Somewhere in America right now, a kid with a terminal illness is getting the best day of their life. A trip to Disney World. A locker room visit with their favorite team. A afternoon that costs some stranger money and asks for nothing back except a smile.
That is one of the most beautiful things human beings do for each other. Make-A-Wish and the organizations like it are sacred. Nobody should ever confuse what they do with anything I’m about to say.
Because there’s another grown man in this country getting every single wish granted too. He’s not sick. He’s not dying. He’s 80 years old, sitting in the most powerful office on earth, and every adult around him has decided their only job is to keep him happy, no matter what it costs the rest of us.
Let’s call it what it is. trump is not being governed by anyone, and he’s certainly not governing anyone either. He’s being granted wishes. One after another, with nobody around him willing to say the word no.
Start with the jet. Qatar handed him a 400 million dollar luxury plane, tricked out like a flying palace, and trump insisted, insisted, that it was a gift to the United States Air Force. Sure. Except he’s already told anyone who’ll listen that it’ll end up in his own presidential library when he’s done with it. Good luck to the Air Force trying to pry that thing out of a building he designed for himself. A gift to the country that somehow lands in his own museum. That’s not a donation, that’s a layaway plan.
Then there’s the crypto. His personal coin made him and his family billions of dollars while regular people, the kind who trusted the name on the wrapper, got wiped out. Billions for him. Wreckage for them. And nobody in Washington so much as raised an eyebrow, because raising an eyebrow isn’t in the job description anymore. The job description is: whatever he wants, he gets, and if regular Americans get hurt along the way, that’s just the cost of keeping him smiling.
Want your name slapped on the Kennedy Center without so much as a phone call to Congress? Sure, why not. Nobody tells him no.
Want to knock down part of the White House, the actual People’s House, to build yourself a giant gaudy ballroom that nobody asked for? Go right ahead. And when the price tag balloons past a billion dollars, sure, tell everyone it’s 100 percent privately funded while your people quietly work the phones trying to get taxpayers to cover half of it. Nobody tells him no.
Think about what that building actually represents. Presidents come and go, but the White House itself is supposed to belong to the country, not to whoever’s currently living in it. It survived a war with Britain. It’s hosted 45 presidencies before this one. And now part of it gets bulldozed because one man wanted a bigger party room than the last guy had. Nobody stopped to ask if the country wanted this. The country wasn’t consulted. The country just gets the bill, or half of it anyway, while being told it’s a gift.
This is the pattern. It’s not policy. It’s indulgence. Every single impulse this man has gets a yes. Every whim gets acted on like it’s a national emergency. It’s the exact energy of a room full of adults hovering around a child who’s been told he doesn’t have much time left, and everyone has quietly agreed among themselves that nothing is off limits anymore. Whatever gramps wants, gramps gets.
Except gramps isn’t dying. Gramps is thriving, richer than he’s ever been, and the only thing terminal here is the country’s patience.
Take the Knicks. New York had a thirteen game winning streak going into the playoffs, a city starving for its first championship since 1973, an entire fan base holding its breath. And trump decided that moment, a moment that had absolutely nothing to do with him, needed him in it. He showed up. He napped during the game. He left before it ended. And the Knicks lost. Their only loss of the entire run happened on the night he decided to make himself the story. He didn’t even care. He wasn’t even awake for most of it.
Anybody else in that building understood what was at stake. Grown men who’d waited their whole lives for this were white knuckling every possession. He slept through it like a man who’d already gotten what he came for, which was attention, and once he had it, the actual game stopped mattering.
Then watch what happens when foreign leaders walk into the Oval Office. Dignitaries and business executives from around the world have figured out exactly what this presidency requires of them. Not policy positions. Not trade terms. Flattery. They show up bearing gifts and heaping praise like they’re approaching a king from some medieval court, because that’s precisely what’s expected of them now. Say the nice things. Bow a little. Hand over something shiny. That’s the actual price of admission to a meeting with the President of the United States in 2026.
Nobody around him benefits from telling him the truth, so nobody does. Not his cabinet, who treat every meeting like an audition for who can praise him hardest. Not the leaders of his own party in Congress, who’ve traded their spines for committee assignments. Not the right wing media that’s supposed to be covering him instead of cheerleading for him. They’ve all made the same calculation, that indulging him costs them nothing and correcting him costs them everything, so they’ve settled into their roles as the world’s most well compensated yes men.
Somewhere down the hall from the Oval Office, there’s probably an actual adviser who understands how insane all of this looks from the outside. Somebody who knows the jet story doesn’t add up, who knows the ballroom math doesn’t add up, who knows a sitting president napping through a championship game he wasn’t invited to is not a good look. But that adviser also knows what happens to people who say so out loud. They get sidelined, or worse, they get tweeted about. So they stay quiet, smile in the photo, and let the wish get granted.
That’s the actual scandal here, not any single wish he’s granted himself, but the fact that an entire government, an entire party, and a good chunk of the media have organized themselves around the emotional management of one man’s ego. Billions in crypto. A 400 million dollar jet. A building named after him with zero oversight. A billion dollar ballroom nobody asked for. A basketball game he couldn’t leave alone. None of it happened because trump is powerful. It happened because everyone around him decided the path of least resistance was simply giving him whatever he wanted and hoping the rest of us wouldn’t notice the bill.
We noticed.
And here’s the part that should scare you more than any single wish granted. This isn’t a man asking for one last request. This is a man with three and a half more years of requests left, and an entire apparatus that has already proven it will say yes to every single one of them. There is no version of this where he wakes up satisfied. The wishes don’t stop. They escalate.
Real kids facing the end of their lives get one wish, and it’s usually something small and human, a trip, a hug from an athlete, a day where the world feels kind. This man gets infinite wishes, and every one of them costs the rest of us something. That’s the difference. That’s the whole article.
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QUESTIONS FOR THE COMMENTS
What’s the most outrageous “wish” trump has granted himself so far, and did anyone even try to stop it?
Who do you think is the biggest enabler right now: his cabinet, Congress, right wing media, or foreign leaders?
If trump got exactly one wish taken away tomorrow, which one would you pick?
The most egregious act, imho, was him suing the IRS, and ‘settling’ for $1.776 BILLION to pay off his insurrectionist buddies. He wants to pay them so he can incite another coup, and they learned from the first time how to make it more effective.
His destruction of the East Wing was unconscionable given that this is The People’s House. The cage fights on the White House lawn were unforgivable! Everything he touches turns to shit. His plans to build himself a number of new monuments is over the top outrageous. The fact that his Gestapo arrested a former Olympian for holding a piece of ripped pool liner is unthinkable. What was the question? I think both SCOTUS and Congress have gone to the dark side. Nobody is upholding Constitutional law. I suppose it is all about money, the root of all evil.