Trump Owns Us Because He Owes Us

That's how banks—and sins—work.

J. Paul Getty

If you owe the bank $100,000, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank.

(That’s from J. Paul Getty—the richest man in the world in 1957, with what would be $8.6 billion today. That’s two percent the net worth of today’s richest man.)

In Trump’s first term, he ran up the national debt by $7.8 trillion.

So-called “deficit hawks,” those old rock-ribbed Republicans who despise government spending and preach fiscal responsibility, were at first bothered. Then angry. And then—he ran it up too much!

As the world’s biggest debtor, Trump then owned them too, and the country.

Our country now owes twice as much as we heavily-indebted individual Americans owe in student loans, car loans, credit cards, and personal debts combined. Trump saddled every one of us with about about $23,500 in new federal debt.

As we groan under our collective debt, Trump fully “owns” the country, as literally a branded property. The platform Trump won on this year made no mention at all of the country’s debt burden. The Republican Party’s new indifference to debt marks the end of an era. “This isn’t top of mind,” said Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) in July. “It’s too painful.”

Just as it’s “too painful” for a bank to be owed $100 million. So it’s the bank that forfeits its existence to its biggest debtor.

Then there’s Trump himself, not Trump as manipulator and avatar of the federal coffers. Trump the man owes fully $2 billion—and counting—to both the people of the United States and the individuals he has prolifically harmed.

Rather than call in these debts, as we might have done by defeating him in November, we have forgiven them all at once. A jubilee when we made him President and immune! He’s now well, well beyond the reach of debt collectors and repo men.

In the Christian Bible, the words sin and debt are often used interchangeably. To restore the harmony between humanity and God—in whose fathomless debt humans forever are (as we are to nature, our families, and our fellows, in what is sometimes called “primordial debt”)—requires divine intervention. These debts can never be repaid in any human way.

In German, Schuld means “debt” as well as “offense” or “sin.” In French, devoir works the same way. In many languages, including this one, debts, like sins, are “forgiven”—or often not.