How Do We Prevent the Next Grifter-in-Chief?: Thom Hartmann for BuzzFlash
December 3, 2020
Trump is just the tip of the iceberg in GOP grifting, although his tends to be more focused on personal enrichment. Mitch McConnell represents the continuation of decades of GOP oligarchical grifting at the expense of working class, poor and even upper middle class Americans. (Gage Skidmore)
By Thom Hartmann
Trump and McConnell are both pushing pardons. Trump wants pardons for his criminal cronies, enablers, and children. McConnell wants pardons for meat packing plants and corporate criminals.
Although past presidents have had family members working for them - Attorney General Bobby Kennedy is a famous example - none have ever had to pardon their family members for criminal activity in the White House. Until Trump.
Trump’s family of grifters have been extracting money from our government and the American people since day one, starting with the inaugural fund scandal. Just since he lost the election. Trump has raised over $170, million: the grift continues!
Trump has sold out our country and our values. He’s given top-secret information to foreign adversaries, embraced dictators and autocrats around the world, and enthusiastically damaged our relationships with allies. It’s almost as if he’s working for a foreign government.
Now we are experiencing 9/11 death rates every single day caused by a virus Trump refused to save America from. Why did he let a quarter million people die and several million become severely disabled from Covid? Incompetence, treason, or a new grift?
Our healthcare system is collapsing; except for the wealthy person‘s stock market, the economy is shredded; and every day average people across America are getting multiple fundraising appeals from Trump.
Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell wants America’s worst corporations pardoned for forcing workers into situations that cause death and disability, both from Covid and other conditions. And he’s holding Covid aid hostage until he gets his corporate pardons.
With very few exceptions, pretty much every elected Republican in the country is supporting both these men in their corrupt pardon demands. Which is crazy.
Since Reagan, Republican ideology has had at its core the fantasy that corporate behavior should never be regulated; when corporations do bad things, the marketplace will punish them so government regulations are unnecessary.
It’s crazy, of course, but it’s the excuse Mitch McConnell is using to say that big corporations in America like meat packing plants and warehouses should not be held responsible if they make decisions that cause their employees to get sick or die.
McConnell’s demanding pardons for corporate criminality in the Covid relief is as obscene as Trump preemptively pardoning his children and criminal co-conspirators. Republicans screamed for years about Bill Clinton pardoning Mark Rich, but now? Crickets.
Trump and McConnell are revealing the true essence of what the Republican Party has become since radical right-wingers took it over with the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1981.
In the 1990s, Newt Gingrich doubled down on the new Republican grift with his Contract on America, where 6 of his 10 points were variations on tax cuts for rich people and his giant corporate funders. Gingrich is now in deep with Trump’s new email fundraising grift.
Republicans’ Reaganomics grift poisoned our air and water and froze workers’ wages for 40 years, while making CEOs and GOP politicians like David Perdue mind-bogglingly rich, all rationalized by a rightwing echo chamber so most Americans didn’t realized how poisonous it is.
Now the GOP’s “Government can’t do anything” grift is out in the open; it’s killed over a quarter million Americans, and led to open, naked, unabashed criminality in the White House, where even second- and third-level functionaries proudly flaunt the Hatch Act and election law.
Trump wants his pardons for himself and his family and criminal buddies; McConnell wants his pardons for the corporations that give him money. Both will probably get away with it, but we need to make sure this level of corruption and criminality never happens again.
After Trump leaves office, we need to revisit the 1970s when Congress passed multiple laws regulating money in politics to protect American from criminals in the White House like Nixon and Agnew. This is so much worse: Congress must act!
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute
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