Naps. Billionaires. Corruption. Misdirection. There’s a thread here.
Napping is in the news these days. Our president is often caught napping on camera. It first came to my attention during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial. Now it happens in the middle of meetings in the Oval Office. He came back from his third “annual” physical in 13 months at Walter Reed Military Medical Center last week and promptly fell asleep at a Cabinet meeting.
I’m actually okay with that. When he’s napping, he’s incapable of doing or saying something bonkers*, which seems to be his default position when he’s conscious.
Truth be told, I take a nap just about every afternoon. I find myself getting sluggish so I’ll set the timer for 25 minutes, turn off all the lights, put on some quiet meditative music, and fall off into slumberland. It is blissful, and I’m fortunate in this third stage of life to be able to indulge in some self care.
But you will note that I don’t have television camera lights shining on me as I nap. And no one—absolutely no one—thinks I should be president.
SLEEP IS VITAL
Babies cry themselves to sleep. Parents put a fussy toddler down for a nap with the expectation that they’ll be in a better mood when they wake up. Teenagers and young adults often resort to napping because they never seem to get enough rest.
Sleep in every stage of life is vital and for most of us naps are restorative. When I wake up from my power nap I am invariably refreshed. In a better mood. Able to jump back into life.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, however, that our napper-in-chief is never in a good mood. In public he always seems to be angry, condescending, vindictive, revengeful, mean. When he takes things that are not his to take, he does so because he thinks it is his right. When he is stopped or chastised, he lashes out. “It’s not illegal if the president does it” has never had such a workout as it is getting now in the courts of justice, much less in the court of public opinion.
Here’s a guy born on third base and yet life is so unfair. He’s always the victim. It’s never his fault.
Perhaps there’s something else going on besides lack of sleep.
PREDATORY PLUTOCRATS
Let’s pause to think about those “born on third base.” Many of the wealthy in our country, such as our president, don’t know any other form of life. They think they have earned those riches. Maybe they did. Most didn’t. But the larger question is at whose expense.
Two years ago Mother Jones magazine published a special edition entitled American Oligarchy. We think of oligarchs as Gilded Age tycoons or current-day Russians who built their fortunes on mineral extraction and transportation monopolies. As senior reporter Tim Murphy describes it, “This American oligarchy offers a twist on the pilfering of the commons that produced Russia’s. It is built on a different kind of resource, not nickel or potash, but you—your data, your attention, your money, your public square.”
Today’s American oligarchs are making billions and billions of dollars. And they are taking it from us. The American people.
A billion dollars is more money than anyone needs. Consider that $1 billion is 1,000 million. If you spent a million dollars a year, it would take you 1,000 years to spend all your money. And that’s not accounting for the rise in wealth that comes from investing.
I was at a dinner party recently when I made the statement that we don’t need billionaires. Some were surprised. But I suggested that even the “good” billionaires make money hand-over-fist in our rigged system in spite of the fact that they “do the right thing.”
MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, was worth approximately $38 billion after her divorce in 2019. Since then she has donated $26 billion to various charities according to a recent article in Forbes. Looking at what she’s supported, she’s one of the good ones. And yet, as she’s given away those billions and reduced her stake in Amazon (the source of her wealth) by about 42%, she’s still worth $42.7 billion today, more than on the day of her divorce settlement. From January to April of 2026, she’s added $2.35 billion to her net worth. In our system, she can’t give away her wealth fast enough to offset the gains in value.
And remember, most billionaires aren’t as good hearted and philanthropic as MacKenzie Scott. Most are only too happy to live in, benefit from, and further corrupt a broken system. As Mother Jones reported, many of our current robber barons began in or still remain active in the tech industry. Marietje Schaake wrote in the eye-opening book The Tech Coup, “I do not want to live in a world dictated by technology companies and their executives.” Tech leaders, it can be shown, “do not have the mandate or, frankly, the ethics necessary to govern so much of our societies.”
Let’s talk about that lack of ethics.
Journalist Paul Waldman points out that so much of what ails us today can be tied to corruption, and then he focuses on the current administration. The slush fund of $1.776 billion in taxpayer money that the president wants to use at his discretion to distribute to the violent thugs who tried to overthrow the government on January 6th is just the latest.
But there’s corruption in our current government everywhere you look. The administration is taking bribes from Middle Eastern countries and cashing in on crypto scams. The president’s son-in-law is drumming up business from Gulf governments while negotiating on behalf of the United States. Media companies are selling out to the administration. The FBI Director is getting “VIP snorkel” outings on the hallowed site of the U.S.S. Arizona. The Secretary of Transportation is making a reality show, funded by sponsorships from the companies he regulates.
“Tech companies are blanketing the country in data centers everybody hates. Trump is handing out pardons to fraudsters, building golden statues of himself, and slapping his name on government buildings. None of Jeffrey Epstein’s rich and powerful buddies have gone to jail.”
And Texas Republicans have just nominated someone for the senate whose career in political corruption, as another writer has noted, “would shame many of the most illustrious charlatans in American history.” And as the Puck cartoon shows, we’ve had some impressive charlatans in our past.
Sheesh.
A billion dollars is more money than anyone needs. When tied with the political corruption and the flow of money used to support politicians and systems that keep the wealthy from paying their fair share, the billionaires—good and bad—are taking advantage of a rigged system that is killing our democracy and our country.
TOO MUCH NAPPING IS NOT OUR PROBLEM
I don’t want to give naps a bad name. Naps have many benefits for the healthy adult. According to the National Sleep Foundation, when people napped around 30 minutes they had “better memory recall and superior overall cognition than both non-nappers and those who napped longer.” NASA tested the effects of power napping on astronauts and found it had an effective boost to performance and alertness.
But as is often the case with this administration, the media focuses on the wrong issues.
- They obsess over the naps instead of on the fact that our president acts like an autocrat mad with power.
- They talk about partisan warfare when what’s really happening is black disenfranchisement.
- They adopt the administration’s deceptive framing of the $1.8 billion slush fund instead of reporting that he’s blatantly stealing from you and me.
When the media focuses on the naps they are missing so much of the real story. The vengefulness as public policy. The turning over of critical government functions to unelected and unethical billionaires. The loss of America’s soft power around the globe. The war crimes. The cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The criminalization of immigration. The staffing of government with unethical and unqualified individuals. The corruption of the highest court in the land. The unprecedented looting of the public treasury by the most corrupt administration in American history.
Naps are good. I want us to continue taking naps. We’re going to need the energy to do the hard work to bring back a responsive government representative of all the people. To take back our country.
The famous first lines of Thomas Paine’s American Crisis—originally published in a bleak, dark winter 250 years ago—describe the challenges we have faced and surmounted and that we must still face and continue to conquer. We’ve been through difficult times before. But the actions of those who fought against tyranny—in the dismal winter of 1776, on the rolling farmland of Gettysburg, on the beaches at Normandy, on the streets of Birmingham, and in so many instances throughout our history—provide hope and a roadmap.
We can do hard things. But it certainly helps if we’ve taken a good power nap before we each make our unique contributions to the work to wrest power away from the oligarchs, tech bros, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and their foreign autocratic allies. As we work hard for justice and democracy.
Sweet dreams.
More to come . . .
DJB
*That’s a technical term. I could have said “to endanger the country or line his own pockets.”
Photo of napping child from Getty Images on Unsplash.
MORE TO COME... 