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Author Topic: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2  (Read 290463 times)

Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4424 on: November 27, 2021, 11:00:02 PM »
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Why would a self proclaimed "billionaire" need to scam his fans out of their money? I don't see any real billionaires doing this. That's because this fraud isn't one.     

Trump’s Campaign Bilked His Fans Out of Millions Because of Course It Did



Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.

Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.

Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.

At first the auto-checked box simply said, “Make this a recurring monthly donation.” Then it added, “Make this a recurring weekly donation until 11/3,” with a second box below it, with even more text, authorizing an additional one-time $100 donation on September 29.

Ultimately, the messages included two text-heavy boxes, filled with boldfaced, all-caps slogans, with a much less conspicuous line at the bottom informing whoever had made it through this mini op-ed that they were authorizing the campaign to drain their bank account. These images comes from the Times story:



Goldmacher found victims who faced serious financial hardship as a result of this scam. Even some professional political operatives sometimes failed to recognize the inconspicuous little box.

The story cannot tabulate how much the campaign raised from unwitting victims. Many of them simply paid without realizing it. The only measure of the size of the grift comes via people who recognized their bank accounts were losing funds every week and demanded a refund. There were a lot of them: The Trump campaign refunded $121 million, or $101 million more than the Biden campaign did.

Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.

Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.

It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling the Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”

Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/trumps-campaign-scammed-donors-auto-checked-box.html

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4424 on: November 27, 2021, 11:00:02 PM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4425 on: November 28, 2021, 10:35:24 AM »
Proud Boys are Trump's base.

Proud Boys terrorize Small Business Saturday shoppers on Long Island



About 20 members of the far-right Proud Boys militia group marched Saturday on Long Island — flashing white power signs, entering stores and shouting slogans.

The march took place in the Village of Rockville Centre, on the South Shore in Nassau County.

"Members of the group marched down Sunrise Highway, waving American flags and 'Don't Tread on Me' flags and playing music from the back of a pickup truck," Newsday reports. "Some store owners appeared surprised and alarmed by the demonstration, while diners expressed concerns about the group coming to the community."
Judy Griffin, a Democrat who represents Long Island in the New York State Assembly, said the Proud Boys did not have permits for the march and didn't give the village notice about it, adding that the event seemed intended to disrupt Small Business Saturday.

"They're a divisive group of hate and violence," Griffin said. "They don't have any place here. I'm all for freedom of speech, but this group doesn't have a very good track record and seem to come to communities to incite problems and polarize."

Democratic state Sen. Todd Kaminsky posted video from the march on Twitter, writing: "The Neo-fascist Proud Boys marched through Rockville Centre today, close to my office. I think the latest elections emboldened them-I don't remember this happening before. I will not be silent. Their hatred has no place here-this is not the Nassau I know. Who else will speak up?"

Rockville Centre Mayor Francis X. Murray, a Republican, told Newsday he didn't know who the Proud Boys were, and declined to comment on the march.

Watch in link below:

https://www.rawstory.com/proud-boys-2655856445/

Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4426 on: November 29, 2021, 12:42:49 AM »
You wouldn't even have a mentally incompetent unqualified moron in charge of your company but this idiot had the most important job in the world.   

CIA releases detailed report about what it was like to give Trump infrequent 'presidential daily briefing'



The CIA released the latest chapter of the ongoing history of Presidential briefings, Micah Zenko tweeted over the weekend. According to the information provided by the U.S. spy agency, Trump didn't much care about national security, while Vice President Mike Pence did the "daily briefing" six days a week. Previous reports cited anonymous sources, but the CIA report detailed the specifics on the record. The report went even deeper into what agents experienced, noting Trump's rants and other issues.

By the time that the 2020 election rolled around, Beth Sanner was the one briefing Trump. The so-called PDB, "Presidential Daily Briefing," actually only took place twice a week under Trump and lasted about 45 minutes, with the overwhelming majority involving Trump's ranting.

