Donald Trump’s exit through the grift shop
The bad news: imagine you’re a four times-indicted criminal defendant with millions of dollars in mounting legal fees. You’ve just been handed, in rapid succession, two crushing civil defamation judgments, one for 5 million dollars and the other for a blood-curdling 83.3 million dollars, both for raping and then defaming a woman. Meanwhile a judge is contemplating exactly how much money you’re going to have to pay for your numerous business frauds. Will it be 250 million dollars, 350 million dollars, 400 million dollars? More civil and criminal fines and expenses loom over the horizon.
The good news: now imagine you’re a billionaire — supposedly. Even if your legal fees, your rapes, your swindles, your cons, your lies, your shell games, your stochastic terrors, your myriad instances of negligent incompetence wind up costing you a cool billion, that’s okay. You cool. You got this. You can come out the other side relatively intact, economically speaking. Besides, on top of everything else, you’ve got a $226,300 annual pension that no civil judgement on earth can touch.
But imagine you’re also Donald Trump. You’re the kind of guy who promises to pick up a measly dinner tab for enthusiastic supporters, then you sneak out the back and leave everybody holding the check. What’s a Donald to do? Easy. You let others pick up your fees, your fines, your expenses. You leverage OPM, Other People’s Money, for all your legal bills.
That could account for why Donald Trump is so evidently cavalier in his attitude toward his recent economic humiliations. In fact, we just learned this week that Donald Trump’s fundraising committees channelled a staggering $50 million toward bankrolling his legal defences throughout 2023.
Despite the fact that some of Trump’s larger donors are abandoning the MAGA ship, Trump can still extort money from his MAGA base. The suckers and losers who attend his rallies, wear his stupid red hats and fly the Trump flag over their trailers are still reliably dumb enough to raid the rusty coffee cans on top of their 30-year-old fridges for Trump. No sacrifice is too great for their Lord and Saviour.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings have shown for years that millions of dollars spent combating Trump’s charges and fines have come from Trump’s Save America political action committee (PAC), which takes donations from Trump supporters across the country. Hallucinatory alarms are cynically raised by the GOP about leftist villains and a dire, apocalyptic “crisis at the border” to provoke the drooling cretins of MAGAland to donate their hard-earned money.
After being taken on a phoney tour of an American landscape allegedly “devastated” by Joe Biden, the morons, suckers and losers of Trump’s base are directed to exit through the grift shop. It’s not enough that many of them are already poor, now they’re expected to pay for the crimes, excesses and torts of this rich asshole who sits on a golden toilet but doesn’t even give a crap about them.
Nice job “owning the libs,” MAGA fools. Have you any idea how much contempt we have for you? Have you any idea how much, in the final analysis, the joke is on you? If ignorance is bliss, welcome to Trump heaven. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.