Jonathan P. Baird

Corruption is often defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. Whatever their other faults, American presidents have not historically used their office as a vehicle to accumulate personal wealth. There is a tradition of presidents disclosing their taxes and then putting their assets into a blind trust. The idea was consistent with the notion the presidency is about public service.

Like other authoritarians, Donald Trump moves to the beat of a different drummer and right from the start he has demonstrated a drive for personal enrichment. This is one president who, last time and this time, has shamelessly used the presidency for the pursuit of maximizing his own wealth. His middle initial should not be J. It should be G. for Grift.

During the campaign it was like he was selling everything that was not nailed down. Just stick a Trump branding name on a product. Take your pick – gold high top sneakers, $199 Trump cologne, $100,000 18-karat gold watches, ultra MAGA gold golf balls or Trump bibles. In his golden age of hype, it appears there is almost nothing he would not sell.

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics found 168 new products on trumpstore.com since November. You can get a $200 MAGA victory blanket, a $30 inauguration seal coffee mug or a $550 “Trump 45-47” Bling Clutch. The Trump store is run by Trump organization and it puts millions in the President’s pocket. So much for not turning the presidency into a profit-making business.

The weekend before the inauguration, Trump released meme coins named after himself and his wife. The meme coins, $Trump and $Melania, are crypto tokens. They perfectly reflect the scam nature of MAGA. A meme coin has no intrinsic value. They are usually based on an internet joke, a product of hype and shared delusion. They reflect and make use of a celebrity’s image.

People make money riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading. Value is highly volatile. Meme coins are used for crypto “pump and dumps”. Investors can use social media to push a profile causing a surge in value. That can allow insiders to sell making quick profit before the price falls. If this sounds sleazy, you got it. As Jacob Silverman has written, it is a bunch of insiders self-dealing fake money and dumping it on the public.

The Friday before his inauguration, the value of $Trump spiked as high as $72.62. 80% of the tokens were allocated to insiders. Trump owned an estimated 800 million of the new $Trump coins blowing up his fortune. On the day of his inauguration, Trump announced the $Melania coin which had a quick rise and fall. By Tuesday, the day after the inauguration, Trump’s own coin value went down to $38. It is hard to think the values offered mean anything but Axios reported the coin had made Trump $56.6 billion on paper.

This art of the deal is about taking something worthless, making easy money and selling before the price crashes. It is about bleeding suckers dry. Just like in everything, there will be losers, likely low level MAGA diehards who bought into what they thought was a get-rich-quick sure thing. Lawsuits about meme coin cheating are an almost certain likelihood.

Trump did a turnaround in his attitude toward crypto when he saw it could be a personal money-maker. He said his sons opened his eyes. Don Jr. and Eric launched their own crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Trump now says he plans to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the planet” and a “bitcoin superpower’.

As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has written corruption is a process as well as a set of practices. In her book, Strongmen, she wrote:

“They turn the economy into an instrument of leader wealth creation, but also encourage changes in ethical and behavioral norms to make things that were illegal or immoral appear acceptable, whether election fraud, torture or sexual assault,”

The legal questions raised by Trump’s behavior abound. There are massive conflicts of interest and securities fraud issues. Trump is seeking to gain while being obligated to regulate. Non-disclosure and de-regulation are his way. The ethics expert, Norm Eisen calls the meme coins “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency”.

Those seeking favors or policy change can buy the $Trump meme coin. This becomes particularly problematic considering the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The Constitution bars federal office holders from receiving payments from foreign governments. Foreign governments can buy the $Trump meme coin and raise its value. No one is policing this activity. It is like the Trump administration is successfully pretending the emoluments clause doesn’t exist. Who will stop foreign governments from giving Trump money in the scheme? It would appear no one.

The proliferation of meme coins would also appear to be the issuance of unlicensed securities opening the door to securities fraud but Trump has replaced the SEC Chair with a crypto currency advocate. The new Chair is likely to take the position that no crypto currency is a security. This is essentially putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. I would expect we will see much defrauding of investors as insiders “pump and dump”.

Last year, House Democrats released evidence that showed Trump accepted $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his first term. He used Trump properties such as Mar-a-Lago and Trump International Hotel in Washington DC for fundraising events and meetings with foreign heads of state. He turned the office of the presidency into a vendor of his own brand.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s transition team submitted an ethics pledge that doesn’t require him to address potential conflicts of interest. Trump’s return is both a shady cash grab and a statement about the end of accountability and ethical standards in government. It is entirely fitting that Trump fired inspector generals from more than a dozen federal agencies. They have been the watchdogs for uncovering fraud and abuse. Trump failed to give Congress the 30 day notice required by law nor did he provide substantive rationale which is also required by law. This is what one would expect from a convicted felon.