"Even during times when President Trump publicly expressed great irritation with the IC—most notably in 2019 when an IC employee filed a whistle-blower complaint concerning the president's efforts to have Ukraine investigate a political opponent, Joe Biden—briefings continued as usual and Trump' s demeanor during the sessions remained the same," said the report. "After the 2020 election, PDB briefings also continued for a period of time. When Sanner briefed the president before he went to Mar-a-Lago for the holidays, he commented that he would see her later. The briefings were to resume on 6 January but none were scheduled after the attack on the Capitol."

By contrast, Pence so regularly held a "presidential daily briefing" that he had briefers to his home and gave them a commemorative medallion as a gift. They offered him a certificate of appreciation as he left office, the report continued.

The report also confessed that no briefing was as bad as Trump's other than Nixon.

"For the Intelligence Community, the Trump transition was far and away the most difficult in its historical experience with briefing new presidents,". The only (and imperfect) analogue was the Nixon transition, when the president-elect effectively declined to work with the IC, electing, instead, to receive intelligence information through an intermediary, National Security Advisor-designate Henry Kissinger," the report also explained. "Trump was like Nixon, suspicious and insecure about the intelligence process, but unlike Nixon in the way he reacted. Rather than shut the IC out, Trump engaged with it, but attacked it publicly."

James Clapper also wrote in his book about Trump's inability to focus during briefings as a candidate. After taking over the White House, Clapper left and Trump brought in his own team.

"Clapper recalled, Trump was prone to 'fly off on tangents; there might be eight or nine minutes of real intelligence in an hour's discussion,'" the report recalled. "The irreconcilable difference, in Clapper's view, was that the IC worked with evidence. Trump 'was 'fact-free'—evidence doesn't cut it with him.'"

You can read the full chapter at the CIA's website.

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-national-security-daily-briefing/

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4426 on: November 29, 2021, 12:42:49 AM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4427 on: November 29, 2021, 05:58:44 AM »
Junior always looks drunk or coked up.

'Hasn't the Trump family had enough riots?' Acosta lambasts Donald Jr. for his hope of an uprising



Donald Trump Jr. demanded a "riot" because of COVID-19 in the United States, referencing the protests in other countries where, like in the United States, people are buying into conspiracy theories.

According to Trump, "they" don't want people to hear about the protests because it might give people ideas. It assumes Americans haven't already been protesting for the past year over everything from CRT to masks and Trump's 2020 election loss.

"I'm trying to figure this out," Acosta said after showing the video. "Don Jr. is upset that there aren't riots here in the United States over COVID vaccines? Hasn't the Trump family had enough riots at this point?"

"Uh, apparently not, not for their taste," said CNN analyst John Avlon. "Speaking of Alex Jones' level energy, Donald Trump Jr. seems certainly amped up about his latest conspiracy theory. And the invoking of sheeple is when you know it's all gone really, really well. This has nothing to do with freedom. This conflation with public health with propaganda is a source of the lot of the sickness in our country, not just the persistence of the virus but the disinformation that gets fueled by people like Donald Trump Jr., who should probably find a real job at this point."

Avlon, Acosta and PBS's Margaret Hoover went on to talk about the latest GOP pearl-clutching over Kamala Harris' shopping trip at a Parisian cooking store. Avlon laughed, noting that they support a president who has an apartment like an Austin Powers villain.

See the discussion below:


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4428 on: November 29, 2021, 01:31:16 PM »
Americans officially bid farewell to Trump's DC hotel that gave access for top dollar



Washington (AFP) - Occupying an entire city block a short walk from the White House, the Trump International Hotel is a splashy neolassical palace steeped in more than a century of Washington lore.

The towering atrium features a huge skylight that dapples the lobby bar in winter sun as the nation's power brokers savor $140 glasses of wine served in Hungarian crystal, or $10,000 tumblers of vintage Macallan scotch.

After a drink, guests with $385 to spare can rejuvenate with a "hydrafacial" skin treatment downstairs before reclining on designer linens in one of the 263 stately, wood-paneled rooms.

"It's a beautiful place," one-time White House spokesman Sean Spicer gushed about the hotel, which is set to become a Waldorf Astoria in the New Year, ending six years of ownership by Donald Trump.

