He's a con man, liar, hate-mongerer whose lies have cost at least half a million American lives. Yet his MAGAnuts love him.
When Dustin Thompson was hauled before US
District Judge Reggie Walton for assaulting the Capitol police on January 6th,
his defense lawyer, Samuel Shamansky, argued about Trump:
“You had, frankly,
a gangster who was in power. The vulnerable are seduced by the strong. That’s
what happened.”
The jury didn’t buy the argument and sent
Thompson to prison, as US District Judge Reggie Walton, who was overseeing the
case, said:
“I think our
democracy is in trouble because, unfortunately, we have charlatans like our
former president who doesn’t, in my view, really care about democracy but only
about power.”
And yet Trump remains popular with about 20 percent of the
American public, making up the majority of the Republican primary-voting base.
But why?
There’s nothing new about charlatans and
confidence men. Marco Antonio Bragadini (1545-1591) was one of
Europe’s most famous: he convinced both a pope and the government of Venice
that he could turn lead into gold and they financed a lavish lifestyle for most
of his life.
William Thompson was America’s first
labeled “confidence man” in New York in the 1840s because he’d approach wealthy
men, pretend they were old friends, and ask them if they had “the confidence”
to give him their gold watch for an hour: many did, and he ran the scam for years
before being busted.
Donald Trump
similarly convinced banks that he was had assets worth ten, twenty, sometimes
more than fifty times their real value as was revealed in court this week. The
self-proclaimed “king of debt” then used his borrowed money to support a
lifestyle that reinforced everybody’s belief that he was truly rich.
After American banks refused to lend Trump money, he and his
good friend Jeffrey Epstein turned to Deutsche Bank
and managed to extract over $2 billion from that institution with the help of
William Broeksmit, Thomas Bowers, and Justin Kennedy.
Broeksmit hanged himself in 2014, leaving a suicide note and paperwork tying him to the bank’s unit accused of laundering some $10 billion of Russian oligarch money along with over $400 million in questionable loans to Trump.
As stories about
Trump’s finances began hitting the media in 2019, Tom Bowers (55 years old),
who signed off on Trump’s loans, also hanged himself.
Justin Kennedy worked for Deutsche Bank
from 1998 to 2009 and, according to the Finance Editor of The
New York Times, David Enrich as reported by The
Guardian’s Julian Borger:
“Drawn to Trump’s
risk-taking and glamour, he [Kennedy] became a Trump confidant, sitting with
the real estate impresario at the US Open tennis or in Manhattan nightclubs,
and chaperoning huge loans to finance Trump’s real estate spending sprees.”
Kennedy was also
the son of US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who, when apparently asked
by Trump to resign to make room for Brett Kavanaugh, mysteriously complied and
stepped away from one of the most powerful positions in America.
Without the help of these three men, Trump would almost
certainly have ended up broke and destitute. He’d been sued thousands of times
for nonpayment of his debts and was well known to New Yorkers as a hustler and
scam artist with a long string of failed businesses behind him.
In fact, by the time of his bankruptcies
in the 1990s he had squandered almost all the roughly half-billion dollars he
inherited from his father and stole from his brother, nephews, and nieces (as Mary Trump will tell you) before
being rescued by mobbed-up Russian oligarchs looking to launder ill-gotten
gains via real estate.
NBC further saved
him by making him the star of a reality TV show that was every bit as deceptive
about Trump’s wealth and business acumen as were Bragadini’s exhibitions of
gold he’d “transmuted” from lead.
This is the great patriot whose father hired a doctor to lie
about his being disabled by bone spurs in his feet to get him out of the
Vietnam draft five times. Five other young men were sent to that
hellscape to die or be injured in Trump’s place.
— He promised to build a wall across
almost 2,000 miles of our southern border and he promised Mexico would pay for
it. Instead, he built about 50 miles of wall
and repaired another 400 that was scheduled for maintenance anyway. Mexico
didn’t contribute a penny: the money was taken from the Pentagon budget for
upgrading soldiers’ housing.
