As has been repeatedly established, Donald Trump is a criminal who has spent a lifetime breaking the law, ducking accountability, stiffing his workers, ripping off purveyors, and selling gaudy, gold-plated crap to people with more money than taste.
One might also recall that Trump pretended—unconvincingly—to sort of respect (but not really) presidential norms for the first part of his first term. For instance, he refused to provide a full copy of his income tax returns, claiming they were under audit, apparently in perpetuity. It was not that he didn’t long to make them public to the electorate, he claimed; the IRS simply prevented him from doing so.
This was utter nonsense, since even if Trump’s taxes were eternally under audit (which they were not), there has never been an IRS proscription about showing your tax returns to whomever you choose. Your returns, your prerogative. Of course, when your tax returns are nothing but a pack of lies and you would prefer that they not be scrutinized by Tish James, fuhgetaboutit.
That was Inartful Dodge #1.
Next, he sidestepped putting his assets into a blind trust (a norm established by Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush) to avoid the appearance of self-dealing and to assure the electorate that decisions affecting all of us are not tainted by the financial self-interest of the chief executive. No, instead of sealing his assets in a virtual lock box overseen by neutral third parties, not to be unlocked until he left office, he placed his assets instead under the “management” of his weak-kneed, nattering sons. As is evident to anyone who has ever heard them speak, Don Jr. and Eric are two of the most entitled twits to ever draw breath. They reported to and were directed by their father, continually, throughout his first term.
That was Inartful Dodge #2.
He then frosted the first-term corruption cake by making a sweetheart deal to turn an elegant old D.C. post office into the Trump International Hotel. As the world already understood, if you had any business with the president, foreign or domestic, nothing would go your way until you spent lavishly at his hotel. He put it on the market shortly after leaving D.C., knowing that the only reason that anyone stayed there to begin with was to gain access and preferential treatment from him.
To be clear, this was a form of not-so-subtle political extortion and constituted Inartful Dodge #3.
The man who accused Barack Obama of taking too many vacations during his eight years as president, costing American taxpayers approximately $97 million, managed to spend $960 million during his first term alone on incessant travel to his resorts, where he routinely overcharged for the rooms and meals provided to his Secret Service detail. To do the math for you, that is close to $1 billion in four years. It took a scant one term for Trump to suck close to 10 times the money Obama spent on eight years of vacations directly out of our pockets and into his own, laundering the money through his resorts.
This was Inartful Dodge #4.
The whole family was in on the grift, as well. Ivanka promoted her fashion brand from within the White House, a clear no-no under any other administration. Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner had zero government experience prior to becoming his father-in-law’s Peewee Herman-esque factotum. Before he was tasked with bringing peace to the Middle East, he was an over-leveraged real estate developer who lost his shirt on a building at 666 Fifth Avenue. Although he failed in his assignment to beat swords into ploughshares in the Holy Land, he absolutely succeeded in flying to Saudi Arabia in the final days of the Trump presidency to pick up $2 billion from Saudi Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who ignored the advice of his own finance ministers in order to underwrite a hedge fund that Jared Kushner had no idea how to run.
To this day, four years later, the fund has paid not one red cent in dividends to anyone. Oh, and during Trump 1.0, he forced Qatar to bail him out of his Fifth Avenue belly flop when he endorsed a Saudi blockade of that country. The blockade did not end until Qatar ponied up. That was quite a windfall, albeit a coerced windfall, from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Jared Kushner. That payment, along with the $2 billion in cash from the Saudis on his way out the door, constituted Inartful Dodges #5 and #6.
The daily double!
One might naturally wonder what would motivate the majority-Muslim UAE to hand over billions in private money to Jared Kushner when his father-in-law famously despises Muslims, but I think we all know the answer to that: In Trump’s America, you get what you pay for. It is, quite simply, a perpetual shake-down. Only money talks to the Trumps. Everyone else can take a number and wait until hell freezes over.
Trump rolled his financially rewarding relationship with the Saudis into a post-presidential bonanza by hosting—and charging exorbitant fees to play in—the Saudi-funded LIV golf tournament, held (where else?) at one of Trump’s golf clubs, much to the consternation of the PGA. Following that, as he managed to wriggle out of almost every sedition charge of his “gap” term, he was stuck hawking cheap, ugly MAGA merch to fill his coffers.
But on his way to a second run for the presidency, Trump managed to take over the Republican National Committee and installed his daughter-in-law as titular head, turning that organization, along with all of the sham super PACs created to fool his loyalists into thinking they were funding a movement, into his personal piggy bank.
Well, the Inartful Dodger has now returned, but because he only intends to leave the White House horizontally, in an over-embellished casket, he no longer feels the need to maintain even the smallest semblance of normalcy. He is now free to simply put his hand in the cookie jar, in broad daylight, whenever he feels like it. And clearly, he feels like it all the time. In a political environment where Trump just signed an executive order to defund Sesame Street, there will be only one Cookie Monster left standing in America: Donald John Trump.
We have now experienced the lunacy of Trump’s first 100 days, parked again behind the Resolute Desk, dashing off insane, and insanely performative, executive orders. Anyone paying attention knows that Trump treats the Resolute Desk, like everything else, as a prop in his made-for-TV presidency; in reality, he spends most of his time parked in front of a big-screen TV, sucking up the sycophancy of his Fox News besties. Gone is the paper-thin veneer of lawfulness with which he tried—and failed—to conceal his criminality, both financial and constitutional, against the citizens of this country. Now, in his return to power, he is Trump Unbound. There is no longer any attempt whatsoever, however minimal it may have been in the past, to conceal his pathological greed.
