The question has arisen among sane people again and again over the last ten years: Who are these people?
I think I know. They’re yabbos, best described by what they are not. They’re not men. They’re not women. They are human beings, but only in the barest sense that they are of flesh and blood. Some examples are necessary. Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, who during the same week it became known that there will not be money for SNAP food assistance for poor people, decided that she would use taxpayer money to buy two ultra-luxurious Gulfstream jets for her department that cost $172 million. She’s not a woman. She’s a yabbo.
Meet Paul Ingrassia. He’s not a man. When he nominated Ingrassia to run the Office of Special Counsel, Donald Trump described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” Ingrassia withdrew his name from the Senate confirmation process this week when it became known that he had texted on a Republican group chat, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time,” and that the Martin Luther King holiday should “be tossed into the seventh circle of hell.” Paul Ingrassia, who still has a job in the White House, is a yabbo.
Who says that kind of stuff? Who called Black people “monkeys” and “watermelon people” and praised those who believe in slavery as a group of Young Republicans recently did in yet another group text? Yabbos, that’s who.
How else do you describe the people behind what is going on in this country right now? Their Maximum Leader, the yabbo who goes by Donald Trump, tore down the East Wing of the White House last week. I mean, the ground where it stood is now a level patch of dirt and the dust and dregs of construction debris. He intends to build in its place a monstrosity which he already calls the “Donald J. Trump Ballroom.” The thing, which has a footprint larger than the entirety of the rest of the White House, will seat 1,000 people and is shown in an architect’s rendering as festooned in gold leaf and marble and crystal chandeliers. He broke multiple laws when he leveled the East Wing. He did not seek Congressional approval and funding, as other presidents have done when they did renovations to the White House. Instead, he is paying for his Towering Tomfoolery with donations from billionaires whose companies do business with the U.S. government and who seek favor with Trump. For this, and many, many other reasons, he is a yabbo.
We have never, in this country, had National Guard soldiers from one state deployed to the streets of a city in another state against the wishes of that state’s governor and the city’s mayor, as Donald Trump is attempting to do with soldiers from Texas and other red states to the cities of Portland and Chicago, both of which have Democrats for mayors. Who does this? A Republican yabbo.
Are all yabbos Republicans? That is a good question. Has the Democratic Party ever had a president in office who took $130 million from one of his political supporters allegedly to “pay the troops” during a government shut down? In fact, this has never happened before, a civilian “donating” money to the government and dictating how that money should be used.
Has the Democratic Party ever elected a president who took upon himself the power to use drones and jet aircraft to shoot boats out of the water on his own say-so that they were carrying drugs that would “kill 25,000 Americans?”
Has a Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives ever refused to seat a member who was duly elected by the constituents of her district simply because if that member is seated, she will vote in a way that is unfavorable to the yabbo into whose ass the Speaker of the House has his nose inserted?
That has never happened. So much has never happened. Has a president, Democratic or Republican, ever unilaterally shut down an entire department of the United States government without Congressional authorization in the way Donald Trump shut down USAID? Remember what they did about two or three days after Trump was inaugurated? They dispatched a couple of workers with crowbars and screwdrivers and chisels and removed the words, United States Agency for International Development, from its headquarters building. Then they used U.S. Marshalls to keep the people who work there from entering the building.
We’ve forgotten so many terrible things that have transpired, because new terrible things, like the East Wing teardown have come along to replace them. I remember thinking when I saw the footage of the workers chiseling the name of the headquarters of USAID from its building that this was a terrible omen. It predicted something frightening: a Donald Trump unleashed from law and order and norms.
And that is where he went, and it’s where he has been throughout the first nine months of his presidency. Every day, something new and terrible happens. He has had cabinet meetings that resemble nothing less than a meeting of the North Korean politburo. So-called “leaders” of government agencies, one after another, rise from their places around the cabinet table and heap praise on the Yabbo In Chief. He is the greatest president who ever lived. He is brilliant. He is a God on earth. On and on they go. I wondered how otherwise apparently sane human beings such as Marco Rubio said those things to a man for whom he showed such contempt only a few years ago, and then I realized that it’s not Marco Rubio sitting at that cabinet table. It’s a yabbo.
That display two weeks ago when some 800 generals and admirals were forced to fly from their commands in distant lands to Quantico, Virginia, and sit there to be lectured by a strutting fool whom they all knew had tattooed Nazi symbols on his own body…those generals and admirals were not observing and listening to a man, they were in the presence of a yabbo, and it was all over their faces that they knew this.
One of the salient aspects of what we might call yabbodom is disrespect for precedent and norms of the law. The human beings who wrote the Constitution foresaw a country that would be governed by the set of laws they wrote down as a blueprint for a nation. Integral to that document, and to the intentions of the Founders, was the idea that the laws and norms written into the Constitution would be respected by leaders of the Executive and the Congress and the Judiciary established by the Constitution.
The Founders hoped that this would be the way a nation keeps itself going. You write laws, and you honor them, and you hold elections called for by the laws, and you respect the offices to which you have been entrusted, and you hold onto all of it because it is what establishes and keeps your legitimacy. The key to all of it, to keeping the Democratic Republic that has been established, is honoring the laws and holding tight to what they compel the branches of the government to do.
This has not happened. The Republican Party has appointed and confirmed members of the Supreme Court who have decided that laws which have been written by the Congress, and decisions that have been passed by previous Supreme Courts, can be ignored or changed at will. This has created chaos. There is now chaos in the land regarding women’s reproductive health and the way decisions are made to keep women healthy. There is chaos in the land about the right to vote, the most precious right conveyed upon citizens by the Constitution. There is chaos in the law because we have a president who has taken it upon himself to decide who must follow the law, and who is permitted to break the law.
This is why I believe that yabbos are now in charge. Donald Trump has decided that laws that were enforced by the previous president, Joe Biden, will not be enforced under his rule. He pardoned every one of the thousand-plus insurgents who were convicted of crimes for what they did on January 6, 2021, even the ones who beat and caused the death of police officers. Some of those who Trump freed have committed new crimes and have been charged and jailed and are headed back to prison.
He freed the man who was convicted and sentenced to a lifetime in prison for running the so-called “dark web” that provided a way to finance drug dealing and murder and other criminal activity.
He recently pardoned a crypto criminal who was convicted of running an enterprise that financed terrorism and the making and distribution of child porn. This man, the head of a company called Binance, used so-called “stable coins” produced by the Trump family crypto company called Liberty Financial to invest his own company’s holdings in bitcoin, yielding huge profits for Trump’s company.
This was a bribe. It is all the evidence we need that Donald Trump has decided that bribing him is legal, but possibly bribing someone else is illegal.
Trump has either frozen or cancelled some $28 billion that was scheduled to be spent on projects in states, cities, and counties run by Democrats. Among the projects is the new rail tunnel from Manhattan to New Jersey under the Hudson River. It has long been understood that so-called blue states run by and inhabited by Democrats contribute far more in tax dollars to the government than they receive in government benefits. Red states that produce less tax revenue are the beneficiaries of those blue state tax dollars. This was an odd but generally acceptable state of affairs until Donald Trump decided that the blue states will not be permitted to benefit from their own tax dollars, creating a vassal system of taxation without representation, yet another break with the democratic norms of the past.
Abandonment of laws and norms is not democracy. It mocks the Constitution and the principles upon which the country was founded. Men and women who are sane and who believe in the rule of law do not do this.
Who are these people, we have asked ourselves. They are not of the world we have known. They do not believe in the things citizens of a democracy believe in. We now live in a yabbocracy overseen by thieves for whom the rule of law that has held this country together for 249 years no longer exists. They are yabbos.




