2025: The Year Of The Grift
As a wild 2025 comes to a crashing halt, what have we learned? Much of the voting public cares little about corruption, is in large part far more interested in the ill-being of others than in the well-being of themselves, and democracy is far more fickle than my already cynical self had imagined possible.
Pierre Poilievre, sucking on the public teat for nearly his entire career, is on a warpath against anyone perceived to be sucking on the public teat. So determined is he to kick people off of all forms of public assistance that he squatted the publicly-funded Stornoway while forcing the public to pay for a vanity by-election in a riding he can barely find on a map — so that he could resume his campaign against all things public.
This Canadian-style grift is relative child’s play in an increasingly grifty world. It is merely a problem of not living his espoused values, of being an unbridled hypocrite, intent on taking away from everyone else what he has managed to gain for himself, of taking only slightly more than what he is entitled to. It is of seeking power for power’s sake, with nothing resembling a vision for his country, no concept of how to deal with the world’s shifting sands, of how to defend ourselves from an imploding American oligarchy intent on taking us down with them.
Not that the Conservative leader has any idea what’s going on anywhere else, for he still won’t get a security clearance. He does not have access to any of the vast amounts of secret information the government holds about our allies and our adversaries, nor even who falls under which category in an increasingly fuzzy world.
Donald Trump, who is technically an ally but would no doubt be filed in those documents under ‘adversary,’ has made himself an estimated 3.4 billion dollars richer in his first year back in office. This represents an increase in his net worth of nearly $10 million per day. Over $113 per second. Or about $85,000 for every dollar of his $400,000 official annual pre-tax presidential salary, putting even Starbucks’ CEO-to-worker 6,666-to-1 pay ratio to shame.
What kind of grift gets a public servant that level of cash? Aside from accepting a personal gift of a $400 million plane from Qatar, a 24-karat gold bar from Apple, and another gold bar and Rolex watch from Swiss billionaires, all in exchange for little things like foreign military bases on US soil and reduced tariffs, there’s his highly lucrative crypto business which is an excellent way to funnel untraceable money to the president, and lesser street-level grift like the Trump Phone. Also, raising the cost of membership to his private Mar-a-Lago estate to $1 million has not hurt, nor has the apparent sale of presidential clemency and pardons. This is obviously not a comprehensive list.
The only trickle-down that is truly succeeding in the US is the acceptance of blatant corruption. The Los Vegas Police, for example, have started using Tesla Cybertrucks as patrol vehicles. On its own it is merely embarrassing, but how they acquired them should be deeply concerning. In a country with both an openly corrupt supreme court and president, the police department for a place nicknamed “Sin City” accepting a $2.7 million gift barely rates a footnote.
A donor provided 10 Cybertrucks to the city’s police force, washed through a charity called “Behind the Blue.” Initially, the donor was anonymous, but as the Guardian reports, the donors turned out to be the co-owners of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with connections to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, surprising nobody.
But who made the donation is irrelevant. Accepting gifts of that scale leads to obvious questions of what the donors expect in return — I assure you it isn’t nothing — and inherent questions around fairness in the administration of justice. There is a strong case to be made that police should not even accept gifts as simple as a free donut, let alone a fleet of high tech if somewhat fragile police cars.
With grift becoming baseline behaviour in the once-democratic United States, though, nobody is going to do anything about it. Local leaders will be more enthusiastic about cutting ribbons for the vehicles than addressing the fundamental question of the legal and ethical basis for their presence.
If the American people are looking to the Supreme Court for guidance and protection on this score, taking a moment to read The Existentialist Republic/Christopher Armitage’s damning indictment of that last line of defence ought to disabuse them of that notion.
The trouble for us in Canada is that the Conservative leadership in particular is watching what is happening south of the border and, more importantly, observing the complete lack of consequence.
For their voters, ensuring that people poorer than themselves don’t get government “handouts” is more important than their own well-being or the honesty and integrity of those in power. That the rich get far more from the government than the poor is not recognised or acknowledged. The basic equality of people that underpins democracy is deliberately and consistently undermined in their divisive supremacy-based model.
Building on that, and the notion shared by many Conservative voters that “all politicians are corrupt,” the foundation of a future government absent all ethical inclination is clearly laid out for anyone who dares to look.
If 2025 has taught us anything, it is that the grifters are in control — and the kleptocrats are just getting started. In the words of Dark Helmet from the cult classic comedy Spaceballs, “evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
The question for us is: are we ready to turn the tide in 2026, reclaim democracy, and finally hold those who have undermined it so thoroughly to account?