— Trump promised
to cut the deficit, a routine lie from every Republican president since Reagan.
Instead, he added at least $8 trillion to our national debt.
— He promised to
replace Obamacare with a national health care plan that would cover everybody
for lower cost. It was another lie, just like when he promised to cut drug
prices for seniors: instead, Joe Biden got drug prices under control and
insulin down to $35/month.
— Trump promised
he was going to cut taxes on the middle class: instead, he raised taxes on
working people while cutting over $2 trillion from the tax obligations of
America’s billionaires.
— He told us COVID would just “go away
like magic.” It didn’t. The week of April 7, 2020, when he learned that the
disease was mostly killing Black and Hispanic people, he abandoned efforts to
contain the virus and issued an executive order requiring mostly minority
essential workers to go back to work: as a result, over a half-million Americans died
unnecessarily.
— Trump ridiculed
Obama for occasionally playing a round of golf, saying he’d be so busy as
president that he’d never take that kind of time off. Instead, he billed you
and me for over $135 million for the 250+ times he visited his own golf clubs.
— He said he’d
increase economic growth by four percent, a number America hadn’t seen since
the 1960s. Instead, like Herbert Hoover, he left office with fewer jobs than
when he entered. Joe Biden, however, just oversaw a GDP increase that was over
4% and more jobs created in a president’s first two years than any time in
American history.
— He repeatedly
promised an infrastructure plan: every week for months, it seemed, was
“infrastructure week.” But it never happened: instead, Joe Biden put a massive
infrastructure program in place that’s today producing jobs across the nation.
— Trump promised to “fight for the dignity
of women and mothers.” Instead he’s been convicted of raping E. Jean Caroll and
more than 20 other women claim he did the same to them. And he brags about
packing the Supreme Court to overturn abortion rights in America.
It’s almost impossible to find a
transcript of any speech or press conference by Trump that’s not filled with
exaggerations and lies: over 30,000 of his falsehoods while in office were
compiled into a book. Trump’s persistent lies have
become so common that the media no longer reports on them.
Trump cheated on
and lied to each of his three wives, lied on his taxes, lied to his bankers and
insurance companies, and lied to the American people.
And yet, he’s still held in the tight embrace of Republicans
nationwide. Why?
One theory is that people are basically trusting, and we tend to
measure somebody’s truthfulness by the certainty with which they make their
assertions. Pathological liars like Trump can be shockingly convincing: it’s
the con man’s stock in trade.
They prey on the fact that most people
conflate or confuse confidence with competence. In fact, most truly competent
people rarely act arrogantly confident:
instead, they’re constantly testing their understandings and skills against
reality to keep sharp and accurate.
Another theory is that the people who support him know he’s a
liar and a fraud and don’t care, so long as he promises to hurt those they
mutually hate: Black people, Hispanics, Muslims, the queer community, uppity
women, academics, and liberals.
It’s a variation on the old saying, “He
may be an SOB, but at least he’s my SOB.” People who are
motivated by fear and hate — like much of the Republican base — aren’t usually
all that concerned with what they consider the nuances of honesty and integrity.
Which brings us to the final reason why so many people still
trust and follow a known liar and con man like Donald Trump: they’ve bought
into what’s essentially a cult.
The first
imperative of all cult leaders is to cut their followers off from contrasting
information that may shatter the cult’s hold over them. While Jim Jones and
Osho had to forbid their followers from reading or watching the news to
accomplish this, Trump has three television networks, hundreds of websites, and
fifteen hundred radio stations all echoing his lies to keep his cult intact.
The good news is that Trump has been able to get as far as he
has, both in business and politics, because most people are basically good and
trusting. The bad news is that he’s succeeded in suckering millions of those
trusting people with his Pied Piper routine.
Trump’s civil and
criminal trials may go a long way toward puncturing his carefully crafted
façade of business and personal success. If they don’t — if, as feared, they
merely strengthen him — we’re all in for a really rough ride over the next few
years.