Trump Is Now Hawking Shoes And Perfume

 

The day after being hit with a $355 million judgement, Donald Trump went on TV to sell over-priced sneakers and perfume. The grift never stops with this conman. I doubt these products are going to make much of a dent in his legal problems though.

Trump Amassed Huge Slush Fund By Conning His Supporters

 The most successful grifter in America today is Donald Trump. He has raised a huge slush fund, which he can spend any way he wishes, by conning his supporters. He raised money by claiming he needed it to fight in the courts the election fraud and by saying it would go to help the Senate candidates in Georgia. It didn't go to either. Some went to the RNC, but most went into Trump's leadership PAC -- Save America.

Here is part of how The New York Times is reporting Trump's latest con:

Donald J. Trump will exit the White House as a private citizen next month perched atop a pile of campaign cash unheard-of for an outgoing president, and with few legal limits on how he can spend it.

Deflated by a loss he has yet to acknowledge, Mr. Trump has cushioned the blow by coaxing huge sums of money from his loyal supporters — often under dubious pretenses — raising roughly $250 million since Election Day along with the national party.

More than $60 million of that sum has gone to a new political action committee, according to people familiar with the matter, which Mr. Trump will control after he leaves office. Those funds, which far exceed what previous outgoing presidents had at their disposal, provide him with tremendous flexibility for his post-presidential ambitions: He could use the money to quell rebel factions within the party, reward loyalists, fund his travels and rallies, hire staff, pay legal bills and even lay the groundwork for a far-from-certain 2024 run.

The post-election blitz of fund-raising has cemented Mr. Trump’s position as an unrivaled force and the pre-eminent fund-raiser of the Republican Party even in defeat. His largest single day for online donations actually came after Election Day — raising almost $750,000 per hour on Nov. 6. So did his second biggest day. And his third. . . .

For Mr. Trump, the quarter-billion dollars he and the party raised over six weeks is enough to pay off all of his remaining campaign bills and to fund his fruitless legal challenges and still leave tens of millions of dollars. . . .

The Trump political apparatus has taken advantage of the grass-roots energy and excitement over the two runoffs to juice its own fund-raising. Email and text solicitations have pitched Trump supporters to give to a “Georgia Election Fund,” even though no funds go directly to either Republican senator on the ballot, irritating some Senate G.O.P. strategists.

Instead, the fine print shows 75 percent of the donations to the Georgia fund go to Mr. Trump’s new PAC, called Save America, with 25 percent to the Republican National Committee.

After weeks of shouting “FRAUD” to supporters in emails and asking them to back an “Election Defense Fund” (which also sent 75 percent of donations to his new PAC), the Trump operation has subtly shifted its tone and focus, returning to more sustainable pre-election themes, like hawking signed hats and opposing socialism. . . .

For a sense of scale of just how much money Mr. Trump will have at his disposal, the new Trump PAC’s $60 million-plus haul — and counting — is about as much money as he spent to win his party’s presidential nomination in 2016. . . .

“A leadership PAC is a slush fund,” said Meredith McGehee, executive director of Issue One, a group that supports increased political transparency. “There are very, very, very few limits on what he can’t spend money on.”

Trump Is Scamming His Supporters To Profit Himself

Donald Trump is still refusing to concede the election, and is asking his supporters for money to file lawsuits claiming election fraud.

Trump is far from the smartest president we've had, but he's not so stupid as to really think he could still win the election. Election administrators in every state have said there was no fraud, and recounts in several states are very unlikely to change the results. The margins for Biden are just too large.

So, why is Trump still trying to raise money? Is it really to fight the lawsuits, or is it just another way to line his own pockets?

Here's part of what Dana Milbank (in The Washington Post) thinks about it:

President Trump isn’t really trying to overturn the election. He’s simply running one more scam before he leaves office that would enable him to enrich himself. 

That’s the way it appears, at least, from the scores of fundraising emails his campaign has sent out since the election. He seems to be asking for funds to challenge the election, but the fine print shows that the money could let him line his own coffers. The tin-pot-dictator routine looks more as if it’s about passing the tin cup.

“They’re trying to STEAL this Election,” declared one such Trump campaign fundraising missive from “Donald J. Trump, President of the United States” on Wednesday afternoon. “I promise you my team is fighting the clock to DEFEND the integrity of this Election, but we cannot do it alone. We need EVERY Patriot, like YOU, to step up and make sure we have the resources to keep going. … Please contribute ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW to DEFEND the Election.”

But at the provided link to the “OFFICIAL ELECTION DEFENSE FUND,” the legalese at the end says something rather different:

Sixty percent of the contribution, up to $5,000, goes to “Save America,” Trump’s newly created leadership PAC. And 40 percent of the contribution up to $35,500, goes to the Republican National Committee’s operating account, its political (not legal) fund.

