Where Everybody Owns a Plane.

During Donald John Trump’s first term, I wrote part of a parody of the Cheers theme song. I never finished it or posted it. The title for this is the second line of the refrain (to match with “Sometimes you want to go / Where everybody knows your name…”). Here’s all I found in my records of that original effort:

I decided it needs reviving, given all the recent plane cabinet skulduggery going on:

1. President Donald John Trump: Trump administration officially accepts jet from Qatar for use as Air Force One
2. DHS Secretary Noem: ‘No expense has been spared’: Inside a luxury jet DHS wants to buy for deportations
3. FBI Director Patel: FBI Director Kash Patel takes agency jet to Italy, plans to attend Olympic hockey games, sources say

I’m sure there are others I missed. Back during that term, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price resigned over his scandalous spending of public funds on jet travel. (See “Tom Price (American politician)”, which has a section on that.)

This phenomenon helps us to further understand the rich and powerful, something worth thinking about. (See “Wealth-Brain” for some of my previous thoughts.) Both the first cabinet and this cabinet have included some super-wealthy people, with this one including Bessent (Treasury), Burgum (Interior), Loeffler (Small Business Administration), Lutnick (Commerce), McMahon (Education), and Oz (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services).

The less super-wealthy among the cabinet surely feel they must measure-up to the mile-high club. There are several reports on their attempts to raise their own profiles, and not in the typical politician-runs-from-the-cabinet way. The FBI director getting his brew on with Team USA in their locker room. The director of national intelligence turning up way out of place for a search warrant on a state facility in Georgia. The secretary of Homeland Security staging a fancy-wristwatch photo op at a prison in El Salvador.

These are people high on high-office. They are snorting paperwork and spiking their arms with the sweat of the taxpayer’s brow. They are high-on-the-hog junkies, following the lead of the posterboy of the dumb-rich, their dear leader.

Most of us are smart enough to realize the stupidities these member of the cabinet exhibit. Elbowing your way into a trip to the Olympics is not kosher. Buying your dream plane so you can pretend to be a bigshot gets in the way of your real responsibilities of office, thwarts your oath.

But it’s not like the cabinet is the only place this behavior comes out. Former governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, eventually resigned because it came out he sent a helicopter to retrieve his wallet that he had left behind! Meanwhile the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security allegedly tried to have her pilot fired for leaving her blankie behind. As of now she still holds her job.

While all these rich and pretend-rich idiots in the cabinet of Donald John Trump deserve to be canned, what America really needs is to remember the line. We don’t want to go where everybody owns (or rents or misappropriates) a plane. The kinds of people who cannot control themselves in the face of a potential airplane joyride are the kinds of people that should not hold office. That’s whether they pay for the plane or use our money to pay for it or if it’s a bribe from Qatar. There’s a line, and we want people with enough sense to stay on our side of it.