A Continuum of Cons

An Orgy Of Business, Politics, Religion, And Sex
On March 4, 2019, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump had lied 9,014 times since his inauguration. He must be close to 10,000 by now. Having followed the career of The Donald for about 35 years, I wrote in 2015 that he was unfit for any office because his mental condition is fully described in the American Association of Psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders. Psychiatrists label him narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic. That’s a real ugly trifecta, but he has been a con since middle school, starting when his parents couldn’t stand him as a teenager and sent him off to a military school to gain discipline. 

The move didn’t take. 

He has made himself the center of an orgy of business, politics, and frenzied sex orgies. He has even conned white evangelical Christians to vote for him. Winning at all costs is his only guiding principle, and he has to keep humiliating “losers.” He loves to humiliate opponents. He is not stable enough to work in an animal shelter. He would kill them all.    

Later I’m going to concentrate on his business practices, particularly with the Russians. After Robert Mueller’s investigation, King Donald said: “After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead.” Well, we shall see. On March 31 the New York Post reported that Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly’s book “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump” was published. Fellow players have called Trump “the world’s worst cheat at golf.”  LPGA tour golfer Suzann Pettersen has played with him and says, “He cheats like hell.” It should be a fascinating book. The Post story revealed that Trump has listed his official handicap at 2.8 on one website. The handicap for Jack Nicklaus, the winner of 18 majors and considered to be one of the greatest pro golfers of all time, is listed at 3.4. Reilly evaluated both handicaps: “If Trump is a 2.8, Queen Elizabeth is a pole vaulter.”  What kind of a person cheats at golf?

The Narcissistic Psychopath has Turned His Family Into Grifters
The difference between a grifter and a thief is a grifter cons you out of money through lies (perhaps 250,000 lies in Trump’s life!) while the thief takes money by force. Never trust a grifter. They are chiselers, scammers, swindlers, and flim-flam artists. Craig Unger of The Washington Post has written a book about the relationship between two thieves and two grifters: “House of Trump, House of Putin.” Here is just a start:  $$$--Unger writes that over the last 30 years at least 13 Russian Mafia have run criminal operations out of the New York Trump Tower and other Trump properties. 

Over 65 condos in Trump properties have been purchased at outrageous prices by Russians to cover money laundering schemes brought on by world drug cartel operations. During J. Edgar Hoover days we tended to crack down on the Italian Mafia that had infiltrated American crime and businesses. In Russia, Vladimir Putin made the Russian Mafia a part of his own governmental structure back as far as the 1990’s. Russian gangsters became Putin’s enforcers. Many Russian journalists investigating Putin and his minions have met “accidents” by Putin’s orders. $$$--After Trump lost over $3 billion in his Atlantic City casino adventures,  a Kremlin-backed fund called the Bayrock Group “franchised” a whole bunch of Trump condos and helped make him “rich” again. $$$--Why were they so many meetings between Trump campaign associates and Russian embassy and government employees in 2015?  Why did the Americans lie so much about meeting them? Was it worth going to jail? Or have they been promised pardons? $$$--Putin’s oligarchs and Mafia were the only people to do business with Trump after Atlantic City—and they did it through untraceable offshore entities. No America n banks would touch him with a ten-cent loan. 

Only Germany’s Deutsche Bank has loaned him any money recently—and its history is tainted. It has been investigated and fined because of its relationship with money-laundering clients, most of them Russian oligarchs. $$$--Trump claims he is smarter than anybody: “I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to the best schools. They didn’t. I have a much more beautiful house, More beautiful apartment. Much more beautiful everything. And I’m president, and they’re not.” I guess “them” refers to all his enemies and other “elites.”  He was so smart he decided to teach others how to make a bundle and be great again at his Trump University. Another Trump scam, it cost him $25 million to close that con.

More Trump Grifting And Corruption
I have a four-inch thick file on Trump and his family, so it wasn’t difficult to find examples of his and his family’s grifting and corruption around the globe.  

$$$--Ivanka Trump’s first big real estate deal under The Donald’s guidance was the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, a 70-story hotel-casino. It earned the Trumps about $40 million. They made the mistake of making a Brazilian financier, a known money-launderer, the manager. He had close ties with the Russian Mafia and was later arrested for fraud and forgery. The Trumps have always depended upon their connections with Russians and the drug cartels for money-laundering. In Panama the Ocean Club also laundered money from Columbian drug cartels. The owners finally dropped the Trump  contract because of its connection to money-laundering. 

$$$--While in the Oval Office Trump asked President Maurico Macri of Argentina for his assistance in eliminating construction delays in completing a Trump building in that country. This illegal action was confirmed by the Argentine press. 