Long before the super-fire that has devastated whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles, climate scientists had issued dire warnings about the dangers of climate change. Really the warnings go back decades for anyone who was listening.

I remember when I was in college in the early 1970’s. I was in a seminar class titled The Literature of Expanded Consciousness and we had dinner with the West Coast poet Gary Snyder. He warned about the harm from fossil fuels and that was more than 50 years ago. Then there was NASA scientist James Hansen, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. In considering the L.A. wildfire, it is impossible not to be struck by our climate change denialism.

Every massive environmental disaster is seen as an isolated event. There is an unwillingness to connect the dots. Donald Trump’s tweets blaming Governor Gavin Newsom of California are a good illustration. Instead of any effort to understand the L.A. wildfire and place it in context, there is a cheap shot blaming effort. Much of the Right is absurdly blaming Diversity Equity and Inclusion, like that had anything to do with it.

There is a climate emergency going on now. It is not something in the future. It is happening in red states and blue states. Both parties bear blame for ignoring it and both have failed to respond. When the L.A. fire happened, I thought of the August 2023 Lahaina wildfire in Maui. Then I thought of all the other wildfires on the West Coast and Western Canada in recent years.

Because we forget so fast, I would mention the summer of 2017 that was a summer of fire. In her book On Fire, Naomi Klein described how 1800 square miles of forest, farm and grassland burned in British Columbia forcing 50,000 people to evacuate their homes. Then there was the fire in November 2018 in Paradise California, a town of 27,000, that was razed to the ground.

In 2020, over 8100 fires contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of California land. About 75% of California’s most destructive wildfires measured in terms of structures burned, have occurred since 2015. Just the number of fires has been overwhelming. It is hard not to think we are trying to forget.

Historically, California experienced wildfires in June and July but climate change has increased the frequency, season length and burned area of wildfires. The combination of tinder-dry conditions, almost no rain for the last six months and very high hot winds created the inferno in L.A. Two rainy winters promoted the growth of brush but it was followed by near-zero rainfall for an extended period. Conditions were beyond ripe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported that evidence for dangerous fire weather conditions linked to human-caused climate change is strongest in regions like the western U.S. and southeastern Australia. The area of heightened wildfire risk has increased with higher levels of warming. It is entirely predictable that the warmer the planet gets, the more frequent and extreme wildfires will become and that is what we are seeing. When forests burn they will release vast amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere which only accelerates warming.

The California writer, the late Mike Davis, studied disasters, especially in L.A..Many years ago he made the case that the dry hills surrounding L.A., running from Pasadena to Malibu, will regularly ignite when the Santa Ana winds blow. He critiqued the building of so many homes in the hills knowing what was likely to happen. Davis wrote:

“The fires are like gun violence. You always get the same mechanical repetition of action, but nothing changes at the root.”

I would say the root is our continuing failure to stop our reliance on burning fossil fuels. Every year that we fail to deliver the required reduction in emissions, the rate of future cuts required in the following year increases. But we pretend there is no climate emergency.

The problem we have is unregulated capitalism. Fossil fuel companies knew about climate change as far back as the 1970’s. Bill McKibben writes that even back then ExxonMobil scientists predicted with great accuracy how much the temperature would rise by 2020. He says they started building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea levels they knew was coming.

However, instead of explaining and publicizing the science, they hired a small army of public relations experts to sow doubt. Their mission was delay in the service of maximizing profit for themselves. This is the logic of short-term thinking and the capitalist marketplace.

Now we face a new administration where, in the face of indisputable evidence, Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax and where he repeatedly says, “drill baby drill”. The insanity of that is palpable. It is like driving off a cliff. It is the equivalent of injecting poison into your body. It is worse than stupid. It is pathologically self-destructive and suicidal.

When the climate disasters start happening under his presidency, let’s see who Trump blames. Will he blame red state governors when the next mega-fire or flood happens in a red state? Will he blame budget cuts or DEI? Will he make aid contingent on whether he won the state in 2024 in the last election? We know he will blame everyone but himself. And, of course, he won’t blame climate change.

I am persuaded that no state is safe. Look at Montpelier or Asheville. Where is the snow cover in New Hampshire this winter? Not enough for cross country skiing from what I can see. We are fortunate to live in a northern clime though. The L.A. fire is a likely model of what we will see more in many locales, especially in the western U.S. I expect large portions of the South will become too hot to live in. Within the next twenty years, I would expect a new exodus to the north as people seek more habitable climes. Humans cannot live in 120 degree temperatures.

