The Lincoln Logue | YouTube Pays Tribute to Trump & the Supreme Court Chips Away at Due Process
A government shutdown should be the headline — instead it’s the background noise.
If you were wondering what counts as governance, it includes inciting an insurrection and receving no punishment for doing so. YouTube, once the platform that muted Trump for inciting an insurrection, now cut him a $24.5 million check that mostly bankrolls his dream of a gaudy White House ballroom — democracy’s funeral catered with Google money. At Quantico, the commander-in-chief told a hall of generals that American cities should double as combat training zones, because nothing says freedom like using Detroit as a live-fire exercise. The job market lost 32,000 paychecks while the shutdown gagged the official data, leaving workers guessing and Wall Street sweating. The Supreme Court kept churning out rulings on its emergency docket, letting Trump’s policies take effect before anyone could blink, because apparently due process is too “woke.” By week’s end, Trump had frozen $26 billion for Democratic states, turning the shutdown into a political ransom note while federal workers mowed cemetery grass for free.
What ties it all together is the alchemy of grievance into power. Trump doesn’t need truth when repetition can baptize a lie. He doesn’t need functioning agencies when dysfunction is proof of his own necessity. He doesn’t need courts to rule on the merits when settlements and shadow dockets deliver faster wins. Chaos isn’t a bug in this system — it’s the business model. The destruction itself becomes the credential.
And so the state becomes a stage, every institution an unpaid extra in the one-man show. Tech companies fund the props, generals provide the uniforms, courts supply the scripts, and workers pick up the bill. Governance isn’t about outcomes anymore; it’s about applause lines. And the audience is forced to watch whether it buys a ticket or not.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let’s get into it.
Monday, September 29 — Trump’s $200 million Ballroom, Sponsored by YouTube
▌YouTube banned him for breaking democracy, now it’s helping pay for his stage.
YouTube coughed up $24.5 million to end Trump’s lawsuit over his 2021 suspension, transforming what was supposed to be accountability into a funding drive for his next vanity project. Of that haul, $22 million is earmarked for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom — a $200 million monument to excess that will outlast his presidency even if democracy doesn’t. The rest of the money trickles to his friends at CPAC and Naomi Wolf, proof that Trump never sues alone, only with a cast of professional grievance merchants. Google didn’t admit guilt, but the check they wrote speaks louder than any press release. A penalty for inciting violence has now become a down payment on chandeliers and catering space; the consequences of insurrection are catered dinners under gilded ceilings.
This is the MAGA twist on justice: Turn accountability into proof of persecution, persecution into lawsuits, and lawsuits into cash. Meta already financed his presidential library in Miami, X cut its check months ago, and now YouTube has bought its way out of the doghouse. Each case becomes a shakedown, with Trump cashing in on the same platforms that once banned him. He’ll call it vindication, spin it as proof that “the fake news” tech overlords admitted fault, and wave around the receipts as trophies. It’s not a settlement, it’s a tribute — the kind mob bosses collect when people know resistance is bad for business. Big Tech, for all its billion-dollar bluster, keeps lining up to pay protection money.
What makes it corrosive is not the payout but the precedent. If the companies that claimed to defend democracy against Trump’s lies are now financing his ballrooms, then democracy isn’t being defended at all — it’s being rented out by the hour. A suspension for undermining the republic has become a cash stream for staging his rallies inside it. Accountability has collapsed into enrichment, punishment into prestige, law into spectacle. Trump doesn’t survive crises; he metabolizes them into monuments. The courtroom that was supposed to restrain him is now underwriting his empire built on grievance and revenge.
Source: Reuters