🃏 The Deck | The Audition: The Bad Actors Guild

Bad Actors

Fact Fictional Story telling by TJ Baden..

What follows is fact-fictional©. The receipts are real. The stage is imagined.

Told by TJB / Creator Human©

The marquee blinked in the drizzle, half its bulbs shot, the word AUDITION still managing to bleed through the rain in ragged neon red. I pulled my collar high and kept moving, shoes whispering against the slick pavement. The line coiled around the block, too long for a play no one had advertised. Men in suits sharp as razors, women in coats thick enough to choke, ticket stubs clutched like promissory notes.

A black sedan idled at the curb, its exhaust curling into the mist. The driver cracked his window, struck a match, and drew in smoke. A briefcase chained to his wrist caught the streetlight, flashing once before sinking back into shadow. He tapped his ash against the lid, casual as if it weren’t worth a nation’s ransom. No one looked. Nobody ever does.

Inside, the theater reeked of damp wool and perfume, velvet seats sagging under the weight of expectation. The curtains trembled, but no actor stepped forward. Instead, a loudspeaker hissed alive, its voice thick with static and ego:

“The dollar will be strong. Or maybe weak. Depends on the day. Either way, you’ll clap.”

The audience laughed on cue. I didn’t. I’d seen this production before. Reagan rehearsed it, Bush ran it into the ground, Trump billed himself as the headliner. The props changed. The script never did.

An usher brushed past, slid a folded sheet into my palm. Not a playbill. A balance sheet. Tariffs circled in red pencil, deregulations scribbled like stage cues, tax cuts underlined twice. In the margin, one word scrawled in black marker:

USD1.

The recovery was never for you. The deck was always stacked.

A whisper breathed from the row behind me:

Two billion. Offshore. Pancake Swap, daily flows. The Guild’s in

I didn’t turn. I knew the voice. The same one that sold wars as freedom, debt as prosperity, despair as inevitability. It never aged.

The curtains bulged with a shadow larger than life. The voice grew louder:

Lower the rates. Borrow more. Buy back the future with their own money. You’ll thank me when your retirement doubles.

The crowd erupted, palms slapping like seals. They wanted to believe. Needed to. Their faces were lit with hunger, not joy — desperate to be dazzled.

Up in the balcony, figures leaned on the rail. Fedoras, heavy glasses, false mustaches — disguises so absurd they’d have gotten laughs in a high-school play. Yet nobody laughed. Sovereign briefcases pooled at their feet, polished leather stuffed until the locks strained. The kind of suitcases that fly private, stamped in countries that never appear on customs forms.

Endless war = endless money printer. The oldest line in the Guild’s script.

The smell of smoke drifted from behind the curtains. War had always been the Guild’s best act. Fear was the currency; corpses were collateral. The printer never jammed. From Kuwait to Kabul, every bullet minted dividends. The tickers in New York sang, the pundits wept on camera, and the audience still applauded.

The loudspeaker spat again:

“War isn’t failure. War is liquidity.”

A roar went up from the floor, as if they’d been waiting for the line. The same cheer had echoed in 1991, in 2003, in every year that followed.

I slid from my row, ducked through a side exit marked Authorized Personnel Only. Nobody stopped me. Nobody ever does.

A single bulb buzzed above a steel table. A manila folder waited there, swollen and soft from too many hands. I flipped it open.

• World Liberty Financial — shell company, Trump family equity stake.

• Alt 5 Sigma — payment rails, merchant integrations active.

• Binance engineers — laundering flagged, still on retainer.

• Treasury inflows — May: $114B foreign capital.

• Annotation: Stablecoin now 17th largest Treasury buyer.

Each page stamped in red:

BAD ACTORS GUILD

PRIVATIZED MONEY PRINTER

Everyone wanted a part. Few read the script.

A cigarette ember glowed above me through the grate. Footsteps shuffled along the balcony. Shadows moved in and out of the half-light — the spies.

Plain disguise. Childish, deliberate. A pair of glasses too thick, a beard too false, a voice pitched wrong. But the suitcases they carried were real. Sovereign wealth. Offshore flows. State secrets bought and sold as easily as theater tickets.

One leaned over the rail, whispered into a recorder the size of a matchbook:

“USD1 is clean. Daily turnover one point two billion. Alt rails confirm.”

Another adjusted his fake mustache.

“Spreads are wide. Time to cut deeper. They’ll never know until Social Security’s gone.”

Binance, offshore funds, sovereign investors — the real stagehands behind Trump’s coin.

I closed the dossier and stepped back into the theater. The smell of sweat and perfume was sharper now, the crowd more restless. The Guild’s stagehands moved among them, whispering about freedom, growth, innovation. They dropped new pages into their laps: glossy brochures, each one stamped with a smiling dollar sign and the word PRIVATIZED.

The trick wasn’t on stage. It wasn’t in the balconies. It was here, in the velvet seats.

The audience thought they were spectators. They were cast members. Their roles already written:

• Social Security recast as self-managed accounts.

• Healthcare prepaid like a ticket stub.

• Retirement played on margin.

• Wages flatlined while debts climbed like scenery ropes, heavy enough to crush if they slipped.

Despair was the business model.

The spotlight isn’t on the actors. It’s on the script.

The loudspeaker rasped:

“Don’t worry about safety nets. You’ll soar without them. That’s liberty. That’s innovation. That’s America.”

The audience cheered until their hands burned.

A spotlight cracked on. Not the stage. Me.

The heat pinned me to my seat. At my feet lay a thick script, bound in red tape. I bent, picked it up, and struck a match.

The corner flared, edges curling black. Gasps rippled through the hall. The balcony hissed, masks shifting in the glow. The Guild stirred behind the curtains, their control slipping with each lick of flame.

Tariffs turned to ash. Deregulations shriveled. USD1 smoldered into smoke.

The crowd faltered. Some scrambled for the exits, others sat frozen as if waking mid-dream.

The loudspeaker sputtered, lost its voice. Curtains froze mid-draw. The stage stuttered into silence.

And for one stolen moment, the play wasn’t theirs anymore.

🎭 Curtain Call

The Guild runs the same play in every generation — war, debt, despair dressed as prosperity. They rely on applause, on distraction, on the belief that the audience is only watching.

But you weren’t just watching tonight.

You saw the script.

You saw the spies.

You saw the fire.

Now the question isn’t whether the play continues.

It’s who writes the next act.

✅ Stay Human

🃏 Subscribe if you’re ready to read the script behind the stage.

I’ll keep showing you the receipts, the stagehands, and the machine that powers them.

— TJB / Creator Human

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