We must stop sleepwalking into climate apocalypse.

In a little-discussed move, on December 17, outgoing Governor Chris Sununu withdrew the nomination of Mindy Atwood to be New Hampshire State Librarian. He said he would leave the decision of who would be State Librarian to the new governor, Kelly Ayotte.

Sununu’s decision reeked of the political cowardice that is typical of Republicans in 2025. They are usually bowing to Trump no matter how outrageous his behavior but in this situation Sununu caved to pressure from the Christian right not to select Atwood. Nothing could be less libertarian or in keeping with the best New Hampshire values.

Sununu was responding to objections centered on Atwood’s advocacy against book censorship. Why aren’t libertarians up in arms about free expression and students’ rights to read? Why do students need censors from the government? Can’t students decide what they want to read without “protection”?

When Atwood applied for the job she wrote: “I deeply believe in the mission of public libraries to provide free and equal access to public information for everyone”. Atwood is entirely qualified for the position of State Librarian. She is the former Director of Abbott/Sunapee Library and for the last two years she was the Administrator of Library Operations at the New Hampshire State Library. She is widely supported by librarians around New Hampshire.

So why did Sununu yank her nomination? To the extent any reason was presented, we heard there was opposition from far right Executive Councilor David Wheeler (R-Milford). Sununu apparently believed the Executive Council wouldn’t support Atwood. Wheeler had said Atwood was “too woke” and was quoted on NHPR saying that Atwood had given presentations on behalf of regional and national library associations challenging censorship. How wild! A librarian who opposed censorship! Wheeler said:

“It was her involvement and the state library’s involvement in opposing parents from keeping their kids from seeing pornography in libraries. She was fighting parents to have any type of choice over what the kids can see.”

This has a very familiar ring to it. It sounds exactly like what the group Moms for Liberty was up to in Florida. They were about protecting students from material they deemed “inappropriate”. In the case of Mindy Atwood it was not about any particular books she favored for inclusion in libraries, including anything categorized as pornography. The retiring state librarian, Michael York, has pointed out that under New Hampshire state law, the State Librarian has no authority over what materials schools and libraries acquire and provide.

We need to see the larger context of the effort to stop people like Mindy Atwood from being State Librarian. Looking around, it is not hard to decipher. Lurking out of sight, Christian nationalists favor book banning and not just of books they deem pornography. They are overwhelmingly preoccupied with sexual order and with opposing LGBTQ books. They have consistently tried to ban books that included characters of color that featured themes of race and racism.

The Christian nationalists are modern-day Anthony Comstocks. They favor promoting a particular variant of Christianity and they see themselves as fighting for salvation against the forces of darkness. They have a cherry-picked narrow-minded perspective masquerading as a biblical worldview. Fundamentally, they are about inserting reactionary religion into public schools. While many see them as a cultural force opposing abortion and same-sex marriage, I see the Christian nationalists as a political movement. They have created a fictionalized version of American history based on the myth that America was founded as a Christian nation. They don’t support pluralistic democracy.

Rescinding Mindy Atwood’s nomination should not be seen as an isolated event. It fits in a national book banning narrative. Book banners have become increasingly active across the country. PEN America, a non-profit that supports freedom of expression in literature, reported 3,362 book bans affecting 1,557 unique titles in the 2022-23 school year. Its newest data, released in November 2024, showed the number of book bans skyrocketed to over 10,000 in the 2023-2024 school year, with Florida and Iowa accounting for over 8,000 of them.

The conflict between secular Enlightenment values and fundamentalist religion goes back to America’s beginnings and it continues. As a mainstream librarian, Atwood reflects the secular side of the conflict. Fundamentalism doesn’t adapt to any secular knowledge that conflicts with its brand of revealed religious truth. Free expression and the right to read widely and freely will never be tolerated by the Christian nationalists. They are control freaks.

Being from New England and being inheritors of the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson, it is appropriate that we are sensitive to the anti-intellectualism embedded in Atwood’s rejection. What pornography are the Christian nationalists assuming Atwood would allow? Is is a passage from Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, or E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey? Is it Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe or All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson? Those last two are among the most challenged and banned books.

Inevitably, the censoring is subjective. One person’s pornography is another person’s literature. Maybe it is just me but when I was a kid, I would have wanted to read anything forbidden. That would have catapulted to the top of what I wanted to read.

