The Robert Kraft-connected sex trafficking scandal just took an ugly turn for Donald Trump and his sons
After exposing Jeffrey Epstein’s egregiously light 2008 sentence for trafficking in underaged girls, along with current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta’s role in those plea negotiations, the Miami Herald is now reporting that Donald Trump was photographed at his Super Bowl party last month with the founder of the massage parlor chain that includes Orchids of Asia in Jupiter, FL, made famous after a human trafficking sting ensnared New England Patriots owner and Trump wingman Robert Kraft last month.
Though founder Cindy Yang reportedly sold the chain in 2013, she has clearly stayed in touch with the Trump clan, as Donald Jr, Eric Trump, along with former Florida Governor and current senator Rick Scott and current Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, all posed with Yang at the West Palm Beach shindig.
While it’s true that Yang is no longer the owner of the business, her continued influence on its operations is unknown, and the optics are clearly awful for a president who was already attached to convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein via his public declaration of friendship, before apparently rewarding Acosta for going easy on Epstein by appointing Acosta to run the Labor Department. It doesn’t take a supercomputer to connect the three dots from the founder of Orchids of Asia to Donald Trump to Robert Kraft. It perhaps does require incredible analytical powers to figure how a multi-billionaire like Kraft would otherwise know of a sleazy strip mall tug shop like the one he was busted at without a tip-off from the president. Did he stumble upon it on a jaunt to Buffalo Wild Wings? Or did his billionaire boys club buddy Donald “know a tremendous joint” based on his relationship with Cindy Yang? What makes the most sense…by a long shot?
We’ll probably never know the dirty details, and neither the nihilist GOP nor Trump’s self-lobotomized base cares about anything but attaching themselves to whatever Trump and Sean Hannity inform them that “winning” is, thus the cheerful overreaction to Paul Manafort’s pathetically soft sentence from the “tough on crime” set. They’ll blow this off. But reporters and perhaps a House Democrat or two should ask Trump if he’d be amenable to giving back the $16,000 Yang donated to his presidential campaign before gifting $42,000 to a PAC called Trump Victory in 2017.
In fact, both Rick Scott and the brazen Trump lackey Ron DeSantis have a whole lot of explaining to do/ Both their constituents and their wives are surely all ears. Maybe it’s all a big coincidence and these pictures just look really, really bad in light of the big Orchids of Asia human trafficking bust? Perhaps Cindy Yang just sold a legitimate strip mall parlor chain to the wrong kind of person and was completely oblivious to what happened after. If it’s not all just mad happenstance, Donald Trump, his grown sons, and his Florida flunkies should prepare to answer a lot of tough questions about their disturbing connections to human traffickers. Why does this keep happening?
Chuck is a former community reporter, columnist, and Army veteran