Only after reaching the first maximum would a single penny go to Trump’s “Recount Account,” and only after reaching the second maximum would a penny go to the RNC’s legal account.

“It’s a straight-up bait and switch,” Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, tells me. Such email solicitations target small donors, so for the “overwhelming majority of people contributing … none of their money will end up in recount accounts” or be used for otherwise challenging the election.

Rather, it will be used to extend Trump’s influence over the RNC during the Biden presidency and to build up his leadership PAC, which amounts to a “slush fund” for Trump’s personal use. “There is no limit to how much Donald Trump can pay himself or any member of his family under ‘Save America,’” Ryan notes. . . .

Should we be surprised?

Trump has used the presidency itself for self-enrichment, so there’s no reason to think an election defeat would stop him. He has funneled vast amounts of taxpayer dollars and political supporters’ funds to his hotels, golf clubs and various properties around the world. Over the years, he has used his charity for self-benefit, he has had favorable treatment by foreign governments, and he has had hundreds of millions in debt forgiven by creditors.

The GOP Is Raising Taxes On Everyone But The Rich

Remember the 2017 Republican tax cut -- the one that they called a "middle class tax cut"? As you surely know by now, most of those tax cuts went to the rich and corporations (over 80%). The middle class only got a tiny cut, and the working class got nothing. Well, it's about to get even worse!

There was a hidden part of that bill that starts to raise taxes on everyone (except for the rich) in 2021, and will keep raising those taxes every two years until 2027. By 2027, three-quarters of the population will be paying more taxes than before the cut. But the other quarter, those making over $100k, will get to keep their cuts.

The bill was never fair for most Americans, and now it will get even more unfair.

Here's part of how economics professor Joseph Stiglitz explains it in The New York Times:

The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: It’s not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Looking at the analyses of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation at the time the December 2017 tax bill was enacted, we see very clearly how different income groups are affected by the Trump tax plan. And it’s disturbing.

The current poverty line for a family of four is $26,200: People with incomes between $10,000 and $30,000 — nearly one-quarter of Americans — are among those scheduled to pay a higher average tax rate in 2021 than in years before the tax “cut” was passed. The C.B.O. and Joint Committee estimated that those with an income of $20,000 to $30,000 would owe an extra $365 next year — these are people who are struggling just to pay rent and put food on the table.

Of course, the poor have never mattered much to the Republican Party, but those on the edge of poverty have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic and the recession it has caused, so Trump’s planned tax increases seem especially heartless, and impractical, when you consider that their higher tax payments, while a huge burden for them, will add little to the budget.

By 2027, when the law’s provisions are set to be fully enacted, with the stealth tax increases complete, the country will be neatly divided into two groups: Those making over $100,000 will on average get a tax cut. Those earning under $100,000 — an income bracket encompassing three-quarters of taxpayers — will not.

If The Republicans Win In November, They're Coming After Social Security And Medicare

Social Security is 83 years old, and Medicare is 52 years old. They are two of the most successful government programs ever passed -- keeping most seniors in America out of abject poverty and protecting their health.

But the Republicans have never liked either program. They voted against their creation, and have been trying to eliminate both ever since. That's because the GOP's constituency is the rich -- people who don't need either program. They don't care about the people who need Social Security and Medicare.

Recently, the Republicans gave the rich a huge tax cut. That cut vastly ballooned the federal deficit to about a trillion dollars a year. They now want to use that to cut Social Security and Medicare (even though Social Security adds nothing to the deficit and Medicare adds very little).

In other words, they want seniors to pay for the huge tax cuts they gave to the rich. Here's how Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (pictured) describes it:

In a recent interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Representative Steve Stivers, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — in effect, the man charged with containing the blue wave — declared that, given the size of the budget deficit, the federal government needs to save money by cutting spending on social programs. When pressed about whether that included Social Security and Medicare, he admitted that it did.

And he’s not alone in seeing major cuts in core programs for older Americans as the next step if Republicans win in November. Many major figures in the G.O.P., including the departing speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and multiple senators, have said the same thing. (Meanwhile, groups tied to Ryan have been running attack ads accusing Democrats of planning to cut Medicare funding — but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So, apparently, is honesty.)

