While the shebeen was closed for the holidays, there was no lack of frenzied insanity among the staffers of Camp Runamuck down in Manhattan. For example, with our Thanksgiving leftovers, we had to digest the notion that the Secret Service may have to pay rent to the president for the privilege of guarding the president and the First Family in the president's own building. I covered the Massachusetts Legislature for almost five years and I can tell you that none of the gombeen men elected thereto ever tried to pull so obvious a scam. I don't think it's asking too much to let the guys who will take a bullet for your sorry ass live rent-free in your building.

Meanwhile, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago nominated for Secretary of Education a person named Betsy DeVos, who has no experience in public education at all except a lifelong devotion to using Amway profits to destroy it, and who is a perfect product of the money power, as Jane Mayer illustrated in The New Yorker. In terms of the damage that can be done to helpless people, this is the worst hire so far. Also, she's a theocratic, homophobic loon.

Members of the family, including Betsy and Dick DeVos, have spent heavily in opposition to same-sex-marriage laws in several states. According to the Michigan L.G.B.T. publication PrideSource.com, Devos and her husband led the successful campaign to pass an anti-gay-marriage ballot referendum in the state in 2004, contributing more than two hundred thousand dollars to the effort. Dick Devos reportedly gave a hundred thousand dollars, in 2008, to an amendment that banned same-sex marriage in Florida. That year, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Betsy Devos's mother, was a major contributor to the effort to pass Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.

Sorry, Heather. Jesus says you have to give up one mommy.

But the real outbreak in the Chronic ward of the camp infirmary didn't happen until the weekend. For starters, when it became public that the president-elect was flirting with the notion of hiring Willard Romney to be Secretary of State, the poo was in the air almost immediately and from every direction. Most prominent among the flingers was Kellyanne Conway, who went on CNN and excoriated Romney for all the mean stuff he'd said about El Caudillo during the campaign.

"I'm all for party unity, but I'm not sure we have to pay for that with the secretary of state position," Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager, told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union." She added: "It's just breathtaking in scope and intensity the type of messages I've received from all over the country ... the number of people who feel betrayed to think that Gov. Romney would get the most prominent Cabinet post after he went so far out of his way to hurt Donald Trump."

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I think this is a remarkably ungracious thing to say about a guy who is willing to demonstrate once again that he is utterly without political principles by coming to work for your boss. (Trump is said to be beside himself at Conway's comments. That's one too many, for sure.) My guess? Kellyanne knows she's going to be aced out of influence when Camp Runamuck relocates to Pennsylvania Avenue, so she's signaling to her old friends in the movement that she'd like a gig in 2020. It's a living, I guess.

We also learned from The Boston Globe that Steve Bannon was handsome and a lot of fun at parties during his days at Harvard Business School. (Alas, two days later, we learned from The New York Times that he's pretty much the same racist barbarian we thought he was. Populist, my Aunt Fanny.) But the piece de idiote came on Sunday from the president-elect his own self, who clearly has become unhinged at the notion that he lost the popular vote, and pretty damned substantially at that. The Tweetstorm broke at dusk on Sunday. Dumbassery was general, all over America. The Washington Post has the play-by-play.

Phillips claims in another tweet that his organization (it's not clear which organization, but it may be True the Vote) has a database of 180 million voter registrations and he confirms that 3 million of the people in that database who voted are noncitizens. He has been asked to provide evidence for that claim repeatedly, without having done so. Update: On Monday morning, True the Vote released a statement about Trump's tweet. It very carefully doesn't repeat Phillips' claim, but says instead that the "election integrity" organization "absolutely supports President-elect Trump's recent comment about the impact of illegal voting." Regardless, the story was quickly picked up by the conspiracy-theory hawking site InfoWars, a story that was linked out at the top of the Drudge Report on Nov. 14.

In short, the president-elect of the United States is trafficking in nonsense dredged up from the deepest and most feverish mudholes of the fever swamp. This, of course, set off the usual chin-stroking from various media outlets over whether this kind of public tantrum is a measure of how unstable the candidate is—hint: it is—or whether it's a calculated distraction from the stories that are now emerging about how the president-elect plans to sell off the Republic piecemeal, like the one in The New York Times about the obvious conflicts-of-interests he has around the world. Some conflicts of interest are mere schoolyard punch-ups. Trump's are the last days at Passchendaele.

But a review by The Times of these business dealings identified a menu of the kinds of complications that could create a running source of controversy for Mr. Trump, as well as tensions between his priorities as president and the needs and objectives of his companies. In Brazil, for example, the beachfront Trump Hotel Rio de Janeiro — one of Mr. Trump's many branding deals, in which he does not have an equity stake — is part of a broad investigation by a federal prosecutor who is examining whether illicit commissions and bribes resulted in apparent favoritism by two pension funds that invested in the project. Several of Mr. Trump's real estate ventures in India — where he has more projects underway than in any location outside North America — are being built through companies with family ties to India's most important political party. This makes it more likely that Indian government officials will do special favors benefiting Mr. Trump's projects, including pressuring state-owned banks to extend favorable loans.

(And, yes, I too was struck by the notion that this kind of six-byline deep dive would have been helpful sometime prior to November 8, maybe on one of those days that didn't call for seven stories on Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mail server. Then I remembered that the NYT has sort of a history of burying damaging stories about Republican politicians so as not to "influence" the election.)

This argument is silly. The binding thread of all of this is corruption.

The tweets, and the paranoid maunderings on which they are based, represent deep intellectual corruption, as well as the corruption of the public dialogue on important issues. The Times story represents the more conventional, quantifiable corruption that occurs when unprincipled scoundrels arrive at the intersection of money and power. The endless public infighting among the people who allegedly are trying to construct the next executive branch of government represents that political corruption that always arises when we hand the levers of power over to incompetents whose animating political energy is an abiding contempt for the institution over which they have come to preside. Corruption is corruption is corruption. Its different manifestations feed off each other. Its practitioners profit off of it. Its victims simply see its omnipresence and give up trying to fight it.

There hasn't been an authoritarian government in my lifetime—from the left or from the right—that didn't exist because of one or more forms of corruption. Welcome to the New World Order. You'll find the snake oil in Aisle 5.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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