"It's somewhere that he's very proud of, and I think it's symbolic of the kind of government that he's going to run."

Spicer turned out to be correct.

Trump promised to "drain the swamp" of corruption in Washington, but instead opened his very own quagmire on Pennsylvania Avenue -- inviting a dizzying array of conflicts of interest.

During Trump's four years in office, the 19th-century Romanesque Revival-style hotel became a magnet for top donors, corporate lobbyists and foreign governments seeking to spend big in the hope of winning influence.

"The law is totally on my side, meaning the president can't have a conflict of interest," Trump said in 2016 when asked about mixing his day job with promoting his sprawling business empire.

'Influence peddling'

The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) lobby group tracked 150 officials from 77 foreign governments that visited a Trump property during his presidency.

According to a congressional probe, the Washington hotel took in $3.7 million from countries including China, Kuwait, Turkey, India, Brazil and Romania.

The Philippines told a television station back home its decision to use the hotel for a 2018 Independence Day celebration was "a statement that we have a good relationship with this president."

The clientele raised concerns about possible violations of anti-corruption provisions written by the nation's founders restricting the acceptance of gifts to office-holders from foreigners.

"Donald Trump should never have been allowed to keep his DC hotel as president," CREW's head Noah Bookbinder said.

"He should have divested himself of it along with the rest of his businesses before taking office. Instead, he rode out four years of using it for influence peddling and constitutional violations."

Altogether, domestic political groups spent $3 million at the hotel across some 40 political events during the Trump era.

Special interest groups, such as the American Petroleum Institute, often took part in White House meetings alongside a hotel event, and many secured favorable policy outcomes, according to CREW.

AFP reached out to the Trump Organization, but there was no response.

The former president handed control of his businesses to his two adult sons and a trustee when he entered the White House, promising not to get involved while in reality promoting the venues at every opportunity.

Meanwhile, the Trump Organization pledged to donate its profits from foreign governments to the US Treasury.

Built in the 1890s, the 12-story Old Post Office that houses the Trump International is the third-tallest building in the capital, after the Washington Monument and National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

$12,000 a night

Scheduled for demolition several times, it was bailed out in 2011 when Trump pipped Hilton and Hyatt with a bid pledging to sink $200 million into a makeover.

The hotel opened in the fall of 2016, a few months before Trump entered the White House, effectively making the new president his own landlord, in violation of a provision banning elected officials from "any share" of the lease.

A review of rates by AFP found the least expensive room around the end of November would cost $512 per night. A night in the Franklin Suite, including breakfast in bed, was on offer for a cool $12,109.98.

But the sky-high prices did not translate into profit.

Investigators in Congress found the hotel lost more than $70 million during Trump's presidency, concluding that he had "grossly exaggerated" its profits.

The Trump Organization called the report "intentionally misleading, irresponsible and unequivocally false" and described it as "political harassment."

But reports in US media have chronicled low occupancy as the Trump International has struggled to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Trump Organization sold the lease for a reported $375 million to an investment fund, which plans to reopen the hotel in the first months of 2022 as a Waldorf Astoria.

"The Trump Hotel DC stood as a bright neon sign telling foreign countries and moneyed interests how to bribe the president and a stark reminder to Americans that his decisions as president were just as likely to be about his bottom line as about our interests," CREW's Bookbinder added.

"Selling it now that he's out of office and the grift dried up is, to say the least, too little, too late."

© Agence France-Presse

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4428 on: November 29, 2021, 01:31:16 PM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4429 on: November 29, 2021, 01:47:49 PM »
Requiem for Donald Trump’s Grift Factory
The former president is selling off the D.C. hotel that served as the brightest star in his universe of scams


The Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C., a gaudy monument to presidential corruption and misgovernment, is about to be sold by the former president to new buyers. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that the Trump Organization is in “advanced discussions” to sell the 60-year lease on the government-owned property to a Miami-based investment firm, less than a decade after acquiring it. Donald Trump’s once-prized acquisition was five years old and is survived by the corrosive effect it had on American anti-corruption efforts.

