The Grifter In Chief

Shortly after the election of Joe Biden to the highest office in the land, the lame-duck president set in motion the last great con of his administration: stealing as much money as he can from his own supporters before being forced to leave office. The idea was to claim that the election had been stolen from him, then inundate the courts with a barrage of baseless lawsuits designed to subvert the will of the people, and make the people pay for it. But almost as soon as the website went up and the emails were sent out demanding that his supporters foot the bill for these legal challenges, astute reporters read the fine print and saw that the money was actually going to two places, the president himself—not the legal fund—and the Republican National Committee. This was reported on by all of the major media outlets in the second week of November, with articles like this one on MSNBC: “For Trump, One Last Fundraising Scam Before Leaving Office.” Likewise, in the Washington Post an editorial headline read, “Trump’s Election Challenge Looks Like a Scam to Line His Pockets.” Politico as well, in an article by Maggie Severns entitled “Where Trump’s Recount Fundraising Dollars are Really Going,” made it clear exactly what the true nature of this scam actually is:

          Much of the money raised by . . . the Trump campaign won’t go towards challenging election results,
          however, but to help set the stage for the president’s next act. The Trump campaign has a recount
          fund, but the money won’t go to it unless someone gives more than $8,333. Rather, 60 percent of a
          donation up to that amount for Trump’s “Official Election Defense Fund” is routed to a new PAC started
          this week by the president that can pay for a wide range of activities . . . The remaining 40 percent
          goes to the Republican National Committee.

All of the mainstream newspapers and on-air personalities covered this story at the time, and it should have been the foundation for all of the reporting that has happened in the last month since. Instead, the media has moved on to a different narrative. The hosts of news shows now discuss the intricacies of the legal challenges—even though all of those legal suits have been entirely baseless and without a shred of evidence—and the wrangling between the president and the individual state legislatures, election offices, and governors, all illegal activities, it should be pointed out, but rarely is. There is also much pointless hand wringing about what this means for the country, when that is not the point of these activities at all. In speaking about the plethora of court cases being summarily dismissed or withdrawn, former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, on MSNBC, put the situation this way: “Trump and his allies aren’t filing these cases because they believe he won the election. They’re not trying to reverse the results in any meaningful way.” True, very true. But it’s then that Vance goes off the rails. “What they’re seeking to do is to undermine the integrity of our elections, to cast doubt in the minds of so many American people that the future of our elections is really in doubt.”

No, no, no, no, no!

That is absolutely NOT what is going on right now. The president does not have a plan and he does not have a grand strategy, for the simple fact that he does not have a brain in his head. He’s a functionally illiterate narcissist who can’t even get out of his own way long enough to succeed at his own criminal undertakings. Sure, he can say the words on a teleprompter, but don’t ask him what they actually mean because he doesn’t know. The only way he can make sense of the President’s Daily Brief is if it’s in comic book form—with the words redacted so they don’t confuse him. Attempting to ascribe some kind of Machiavellian scheme to his actions is tantamount to claiming Jaws had a personal vendetta against the Brody family. A shark is fish with a tiny brain that has no way of distinguishing between the kicking feet of individual humans in the water, much less the humans themselves. And the president’s brain is nowhere near that complex. The president has already scammed over 200 million dollars from his supporters through the election defense fund, and so there’s no way he’s going to give up that pipeline of free cash by conceding the election, ever. He is a common criminal—very common indeed—and the only thing that animates his every activity is how he can enrich himself. Period. There is no other motive. The president said as much in his recent rally in Georgia, which was ostensibly for getting out the vote in the state runoff for two crucial Senate seats, but as with everything else was really only about him: “You know, I don’t do these things for other people . . . I don’t like doing it for other people.”

Of course not. The president has absolutely no concern for anyone but himself. His sociopathic response to the Covid-19 pandemic is only the most obvious case in point. Not only did he ignore warnings about the deadly epidemic early this year, but purposely downplayed it with the public. Then, when he was proven wrong about the true virulence of the virus he doubled down and said people should not wear masks, and so as part of the 296,000 deaths so far—and still climbing—that he is directly responsible for, are the over seven hundred deaths of the supporters at his mask-less rallies in which he should rightly be charged with manslaughter. It would not in any way be out of line or unrealistic to suggest that the reason the president refused more doses of the vaccine from Pfizer last summer is because they weren’t willing to give him a big enough kickback. So he thought he’d try his luck with other pharmaceutical companies also working on a vaccine. None of what the president has done in the last four years—NONE of it, including what has transpired in the last month—is out of character for a man who has been such an abject failure in business that the only way he can actually make any money is to steal it from other people.

The two commentators who consistently seem to focus on the president’s criminal activities with any regularity are the independent Keith Olbermann and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who said the other day that despite all of the attempts to overturn the election results that people shouldn’t loose site of the “crimey things” the president is doing. What Maddow—and the rest of the news media, it seems—cannot seem to stay focused on is that IT'S ALL CRIMEY. That’s right. The only thing the president knows how to do is lie, cheat, swindle and steal, all day, every day. This latest escapade is nothing but the next chapter in the long con he is playing on the American people, the Republican Party, and his anti-intellectual followers. This president is the most repugnant human being ever to hold office in the U.S. government, and that’s saying something for a political party that also boasts the likes of Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio among its membership. But the mainstream media cannot seem to keep their focus on what really matters in these remaining few weeks, that the president is a criminal, and therefore everything he does is simply a part of his criminal operation.

No doubt the president will announce his intention to run for re-election at some inopportune moment, perhaps on January 20th, and perhaps timing the announcement to occur at the very moment when Joe Biden is being sworn in as a genuine president. When it happens, however, is less certain than the fact that it definitely will happen. Why? Again, for only one reason. This will allow him to continue to raise money from his clueless base after he is gone from the White House, from people who can ill afford to be sending their hard earned money to a grifter. His re-election organization will then allow him to keep on stealing a steady stream of cash from the electorate for his personal use for years. That’s right, every time he takes a trip somewhere his plane fare will be paid out of campaign funds. Every time he stays at a hotel it will be paid for with campaign dollars. He will argue that everything he does for the next four years and beyond is part of one endless presidential run and therefore he will be able to live off of the money he steals from the working class people he has duped into believe he cares for, despite the fact that he has no more concern for them than he does for the women he has sexually abused, the undocumented immigrant children he has caged, the non-violent protestors he has violently attacked, or the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens that he has killed through his criminal negligence.

The current president of the United States is a sociopathic criminal and a con man, and the only hope of restoring the confidence of the people in the office of the president is if individual states’ attorney’s general and city district attorneys open numerous investigations next year into all of the illegal activities of the president’s crime family operations, then take the president and his family to court, and eventually put them all behind bars where they belong. Keith Olbermann, bless his heart, seems to be the only political commentator with his eyes on the prize, continually pointing out the president’s many crimes, as well as the crimes of his family and associates, and the specific laws they have broken. And in doing so he unambiguously advocates for the vigorous prosecution of these un-convicted felons. But for them to actually be convicted, the rest of the news media need to stay focused on what the president really is, and what his only goal is: a continued and concentrated effort to subvert the laws of this country for his own benefit. Nothing President Joe Biden does in the next four years will be able to bring this country together if a known criminal is able to roam free and continue his blatant illegal behavior without any consequences. The only thing that will wake up his brainwashed followers to the fact that he is not above the law is if he is finally put in jail. And for that to happen the media needs to fulfill its duty to the American public, not just by calling out the president for his many lies, but by pointing out the specific treasonous criminal activity he is engaged in every time they mention his name.