Trump has spent his lifetime defining the word grifter as synonymous with his last name. Here’s how the dictionary defines it:
grifter noun, Slang.
- a person who operates a side show at a circus, fair, etc., especially a gambling attraction.
- a swindler, dishonest gambler, or the like.
We’ve been taken over by a family of grifters. Literally.
For anyone who bought into Trump’s populist talk about taking on a “rigged system,” it’s time to admit you’ve been conned. The Trump “presidency” is emerging as the most closed, corrupt and undemocratic on record. It is for by and of his family clan and a few other billionaires. The message to the rest of is get lost!
Trump’s family is digging into the trough of Federal connection and money as if the US Government is the Trump clan’s private piggy bank. Even people on the far right are noticing.
As noted by columnist Dana Milbank– “Last year, Mark Meckler, one of the founders of the Tea Party movement, had concerns about Donald Trump but gave the Republican nominee the benefit of the doubt, because Trump ‘at least says he’s going to attack’ the crony-capitalist system.’ The conservative activist has revised his opinion. Trump ‘said he was going to D.C. to drain the swamp,’ Meckler said in a recent Fox Business interview, but ‘now it looks like we’ve got the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the White House.’”
No one should be surprised. Corruption is the Trump family MO, as a detailed article in the Atlantic (“The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet”). Many sources have enumerated Trump’s corruption many times “ranging from allegations of mafia ties to unscrupulous business dealings, and from racial discrimination to alleged marital rape. They stretch over more than four decades, from the mid-1970s to the present day.
For decades Trump has operated outside the law in fact and in spirit, as a historic Newsweek article detailed:
Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.
Now Trump’s method: lie, lie, hide the evidence and lie some more… continues as he’s crudely and openly raping the American people for profit. The billionaire has embraced a level of corporate control of the government that makes previous controversies involving corporate influence — Vice President Dick Cheney’s attempt in 2001 to keep secret the names of industry officials who participated in his energy task force, for example — seem quaint. And this isn’t just another Nixon. This is someone with a lifelong addiction to lying and corruption as chosen a way of life.
As the explosive Newsweek detailed exposé detailed:
“Trump’s many decades of abusing the judicial system, ignoring judges, disregarding rules, destroying documents and lying about it is not simply a sordid history lesson. Rather, it helps explain his behavior since he declared his candidacy.”
Trump promised to turn over his tax returns and his health records—just as he promised to comply with document discovery requirements in so many lawsuits—then reneged. As a result, he has left a sparse evidentiary trail that can be used to assess his wealth, his qualifications for the presidency or even his mental fitness.
Using Good Friday (as a quiet media day) President Trump’s White House announced that it would end the practice of releasing White House visitor logs, giving the public no way to know which corporate suitors have the ear of Trump and his staff.
Trump was already insulated from such disclosure during the disproportionate amount of his presidency he spends at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties.
As Milbank notes, “Trump seems to think people won’t care about this any more than they do about his refusal to release his tax returns and other disclosures that would reveal his conflicts of interest.” Now Trump’s well-crafted opacity is obscuring the rise of a new American plutocracy.
ProPublica and the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is being populated with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are making policy for the industries that had been paying them.
The arrangement has violated Trump’s (already weakened) ethics rules, and the administration is secretly issuing waivers exempting the former lobbyists from rules blocking them from working on issues that would benefit their former clients.
Trump White House officials have already hired more than 300 recent corporate clients and employers, the Times reported, and more than 40 Trump-hired former lobbyists are now in the White House and federal government. The director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics says even he has “no idea how many waivers have been issued.”
In 2005, the Trump announced a “university” to teach his real-estate development secrets. Students paid as much as $35,000—some after being suckered in by slick free “seminars”—to learn how to get rich. One ad promised they would “learn from Donald Trump’s handpicked instructors, and that participants would have access to Trump’s real estate ‘secrets.’” In fact, Trump had little to do with the curriculum or the instructors. Many of the “students” have since complained that Trump U. was a scam. And now we’ve all been taken to “school” by the Trump clan… and we are only now waking up. We’ve been conned.
In whatever inner dialogue Trump carries on in his brain, I imagine he has has several simple answers for those who question his attempts to conceal the corrupt corporate and family influence in his administration. I think this is what he thinks: No one cares! My lies always work! I may be a bad fake president but I’m the greatest grifter America’s ever seen!
Please watch my 6-minute video commentary on Trump’s rape of America HERE
https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16/videos/1014777868652319/