It is worth pointing out that there is little evidence showing a relationship between reading edgy books and negative outcomes. Protecting the right to read is not anti-parent. I would worry that we would have a few parents with a certain world view determining whether or not books could be available in the library.

There is no good reason why Governor Ayotte could not re-nominate Mindy Atwood to be State Librarian. As noted, she has all the qualifications. The reasons given for rescinding her nomination are lame.

Like many Bob Dylan fans, I ran out on New Years’ Day to see the new movie, A Complete Unknown. What impressed me about the movie was how well it captured that time in the early 1960’s when America’s old culture was coming apart and something new was being born.

The movie is a period piece. It takes place between the somnolent 1950’s and the birth of the counterculture. Dylan was more in flux than ever then, moving from acoustic folkie playing protest songs to his new electric incarnation.

That folkie time was best captured by his album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. That is the album with the picture of him and his girlfriend Suzy Rotolo on the cover. It was one of the first albums I ever bought. It was vinyl, 33 rpm. I listened to it so many times. I had a tiny record player that was like a little suitcase. It was a prize possession. It played 45’s and 33’s. I listened away from my parents, in the privacy of my bedroom.

It is amazing how many great songs were on that album. Although it was Dylan’s second album, it was his first that featured his own original songs. Eleven of the thirteen songs were Dylan originals. They included “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, “Girl from the North Country”, “Masters of War, and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. Also on it was the masterpiece “Blowin in the Wind”.

The movie does a good job of placing the songs in a context that gave them more meaning. Of course, Bob was always enigmatic, the riddle who could not be reduced to any agenda. Still, the protest songs on the Freewheelin’ album had lasting power. Consider the start of “Masters of War”:

“Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.”

Those lyrics could be about now but they were written near the time of the Cuban missile crisis when the danger of nuclear war was frighteningly close. Dylan has a funny take on it though. In Talking World War III Blues, he wrote:

“Well the whole thing started at 3 o’clock fast
It was all over by quarter past
I was down in the sewer with some little lover
When I peeked out from a manhole cover
Wondering who turned the lights on…

Well I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell
“Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man”
A shotgun fired and away I ran
I don’t blame them too much though, I know I look funny”

Even on nuclear war, Dylan had his own original spin. He grew to hate that anyone looked at him as any kind of leader or protest icon. In his memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, he made that so clear. The movie transmits the tension between the Dylan the folk movement wanted him to be and the Bob that was emerging.

Bob cultivated a sense of mystery about himself. The same person who wrote George Jackson could also sell Chryslers at the Super Bowl. He was not on anyone’s bandwagon. Dylan prided himself on being eclectic. In Chronicles, he mentions influences: the wrester Gorgeous George, Joe Hill, Picasso, Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland.

The Woody Guthrie connection is developed in the movie. Dylan goes to visit Woody in New Jersey where he was institutionalized suffering from Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition. Bob sings “Song to Woody” a song he wrote. Because of his condition, Woody can’t speak but he pounds the wall, in appreciation I thought.

Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, both played superbly by Ed Norton and Monica Barbaro, perform very helpful roles in advancing Dylan’s career but they also can’t handle Dylan’s break when he goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. They both seem in awe of Dylan’s genius but entirely frustrated at his evolution

Dylan, who is extremely well played by Timothee Chalamet, comes off as a self-absorbed jerk. In the movie, his romantic relationships are disasters and he appears to care little for either Baez or his other main girlfriend Suzy Rotolo , called Sylvie Russo, in the movie. Baez calls him “kind of an asshole” and at one point gives him the finger. As portrayed in the movie, Bob’s relationships were erratic, impulsive, and selfishly inconsistent.

One truly impressive thing about the movie was that Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro all sang the songs and played the instruments when they performed. Norton especially captured Pete Seeger bringing out Pete’s moral integrity, his bravery, his helpfulness as well as his being square.

When the movie had Dylan singing “The Times They Are A’Changin, you could feel the urgency of the 1960’s busting through. The Eisenhower 1950’s were being left behind. One of the lesser-known tracks on the Freewheelin’ album was “Oxford Town”, a song about James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss. Dylan wrote:

“He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town..

Oxford Town in the afternoon
Everybody singing a sorrowful tune
Two men died neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon.”

Dylan was inextricably connected to the 60’s even if as an unwilling symbol. Like other folkies, he connected to the struggle for racial justice. Oxford Town was not a one-off. Think “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Hurricane”.

America has periods where it is like any sense of morality goes to sleep. As we enter a time of darkness and suppression of the struggle against racism, we need Bob’s anti-authoritarian energy for the fight back against racism and fascism.