The United States of America, Inc (A modest proposal for a hedge-fund nation)

Salt Lake City, Utah

By Samuel K. Von Twain.

Well now, friends, it’s a curious thing about America — it’s the only country in the world that ever started out perfect and then worked diligently every single day to ruin itself. That’s progress for you. And wouldn’t you know it, we finally got ourselves a President who saw the problem clear as daylight: America wasn’t failing because of corruption, greed, or neglect. Oh no. It was failing because nobody had yet figured out how to make a killing off it properly.

Enter Donald J. Trump, President and CEO of The United States of America, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Donald J. Trump Organization, with minority stakes held by friendly billionaires, two Saudi princes, and a televangelist who once sold blessed garden hoses as a cure for gout.

Narrator’s note: If you think this is an exaggeration, you haven’t been paying attention. The truth is like a live chicken—pluck it and it’ll still run around headless for a while before it drops.

The business model was simple:

1. Acquire assets.
2. Sell to friends.
3. Call it patriotism.​

The National Parks — “America’s Best Idea,” bless ‘em — got their budget cut until the rangers had to rent out Yosemite for Monster Truck Week. The Department of Education was sent to live on a farm upstate where it could “run free,” which is to say it was shot in the back of the head. Renewable energy subsidies? Cut down to nothing, so coal could be brought back like it was an Elvis comeback special.

Narrator’s note: Coal is America’s nostalgia drug — it kills you, but it makes you feel like you’re in a simpler time when you knew who your enemies were and could cough without thinking about the air quality index.

Project 2025 was rolled out like a new chain of drive-thru brainwashing stations. The mission: sweep away all that bureaucratic “rule of law” nonsense and replace it with the good common sense of whoever had last spoken to the President on the golf course.

USAID? Gone. No sense sending money to poor foreigners when we had so many poor Americans who could be ignored much closer to home.
​
The Bureau of Labor Statistics? The head was fired after reporting an unemployment number that didn’t match the one the President had invented that morning. “Facts,” the President explained, “are like steaks — the rarer the better.”

And then there were the white evangelicals — God bless their untroubled minds. They were the preferred voting bloc because, as one strategist put it, “If the Lord told them the sky was plaid, they’d start knitting matching sweaters.”

Health care for the poor? Cut, because it only encouraged them to keep on living. Free speech protections for non-citizens? Ended. As the President said, “If you want free speech, you have to earn it — like my father did, when he inherited it.”

Masked and armed men with no identification began collecting immigrants — and a few unlucky citizens — right off the street. They didn’t bother with due process because that would mean paperwork, and paperwork meant the Department of Justice might have to admit it still existed.

Narrator’s note: People kept asking, “Isn’t this against the Constitution?” which is adorable. That’s like asking a wolf if it has a vegan option.

Universities were called “breeding grounds for enemies of the people,” so budgets were gutted, faculty were smeared, and any law firm defending such institutions was targeted for “special review” — which is to say they were sued into bankruptcy by legal teams paid in Trump steaks and casino vouchers.

The Epstein Files? Locked away. “For national security,” said the President, which is what every government says when the real reason is “because it would be embarrassing to me personally.”

He accused Barack Obama of treason so often that foreign leaders began to think “treason” was a kind of honorary title. Criminals were pardoned wholesale — provided they’d kissed the ring or had the good manners to commit crimes in the right ideological direction.

​Our religiously-inclined Supreme Court was the keystone investor. These robed market-makers had figured out that the Lord’s work could be done quite effectively by rubber-stamping the CEO’s mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers of the Constitution.

And through it all, the President lied. Constantly. Not the cute lies politicians tell to keep Grandma hopeful, but big lies, lies so loud and brazen they became part of the weather. People stopped fact-checking, the way you stop checking for rain when you already live underwater.

Narrator’s note: This, dear reader, is how a hedge fund works. You take something alive, you strip it for parts, you call it lean and efficient, and when it finally collapses, you say, “Well, it was failing before I got here.”

In the end, America became exactly what it had always secretly wanted to be: a brand. And like all brands, it was only as good as its last quarterly report. The stars on the flag were replaced with little gold dollar signs. And somewhere in a penthouse in Florida, the CEO smiled, knowing the merger was complete.

After all, The United States of America, Inc. had finally turned a profit — for the right people. And that, friends, is the only statistic that counts anymore.