OK, quick show of hands. Who among us in here has ever been “conned?” Really? You sure? Come on now, my hand is in the air, where’s yours? After all, at it’s core, being conned simply means that somebody is taken advantage of by somebody else.
There’s two universal things about being conned. Number one, it’s universal. Not only has everybody reading this, as well as everybody who’s not reading this been conned, we all get conned every day. The HVAC dick who hoses us for unnecessary repairs. The tip to a waitress or waiter who provided shitty service. Giving a bum $2 to get his filthy rag away from your clean windshield. Everyday occurrences, and every one of them a con.
The second universal thing about being conned is that we all fucking hate it! I swear, most people I know, including me, would rather be robbed than conned. At least if you’re robbed at knife or gunpoint, you’re a innocent victim. When you get conned, the con man makes you his willing accomplice. People will dine for years off of the terrifying story of how they were robbed, but nobody will admit to anyone else that they got conned, Because nobody wants to feel like a schmuck.
Donald Trump is without a doubt one of the premier con men of the 20th century. I mean, think of this. Donald Trump has filed for business related bankruptcies at least 4 times, and yet he has somehow or other managed to make millions of dollars by convincing schmucks that his very name is gold! This ass gasket makes your freakin’ cell phone provider look like an honest broker. That takes some kind of stones.
As president, Donald Trump has gotten away with being a brazen con man for almost three years for a very simple reason. Because the cons that people in the know were trying to expose were the wrong cons. Congressional Democrats spent more than two years trying to explain how Trump was conning us about his dirty, secret deals with Putin and the Russians. Bad call. That’s way too complicated, and outside of normal peoples’ experience to explain. That’s like trying to explain the “Dutch Land Grant” scam to anybody who doesn’t own a house on the east coast.
And what else? Oh yeah, they spent almost two years trying to point out how His Lowness obstructed justice when first Mueller, and then congress, tried to investigate his impossible to explain dealings with Putin and the Borscht Brigade. Sorry, try again Charlie. Because proving obstruction requires criminal intent, and anybody who has ever listened to Trumpenstein talk knows that whenever he opens his mouth, he doesn’t intend to do anything except to fill the room with hot air and gibberish.
When does a con man get into trouble? When he gets caught. And Don the Con is in the process of getting caught as we speak. Because every good con man knows, as does every good magician, that the secret is in misdirection, or a diversion. And Trump has lost his diversion. For more than two years, Robert Mueller and the Russia investigation was the shell he could hide the pea under while he used suggestive facial and hand motions to make you pick the empty shell. Any time one of Trump’s more pedestrian cons was reported on in the press, Trump simply waved his hands, and focused everybody back on the empty Mueller shell. And it worked like a charm.
But those days are over now. Robert Mueller has gone back to being a private citizen, playing with his grandkids, and trying to wash the Trump stink out of his clothes. There is no empty shell left for Trump to point to when the media spends a week in relating how, in a fit of bad tempered pique at being wrong, Trump intentionally tried to panic millions of Alabamans into running for their lives from a hurricane that wasn’t coming, while also potentially lulling millions of people directly in harms way into a false sense of security.
And there’s no longer an empty shell to wave at when the media reports about Trump conning the air force into flying a thousand miles out of their way to buy overpriced fuel at a dinky ass Scottish airport, while a captain, a lieutenant, and three airmen spend the night at Trump’s failing golf resort, where their per diem doesn’t leave them any money to buy overpriced food. Or the Vice President staying 2.5 hours away from his conference site in Dublin to stay at another gilt Schlock Trump palace.
And thank the Lord and little fishes if the Democrats aren’t actually paying attention for once! Yes, they’re still making grr-grr-grr noises, and pounding their chests about Trump-Russia, but they’re also holding hearings about these more common, hiding-in-plain-sight cons that everyday people can see and understand. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget that little farrago of being an un-indicted co-conspirator in that hush money scheme for porn stars. You know, the one your personal attorney is spending three years in the pokey for?
Forget about impeachment, even on these easier to explain cons. You could have high res photographs of Trump on the grassy knoll, pulling the trigger on JFK, and the GOP Senate won’t convict. The sole objective now is to get Trump out of office next year, and these cheap, shoddy, transparent cons are going to help to do it.
Because everybody fucking hates to get conned. And because everybody pays taxes. And even people who voted for Trump are not going to be thrilled about their tax dollars going into Trump’s pockets through his crappy Scottish golf resort, when there is cheaper gas, and billets on the bases that the air force flights normally go to refuel and lay over. And they’re gonna shit a cow when they finally pay attention to, and learn that not only does Trump charge the Secret Service premium rack rates for the Secret Service agents to sleep in while they protect him at Mar-A-Lago, every couple of months, it costs a cool $50,000 in golf cart rentals, so the Secret Service can chase him around while he burns through golf balls in woods and water hazards, along with three erasers altering his score.
None of these are state secrets, hell, some of them, like the Mar-A-Lago expenditures have been known since day one. But nobody paid any attention, because Trump kept diverting that attention back to Mueller while he blithely lined his pockets. But people are paying attention now, because the distraction is gone. People are not going to like their hard earned tax dollars going into Trump’s pockets, especially since he brags about how stinking rich he is. And if there’s one thing that people hate even more than being taken for a ride, it’s getting their noses rubbed in it. Like Trump did when he sneeringly tweeted about those air force crews having such “good taste” in staying at his resort. News Flash! I don’t think that 38% is Trump’s popularity floor in polling once this shit starts piling up.
