once knew a guy who went by the code name “Deep Throat.”

How did this country get to the point where the president can sue his own government for $10 billion, “settle” the case by getting a $1.8 billion slush fund for his allies, and then grant himself and his family a free tax-fraud-for-life card? The only thing worse than burning in Hell is watching this country burn itself to the ground in the dumbest, sleaziest way possible.

Don’t get me wrong, the daily penis panini presses and poison-ivy enemas here in Hell are no picnic. But do you know what true Hell is? Watching the same country that forced you to resign in disgrace collectively shrug its shoulders every time the current president takes to Truth Social to brag about committing another felony.

It used to be that if you wanted to be a crook, you had to be discreet about it. When I wanted to dig up dirt on the Democrats, I had a team break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Complex. And it would’ve worked if it weren’t for Bob Woodward and those thumb-nosing narcs at The Washington Post.

These days, if the president wants to get back at a political enemy, he just sics the DOJ on them without any pretense. Where’s the style? Where’s the panache? Having billionaires buy up all the newspapers to kill any negative coverage of you is dastardly, sure, but it lacks class. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe criminals should at least have to try to get away with crimes.

And don’t even get me started on foreign policy. Back in my day, when we wanted to bomb civilians in other countries, we did it covertly like decent war criminals. We sure as hell didn’t stitch the footage over SpongeBob memes and share it with the entire world.

Doing evil used to take guts. You had to have chutzpah. Do you have any idea how hard it is to declare a “War on Drugs” and then carefully coordinate multiple intelligence agencies as they distribute crack cocaine in low-income neighborhoods? That’s how you’re supposed to undermine marginalized communities—with plausible deniability. You can’t just hire masked goons to round up all the people you don’t like and ship them out of the country. That kind of brazenness and stupidity gives being a bad guy a bad name.

I’m not saying other American presidents have been saints. Hell has an entire Hall of Presidents that’s like the one at Disney, just with a lot more eye gouging and testicle torsion. But even the worst among us never had the audacity to launch a coup, or create his own form of currency that’s obviously a scam, or invite a bunch of evangelicals to literally pray before a giant golden statue of himself.

So please, for the love of all that is unholy, cut it out with all the grifting in plain sight and do your dirty deeds behind closed doors like a respectable crony.