August 20, 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Steve Bannon was just arrested for running a giant con on Trump supporters.

He and a few buddies started a “charity” inviting people to make contributions to help “build the wall” on our southern border. Gullible and vulnerable people gave them millions of dollars, and they used that money for their own purposes.

This shouldn’t surprise us. The entire Trump campaign has been one long con job.

It started when Trump announced he was running for president, not because he thought he would be a good president but because he thought it would force GE and NBC to pay him more money for his Apprentice show.

He assembled a group of grifters around him, like Bannon and Manafort, and, with the help of several foreign governments including Russia, they managed to squeak him into the White House.

Since then the grift has gone into overdrive. They are giving away public lands to campaign donors, giving huge no-bid contracts to friends and campaign donors, passing out massive tax breaks to their largest campaign donors, and even trying to destroy the Post Office on behalf of campaign donors.

The biggest and most dangerous part of the Trump con job on America, however, was called out last night by President Obama, who pointed out the Donald Trump and his grifter buddies represent an actual threat to the safety and security of Americans and to democracy itself.

From billionaire funded right wing think tanks to billionaire owned Fox News to billionaire funded efforts to put billionaire friendly judges on our federal courts to billionaire funded groups like ALEC writing the very legislation that gets made into law, the “conservative“ movement started by Ronald Reagan in 1980 has been one long grift.

Many Americans have known this all along, but the reality of it has only penetrated the broader public’s consciousness in the last few years as it has become so brazen.

In response, the billionaire grifters have kicked their grift into overdrive. They sponsor bizarre conspiracy theories, questioned the viability of democracy, attack American institutions from our intelligence services to our post office, and try to wrap their a theft of America’s resources and wealth in the flag.

America’s racists and neo-Nazis are very happy about all this, as are the billionaires benefiting from this con job, but the rest of America, and the very viability of democracy in our republic going forward, have been severely harmed.

The question now is whether enough Americans have awakened to this 40 year-long con job that has reached its peak with the Trump presidency that we can put this behind us.

If we fail to, we may not have a second chance.

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.