The hotel’s cause of death was the Covid-19 pandemic, which had a devastating impact on the hospitality industry in general, as well as the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. According to Trump’s last financial disclosure report in 2020, revenue at the D.C. hotel alone had plunged by 62 percent that year. Those losses compounded earlier shortfalls: A House Oversight report earlier this week revealed that the hotel had accrued more than $73 million in losses between 2016 and 2020.

When Trump struck a deal with the federal government for the property in 2013, it looked like a lucrative venture. The 260-room hotel sat within the historic Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, roughly one-third of the way between the White House and the Capitol building. Guests would be merely steps away from a variety of museums and landmarks on the National Mall. Ironically, it also sat adjacent to the Justice Department’s main headquarters and across the street from the FBI building.

But trouble began almost immediately after Trump mounted his presidential bid. His company planned to open two restaurants in the building led by renowned chefs José Andrés and Geoffrey Zakarian. But both men withdrew from their respective projects with Trump after he launched his campaign with racist comments about Mexicans in the summer of 2015. Despite the business’s prime location and decent accommodations, it apparently struggled to attract a broad assortment of guests during Trump’s divisive presidency.

That did not deter everyone from staying there. For many in Trumpworld, the hotel was a place to see and be seen—a bizarro Camelot where Republican lawmakers, conservative elites, and MAGA enthusiasts could cross paths, mingle, and hobnob the night away. On some evenings, Trump himself would grace the hotel with his presence like Louis XVI greeting his courtiers at Versailles, settling in for a well-done steak at Table 76. It was as close as Trump came to friendly territory in the nation’s capital; he only ate at one other restaurant in D.C. during his entire presidency.

Some of the guests of Trump’s hotel checked in with a different sort of baggage. Trump’s inaugural committee, which raised funds through private donations, pushed cash into his hotel in 2017 at such high rates that some planners raised concerns that the Trump Organization was overcharging them. Lobbyists of all stripes bought rooms and dined at restaurants while seeking favor before the man who effectively served as landlord and tenant of the government-owned property for four years. Some weren’t even subtle about it. While seeking regulatory approval for a merger with Sprint in 2018, T-Mobile executives frequently stayed at Trump’s hotel while in town, with one making 10 separate visits, according to The Washington Post. John Legere, the company’s CEO, reportedly stayed at least four times and was regularly spotted wearing T-Mobile-branded gear in its well-traveled lobby.

Perhaps the most controversial guests, however, were those who came in from overseas. When the hotel opened in September 2016, it hired a “director of diplomatic sales” to handle the anticipated influx of diplomats and foreign officials who would stay at the hotel. Given D.C.’s small geographic size and massive global stature, the city’s major hotels are accustomed to hosting a wide range of international guests. But Trump’s hotel had a habit of drawing millions in dollars in business from countries that also sought favor with the Trump administration itself: the governments of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and other foreign powers spent tens of thousands of dollars on lodging at the hotel during Trump’s presidency. The Trump Organization insisted it complied with the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause by transferring any profits from foreign sources to the Treasury.

That voluntary compliance did not ameliorate all of the ethical problems that came with the president owning a hotel in the nation’s capital. Trump’s predecessors typically took steps to divest any business holdings and avoid the appearance of corruption or impropriety. Jimmy Carter famously sold his peanut farm to meet post-Watergate expectations of good governance. Though many of the early presidents owned large plantations, which were troubling in different ways, the practical limits of nineteenth-century commerce made them poor vehicles for corrupt transactions. Trump, however, refused to sell his stake in his family business or place his assets in a blind trust as president and, in doing so, opened the door to unprecedented cash-for-influence schemes.