Now, Republicans who call for cuts in social spending to balance the budget are showing extraordinary chutzpah, which is traditionally defined as what you exhibit when you kill your parents, then plead for mercy because you’re an orphan. After all, the same Republicans now wringing their hands over budget deficits just blew up that same deficit by enacting a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

So it might seem shocking that only a few months later they’re once again posing as deficit hawks and calling for spending cuts. That is, it might seem shocking if it weren’t for the fact that this has been the G.O.P.’s budget strategy for decades. First, cut taxes. Then, bemoan the deficit created by those tax cuts and demand cuts in social spending. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This strategy, known as “starve the beast,” has been around since the 1970s, when Republican economists like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman began declaring that the role of tax cuts in worsening budget deficits was a feature, not a bug. As Greenspan openly put it in 1978, the goal was to rein in spending with tax cuts that reduce revenue, then “trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.”

It’s true that when tax cuts are on the table their proponents tend to deny that they’ll increase the deficit, claiming that they’ll provide a miraculous boost to the economy and that tax receipts will actually rise. But there’s not a shred of evidence to support this claim, and it has never been clear whether anyone with real political power has ever believed it. For the most part it’s just a smoke screen to help conceal the G.O.P.’s true intentions.

The puzzle is why Republicans keep getting away with this bait-and-switch. 

Fifteen years ago I wrote a long piece titled “The Tax-Cut Con,” describing what was even then a time-honored scam; it reads almost word for word as a description of Republican strategy in 2017-18. Yet I keep reading news analyses expressing puzzlement that men who were strident deficit hawks in the Obama years so cheerfully signed on to a budget-busting tax cut under Trump. To say the obvious: These men were never deficit hawks; it was always a pose. . . .

If the G.O.P. holds its majority, Social Security and Medicare as we know them will be very much in danger.

Space Force -- Just Another Trump Con Like His "University"

The images above are from the Trump administration. They want people to vote on the logo for Trump's proposed new military division -- the Space Force. And after you vote, you are then asked for a donation to Trump.

Frankly, I find all of the proposed logos to be rather pathetic -- as pathetic as the proposed military force, which is not needed. They are embarrassingly comical.

Here's what David A. Graham has to say about Trump's proposal in The Atlantic:

Trump first announced the Space Force, which he says will be a sixth, co-equal branch of the military, in June, when he signed a space-policy directive. But that directive didn’t even mention the Space Force, nor was it totally clear how it would work. As my colleague Marina Koren has reported, many top commanders in the military (including Secretary of Defense James Mattis) opposed the plan, arguing that the Pentagon already had the right infrastructure in place to achieve what Trump wanted: the ability to defend American interests in space. There’s even an existing Air Force Space Command.

Of course, bureaucratic maneuvering isn’t as sexy as the first new branch of the military since 1947. The actual function of the Space Force isn’t nearly as sexy as its name implies, either. As Vice President Mike Pence outlined in a speech Thursday announcing a new Pentagon report on the project, the Space Force is not so much about sending battalions of armed astronauts into the atmosphere as it is about satellites and space-based defense systems. Those functions are potentially important, and American adversaries are interested in making plays for space weapons, but the Defense Department is already working on them.

When Pence complained Thursday that “while our adversaries have been busy weaponizing space, too often we have bureaucratized it,” he was protesting too much. Even though what Trump is proposing is basically a reorganization of existing systems, he has treated it as if he is launching something unprecedented. (The Space Force also can’t go forward unless Congress authorizes it.)

Later on Thursday, the Trump reelection campaign sent an email inviting supporters to vote on a logo for the Space Force. . . .

Once people have voted in the poll, naturally, they are invited to donate to Trump’s reelection. That leads to a natural complaint: The Trump campaign appears to be selling the logo rights to the Space Force in exchange for campaign donations, turning the government into a tool for Trump’s own political enrichment.

The reality is much more pedestrian, and more characteristically Trump-y. What the campaign email is selling is not access and influence, but the illusion of access and influence—an even better scheme, since it demands nothing real in return. The vote will likely have no effect on the eventual logo of the Space Force, should Congress approve it. That’s only fitting for a president who campaigned as a populist but has governed by, and to the benefit of, the wealthy and powerful.

Such salesmanship is not new for Trump. The branding of the Space Force resembles nothing so much as Trump University. In that program, Trump gussied up a series of drab, clichéd get-rich-quick real-estate seminars by giving it the name and crest of a full-fledged university and promising “handpicked” instructors. It was not a university, nor were the instructors handpicked. In depositions about the project, Trump proved far removed from any of the actual operations, repeatedly saying lieutenants had dealt with this or that matter. . . .

Anyone tempted to get excited about the Space Force would be well advised to keep the Trump University precedent in mind. The seminars were a short-term success: Thousands of people signed up, creating a new revenue stream for Trump. But they eventually wised up that they weren’t buying real-estate secrets so much as a bill of goods, and some of them sued him, resulting in a $25 million settlement. Eventually, misleading branding schemes have a tendency to fall back down to Earth.