To know the future, look to the past. before the insanity of the 2020 election, relive the insanity of the 2016 GOP primary campaign, and the general election, to see how we got to where we are. Copies of President Evil, and the sequel, President Evil II, A Clodwork Orange are available as e-books on Amazon, at the links above. Catch up before the upcoming release of the third book in the trilogy, President Evil III: All The Presidents Fen
Love your articles. Just got ‘President Evil,’ looking forward to reading it.
Hey Terrie, thanks so much on both counts!!! I hope you enjoy it…They’re pretty much daily dispatches from the campaign, in chronological order, so hopefully you can get an idea of how things built up to what eventually became our current national nightmare….
Prestwick isn’t all *that* dinky – it’s got at least 8 gates for jets, looking at Google maps (and you can clearly see a USAF jet parked out back off the main runway, which is something over 6000 feet long). Train station out front, with a pedestrian bridge right to the terminal, also.
Which is all nice, PJ, but still nothing to qualify for a diversion wasting fuel, to buy even more overpriced fuel…
Oh so true. You know that was Himself’s idea.
It’s not dinky if it can handle a C-17. That’s for sure. However it’s long been a money losing airport. There’s such a thing as over capacity even for airports. The govt. over there bought the place for a single Pound. And they’ve been trying without success to sell it since as it’s still been losing money, even with the deal Trump made to route jet traffic to it for stays at his golf club and the Air Force ramping up visits and paying full price for fuel. Again, a c-17 holds a shitload of fuel and although the place is still losing money their revenue increased by 3 million last year thanks to the U.S. taxpayer and the Air Force ramping up sending crews/flights out of their way from U.S. military bases they used to almost always use in the past year or so.
It’s one thing for our govt. to make arrangements with civilian airports both overseas and here at home to sometimes take a military aircraft & quite another to start regularly routing military aircraft to them when U.S. bases or allied military airfields are available – at significantly lower cost to U.S. taxpayers. Trump needs that airport to stay in business to have any hope of cutting his annual losses at that resort.
One final note that hasn’t been mentioned in all this. We all know how fervent Trump’s support is with Evangelicals and the U.S. Air Force has a long history of going over the top in forcing “Christianity” down their member’s throats. The Air Force Academy itself got wrapped up in scandal over decades of their prosthelyzing culture. That can’t happen without significant support and even direction from generations of top leadership. I can’t help but wonder if some of the Generals who have been responsible for this aren’t part of the Air Force’s Evangelical culture.
Something I’m not clear about nor have heard anything on is when did these diversions to Scotland start, and how often? How many stops there are we talking about? Does anybody know for sure?
Maybe you’re right and the majority of the American people are finally starting to catch on to the tRump shell game. Can anyone even imagine a sitting occupant in the Oval Office actually bragging about not paying taxes for nearly 10 years, only to run up over 1 trillion in new debt and red ink as far as the eye can see.
See, that’s the other thing…If ANY part of his taxes come out, even if there’s no fraud, which I find inconceivable, his tax rate compared to his voters is going to be a cold slap in the face…Exactly why he kept them hidden in the first place…
The GOP-T has convinced their followers that lower taxes are better, and reality doesn’t seem to get through until they discover they don’t have paved roads and nice parks and libraries any more. Or hospitals that aren’t at least 30 miles away.
You got that right my friend…
He also, if i correctly recall, invested 250 mil in Prestwick as an ownership stake, so he’s selling jet fuel to the airforce at a nice profit to himself, I’m sure. How much is he pocketing from every plane and every serviceman? What a PABOTUS!!!!!
” I don’t think that 38% is Trump’s popularity floor in polling once this shit starts piling up.”
Neither do I, I’d guess him hitting the low twenties and even getting into the teens. But more striking is his disapproval rating, he’s getting more than 50% in Texas.
Texas!
I live in Austin, which is like an eclectic oasis in the middle of Texas. But in the 2018 mid-term elections, many more Democrats were voted into various offices all over the state. Especially important were the wins on school boards and judgeships. The parts of Texas that are still deep red are rural & most suburbs are definitely purple now.
Trump’s war on migrants is a war on Texas culture itself. No matter what political party one claims, Tex-Mex is a popular notion. Our public schools have extremely successful Spanish immersion classes, beginning with Kindergarten which my grandkids have been in since they began going to school. Texas has a huge number of crops that must be picked by hand but seasonal workers have dried up. No one really worried about so-called “illegals” because they contribute so much financially to their communities and have never committed serious crimes. The detention camps are a source of shame for all. Taking private property for Trump’s vanity wall is making even his voters very unhappy.
The mass shootings have made many Texans rethink their views on gun control. Most folks think of having the right to bear arms means a shotgun or rifle for hunting and maybe a pistol for shooting beer cans, not weapons of war. I think that the Republicans may have overplayed their hand with Trump. I sure hope so, for the sake of my own children & grandchildren and everyone else’s too.
Immersion is the way to go. I just hope your public schools did not create the Spanish immersion classes full of Spanish-speaking students by requiring those students to take so-called bilingual education classes and denying them English immersion.