In theory, the Constitution forbids these sorts of schemes with foreign nationals and governments. But the Foreign Emoluments Clause is not self-enforcing, and the courts generally declined to find that anyone had standing to bring a lawsuit against Trump for breaching it. Multiple lawsuits, including some brought by members of Congress, were thrown out by federal courts in recent years on procedural grounds. Legislation that would create mechanisms to enforce the clause does not appear to be imminent. My 2018 proposal to avoid future corruption traps by nationalizing any president-owned businesses, including the Trump Organization at the time, has yet to garner any support on Capitol Hill.

became channels for people to swap large sums of money for access and influence over the previous four years. Trump briefly floated his resort in Doral, Florida, as a possible site for a G-7 summit, effectively turning a major diplomatic event for world leaders into a free ad for his properties. Former Vice President Mike Pence went out of his way to stay at Trump’s Doonbeg resort in Ireland, ostensibly because it was well equipped to handle his entourage. (Dublin apparently doesn’t have hotels.) And Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s current residence and the site of his postpresidential court-in-exile, doubled its membership fee to $200,000 almost immediately after he took office.

What made Trump’s D.C. hotel truly unique, however, was the sheer blatancy of the grift. Thanks to the havoc wreaked upon federal anti-corruption laws by the Supreme Court over the last 15 years, corruption is an almost pedestrian habit in modern American politics. The Supreme Court, in its infinite majesty, allows rich and poor Americans alike to donate millions of dollars to super PACs, to shower elected officials with lavish gifts while seeking favors, and to enjoy a stream of benefits from politicians unimpeded by federal prosecutors. But the Trump International Hotel in D.C. was more flamboyant, more undeniable, and, in some ways, more transparent about the health of American democracy than any Federal Election Commission filing could ever be. In that sense—and that sense alone—it will be sorely missed.

https://newrepublic.com/article/164006/trump-selling-dc-hotel-emoluments

Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4430 on: November 30, 2021, 11:08:11 AM »
Lincoln Project slams GOP's 'violence and domestic terror tactics' in scathing new ad

The Lincoln Project has laid out a roadmap to defeat Republican candidates in key congressional races in next year's midterms.

The PAC set up by current and former Republicans who oppose Donald Trump says the GOP cannot be reformed and must be defeated to preserve American democracy, and the group's latest ad points the way, reported Florida Politics.

"The Republicans know what they’re doing,” says the ad's narrator, listing the GOP's opposition to coronavirus safety measures and its seeming embrace of "violence and domestic terror tactics."

“Republican leaders have turned their backs on America — putting power and ambition above service," said co-founder Reed Galen. "They’ve spent this year implementing an authoritarian political agenda in an effort to subvert democracy in 2022 and 2024."

Watch the ad below:


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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4430 on: November 30, 2021, 11:08:11 AM »


Offline Rick Plant

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Re: Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2
« Reply #4431 on: November 30, 2021, 02:41:51 PM »
Time to indict the Trump Crime Family.

Trump Org fleeced Americans for $1.7 billion while in office: David Cay Johnston

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston has calculated how much money flowed through Donald Trump's businesses while serving as president — and has reached a startling total figure.

CNN's Brianna Keilar interviewed Johnston about his new book, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family.

"A new book is pulling back the curtain on how much former President Trump enriched himself and his family while he was in office, finding that nearly $1.7 billion in revenue flowed through him and his organizations during his four years as commander-in-chief," Keilar reported.

She described the book as "the most complete picture we've seen of this."

"Tell us how much Donald Trump profited — and how you were able to get to this number," Keilar asked.

"Well, Donald Trump had to disclose his finances as president, all top federal officials do," Johnston replied. "Now, several of them filed very incomplete and misleading forms. Donald, in fact, asked through his lawyers if he could file financial disclosures without signing under penalty of perjury. He was told, no, you have to sign under penalty of perjury."

He explained that of the more than $1.7 billion in question, much of it came from taxpayers.

"Donald did everything he could to make sure the taxpayers were putting money into his businesses," he noted. "Hundreds of millions of dollars."

In addition to his business interests making money, Trump has also received large amounts of donations.

"You know, you also talk about it, just before the 2020 election and on his way out the door with stop the steal fundraising, he rakes in $500 million," Keilar noted. "He spends less than $9 million on lawyers, the rest of that money, he can use how?"

"Oh, he can spend it on himself," Johnston replied.

"I expect that once he is indicted in Manhattan and perhaps other jurisdictions, a lot of that money will go to criminal defense lawyers," he explained.

"Really fascinating," Keilar said.

Watch: