Mar-a-Lago is a health hazard. Close it down already

This is what would happen if the club were not owned by Trump, and did not cater to the Palm Beach “socialite” class, a particularly parasitic collection of people who either lucked or cheated their way into money, and who now spend large quantities of their time being seen rather than, say, doing anything that would benefit any other human being to even the slightest extent. They seem bent on proving to the rest of the nation that the rich are, indeed, absolutely useless, while protecting themselves from would-be revolution primarily by injecting themselves with enough Botox to render themselves inedible.

The message of Mar-a-Lago is the same message Trump spreads everywhere he goes. The wealthy are allowed to be superspreaders; it is their right. The wealthy are allowed to injure and kill; it should go without saying. Whatever laws exist, they no longer exist in the areas where cash collects. It is a game.

Donald Trump is not allowed to live at Mar-a-Lago, a business, as his permanent residence; he gave that up in negotiations to turn the mansion into a for-profit club, despite the objections of his new neighbors. He claims it as his residence anyway, and states that he intends to live there. Trump is not allowed to hold for-profit events that mock the county’s pandemic safety precautious; yet he did so, his guests photographed it all (remember the being seen part, which subsumes all other considerations), and nobody truly believes the county will do anything in response—because the revelers have money and the county has less.

The whole of the country is corrupt. It took only the slightest push from Trump to send the entire Republican Party hurdling into hoaxes and delusions, because the party was already nine-tenths of the way there. They were already declaring non-Republican rule to be illegitimate. They were already declaring non-Republican wins to be the result of the wrong people voting. They were already responding to scandal and superscandal by claiming that the real outrage was that law enforcement, tax officials or the press still dare to probe such things.

The McConnells are free to trade away Russian sanctions for Russian investments, Georgia’s senators are free to game the stock markets to profit off national disasters, and Donald Trump is allowed to use his military to extort specific propaganda from foreign countries in benefit not to the nation, but to himself, and Mar-a-Lago is allowed, by corporate charter, to spread whatever disease they wish to spread, at whatever ticket prices the market will bear.

It is not that the wealthy can get away with violating petty laws intended to better secure the safety of petty people. They can mock those laws. They can turn the laws that irritate them into a new campaign, with captured faux-press outlets bellowing day after day to the common rabble that they, too, are terribly wounded by having to do the most trivial of things for their fellow man. They can turn it into a movement. On a whim.

Mar-a-Lago guests know they are not bound by even the most petty and trivial of laws because they, for decades, haven’t been subject to any of the others. We may have to eat them, Botox or no Botox. This is an invasive species that does more damage than any other; putting them on the menu may be the only way to reduce their numbers to more manageable levels.

Or we could just close their stupid club for a while. On this one, the hacks may be right: The depression caused by not being seen for an entire month might do more damage than the threat of catching a deadly disease ever could. Close down Mar-a-Lago for a month or two, and the socialites will be falling out of Florida trees like chilled iguanas.