Because he is nothing if not hyper-alert to opportunities for self-enrichment at public expense, Trump has now brought laser focus to actions that will lead, perhaps, to some of the biggest paydays of his life. In Trump 2.0, his two swaggering sons are running all over the UAE making deals right and left in the despotic Arab world, where all members of the Emirates are hedging their bets by striking massive deals for Trump-themed projects.
It seems that we became so inured to his indifference to basic norms during his first term that no one even bothered to inquire about his tax returns this time around; no one even raised an eyebrow about his continued personal profiteering from his powerful position; no one has even bothered to suggest that maybe, just maybe, his preening sons should not be flying all over the place accepting what amounts to billions in foreign bribes from the same people who brought you 9/11, along with the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This means that if you like murdering your critics or killing thousands of Americans in one fell swoop, just pay Donald Trump and his progeny billions of dollars and they will be delighted to look the other way. Trump is a money launderer, always open for business with reputation launderers.
Trump will undoubtedly continue the Big Middle East Squeeze by doing absolutely nothing to stop Benjamin Netanyahu from killing women, children, the aged, and the ill in Gaza, and at this point we all know why: Once Bibi Netanyahu has killed all of them, our current president will turn that scorched earth into Trump Gaza, the gaudiest, beachiest golf resort the Middle East has ever seen. I am confident that the LIV golf tournament will flourish there, as well.
But perhaps the biggest cash capture of all may not even have a basis in cash, because Donald Trump, under the steady, sober guidance of his idiot sons and Elon Musk, is now selling his own branded cryptocurrencies directly from the White House.
I will be the first to admit that I do not understand why anyone would invest in a product that has no inherent value, but apparently that is exactly what the Trump “meme” coin is. Frankly, I am such a dinosaur that I had to look up the meaning of “meme.” From what I can gather, a meme is an image that has gained a lot of internet traction—for instance, the photo of a defiant, fist-pumping Trump being hustled off a stage in the middle of a Midwest pasture, blood dripping from his ear. Yes, that is one of the meme coins from which Trump is profiting. The bloody-ear meme coin.
A meme coin does not even occupy physical space—it exists only digitally, just like that other perplexing product that has generated plenty of cash for Trump, NFTs, which the grifter-in-chief refers to as “digital trading cards,” typically representing Trump as a superhero or cowboy or Rambo-like mercenary.
So, for all intents and purposes, the meme coins and NFTs, which have already netted Trump millions, are the digital equivalents of baseball cards—just digital pictures of things that you trade with other people who collect the same things. The cost of creating a meme coin falls somewhere between $5,000 and $50,000, which is a rather modest investment in a product that can net millions. That is a very nice return on investment, and as all of us know, Trump is such a skinflint that he undoubtedly gets someone else to cover the cost of creation. The licensor-in-chief never spends his own money, but he is more than happy to spend everyone else’s. Just ask Mohammed Bin Salman.
The meme coins and NFTs just seemed like more dumb things that Trump routinely sells to dumb people, for who among us does not recall the cheesy gold sneakers, the Trump Bible, Trump cologne, Trump steak, Trump wine, Trump wristwatches? But World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto business, feels far more insidious. World Liberty Financial just struck a deal with a UAE financial firm for a $2 billion investment in Binance cryptocurrency exchange. And again, I assure you that I understand none of this, but here is what I absolutely understand: There is an unmistakable odor of corruption. And by “unmistakable odor,” I mean “stench.”
Coincident to this event, to absolutely no one’s surprise, the Trump administration is unwinding their regulation of cryptocurrencies, and Pam Bondi, Trump’s ever-complicit wing woman, is aiding and abetting her boss by taking an axe to the Justice Department’s crypto-fraud investigation unit.
It is important to understand that cryptocurrencies are the preferred currencies through which domestic and international criminals launder their money. International and domestic criminals also enjoy laundering their money by purchasing apartments in Trump-owned properties that they never, ever occupy. They are simply purchases that allow hot money to cool down.
As one would absolutely expect of showboat Trump, there is nothing subtle about his determination to use his position of power to goose the sales of his newest product. On April 23 of this year, one of the subsidiary companies affiliated with Liberty Financial began offering an invitation to an “intimate private dinner” with Trump at his golf club in Virginia. The “intimate dinner” will be hosted for the 220 top investors in Trump’s digital products. How a dinner for 220 individuals could be construed as “intimate” is beyond me, but there you have it.
But wait—there is more!—the top 25 investors of the top 220 investors are promised a private reception and guided tour of the White House. It makes Bill Clinton’s use of a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to thank his donors seem almost quaint.
It gets even worse, though. Trump has now begun work on a “Strategic USA Crypto Reserve.” Hmm. A reserve of bitcoin? I wonder exactly whose cryptocurrency will be purchased for the purpose of creating a national crypto reserve. Would anyone like to hazard a guess?
Evidently, the gold standard is now passé. The president of the United States has determined that what we really need in order to protect our country in a time of crisis is a currency that has no value except to the criminals who buy it, sell it, and launder money with it. There is no currency less stable than cryptocurrency, and now our tax dollars will be used not to benefit the young, the elderly, the sick, and the less fortunate among us, but to buy Donald John Trump’s cheesy crypto. I would imagine that we will also be purchasing the cheesy currency of other FOTs—friends of Trump.
It may be useful to consider that as Trump bankrupts America with his nonsensical and dangerous tariffs and pumps up the value of his own fake currency with your tax dollars, he has counselled that no child in America needs more than two dolls or more than two pencils. He has also alerted us to the fact that strollers are unnecessary purchases for parents with young children. Perhaps he thinks that your live-in nanny can just carry them.
Oh, wait—you don’t have a live-in nanny?
Pity.
