August 10th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Trump says he is going to boost unemployment payments by $400, stop evictions, cut payroll taxes, and extend student loan relief.

In fact, these are all lies. As usual, it’s a new con job, a grift from our grifter-in-chief.

On the unemployment payments, he lacks the authority to appropriate money for people from the Treasury Department like Democrats did with the cares act, so he’s taking $44 billion still left in the FEMA budget and saying that he will pass that money out to unemployed people - if states match $300 from FEMA with $100 from the state.

If every state took him up on that, the FEMA budget would be exhausted in a few weeks, just as we are entering what may be the worst hurricane and wildfireseason in decades. It’s a scam. It also was not an executive order: it was merely a directive to the emergency agency.

On student loans, he merely issued a “memorandum“ requesting that the Education Department study the feasibility of doing something about the student loan crisis.

On evictions, he actually issued a presidential executive order, but it doesn’t require evictions stop. Instead, it asks the department of Health and Human Services to investigate the possibility and feasibility of stopping or slowing evictions at the department level, something that HHS has no authority to do outside of its own low income housing. Another scam.

And on the payroll tax, he does not have the authority to turn on or off Americans owing taxes, so he says you will still owe the payroll tax every paycheck, but the government just won’t bother to collect it… until the end of the year, a month after the election. Then you are going to owe all the payroll taxes that were not collected, and you’re going to have to pay it by April 15. You know, when the next guy is president.

Donald Trump has pretended to be a billionaire for years by laundering money for foreign oligarchs and living on borrowed cash from Deutsche bank. He looks like a billionaire, lives the lifestyle of a billionaire, but in all probability, according to David Cay Johnston and other reporters and economists, he is broke and deeply in debt and has been since the late 1990s.

This executive order and three memorandums basically continue that scam he’s been running ever since he burned through the last of his daddy’s money, only now he has the federal government running it, too.

There will not be extra money in your paycheck this month, you can still be evicted, your student loan banker will continue to demand payments and interest, and even if your paycheck, if you’re employed, goes up 6% between now and the end of the year, you will owe back every penny of that money on April 15th.

Meanwhile, we have no national testing, our schools are in chaos, our elections are under attack from both foreign governments and the Post Office, a quarter-million Americans will be dead by election time and 5 million are already sick, and Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate are on vacation.

Trump continues to live the life of a grifter, and is applying that to the federal government. Abraham Lincoln famously said that you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.

Trump figures all he has to do is fool “some of the people all the time” and get enough of them to vote while he prevents everybody else from doing so. He calls those people his “base.“

The fate and future of America, and democracy around the world, hangs on whether he gets away with this latest grift.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy 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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