$$$--Remember during the campaign Trump was always accusing China of currency manipulation at every rally?  That charge was dropped after Chinese President Xi approved licensing deals and trademarks for Ivanka’s clothing line sold around the world. Our presidents are not supposed to violate the emoluments clause in the Constitution which keeps presidents from making money off foreign contracts. 

$$$--Saudi Arabia has spent well over $250,000 on hotel bills at the Trump International Hotel just down from the White House. We certainly are friendly with the Saudis. We even allow them to kill Washington Post reporters. Executives of T-Mobile, a cellphone company, spent many nights in the expensive hotel—while waiting for Trump to approve a merger for them with Sprint. That’s called grease in the con game. 

$$$--Trump’s Mar-a-Lago  has made $15 million off Trump’s trips to his Florida “White House” through room rental, restaurants, and the rental of golf carts by the Secret Service and other agencies.  

$$$--A Chinese state bank pays $2 million a year to rent an office in Trump Tower. After Trump agreed to drop US sanctions against a Chinese telecom company, he got a $500 million loan from the bank.  

$$$--Why does Trump love Putin? Why does Trump believe Putin while denigrating his own CIA and NSA decisions? When Trump Tower opened, Russian oligarchs wanted to meet Donald so much they bought 65 units in Trump Tower alone. Trump’s office is surrounded by Russian apartments and offices. Of course, with his demonstrated integrity in business there absolutely was no collusion. Russians have bought 1,300 condos in Trump properties since the 1980s. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in the 1980s, hundreds of billions of dollars left the country in the hands of Russian oligarchs and wealthy Russian Mafia.    

As an example, a Russian gangster by the name of David Bogatin bought five condos in New York from Trump for $6 million ($15 million today). Anders Aslund, A Swedish economist, said this to writer Unger: “Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks rather than with honest people. Crooks have two big advantages. First they’re prepared to pay more money than honest people. And second, they will always lose if you sue them because they are known to be crooks.”  This has become Trump’s credo. 

$$$--When grifter Trump was trying to borrow many millions to build Trump Tower, he used flim-flam and added ten phantom floors to the building, added 800 phantom acres to a vineyard he owned in Virginia, puffed up a Trump estate in New Jersey by “only” $200 million, and further inflated his net worth by a cool $4 billion.

From “Trump: The Game”: “It’s Not Whether You Win Or Lose, But Whether You Win” 
This quote came from a Milton Bradley Co. board game released in 1989. It did not sell as well as “Monopoly.” If presidential candidates had to pass psychological and IQ tests for qualifications enumerated in the 25th Amendment, Trump would have never passed. He has brought reality TV to the White House, destroying moral norms, resurrected racism and white supremacy, intensified the various culture wars, labeled the free press “the enemy of the people,” turned FOX NEWS into a government “Big Brother,” and developed Truth as his mortal enemy.    

Pieter Breugel and Hieronymus Bosch were two medieval painters who painted huge landscapes of life and death. Breugel concentrated on country life and the relationships of human beings. If you want to understand more about death, view Bosch’s illustrations of naked humans suffering in Hell. If the two were alive in the 21st Century and combined their artistic talents to illustrate our present sick and infected Trump culture, their painting would probably contain the following scenes from the Trump era: 

** Democrats and Republicans would be in WWI trenches, hurling paper bags of human excrement at each other produced on site--while shouting invectives through bullhorns--while reading Trump tweets on Twitter. 

** The National Rifle Association under the direction of CEO Wayne LaPierre would be in the corner waving the Second Amendment, selling 105mm. howitzers, rocket grenade launchers, and flamethrowers as personal weapons. 

** Evangelical Christian TV “prosperity” ministers dressed in $2000 Armani suits would be pictured stuffing their pockets with $100 bills while waving the Bible and accepting a month’s wages from their enraptured audiences. ** Jesus Christ would be painted in the upper left-hand corner trying to wipe copious tears from his red eyes. 

** A golden-haired pussy-grabbing Lothario would be copulating in a sex orgy with at least 23 other women in the middle of the painting waiting in line. 

** There would be a section showing many men prostrating themselves on a large floor. No, they are not Muslims praying in a mosque. They are Republican members of Congress worshipping their savior King Donald at a political strategy meeting. 

** An LA harbor scene will have super yachts of the One Percent anchored in an imposing line by docks covered with the tents of the homeless. 

** In one scene Democratic Socialists will be listening to a Karl Marx rant about capitalism while Trump White Supremacists will have their right arm raised in a salute to an Adolf Hitler rant about race. If you still want to vote for a lying crotch-grabbing psycho who is the world’s champion liar and cheater at golf, please exercise your personal right.