May 7th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

Over the years, it’s been well-documented that the Trump Crime Family has run a whole variety of frauds and grifts. The New York Times reported how Trump and his sister ripped off the IRS with a massive tax fraud to lay their hands on their daddy’s estate. There are numerous stories in the media about the Trump children lying to investors to sell condos in New York, and Kushner’s sister selling Green Cards to Chinese people who invest in Trump properties.

And now we have Jared Kushner running the White House’ operation to get tests, personal protective equipment, and vaccines. That task force, too, was filled with hustlers and grifters from banks and hedge funds, and therefore utterly failed. The grift has now expanded in a dangerous and potentially deadly way with the “anti-lock down“ movement being funded by authoritarian right wing billionaires like Betsy DeVos.

Running a grift to make money or even to acquire political power is nothing new, but running a grift where you empower and turn loose on America a group of well armed wannabe Nazis carries the real threat of creating deep and lasting damage to our society and our form of government. Many of these people are calling for their “boogaloo“ - a new, race based Civil War.

We saw this movie back in the 1860s, and it’s not one we want to repeat. Trumps “very fine people“ need to be marginalized, not used to promote his latest grift. They need to be pitied, condemned, and socially ostracized for the traitors and pathetic America haters that they are. Some suggest all this will end with the election in November; but more likely Trump has done the same kind of damage to America that the original America First movement in the 1930s did when it promoted fascism and racism across this country and further empowered the Klan.

It’s going to take years, and perhaps even decades, for America to recover from the damage of these grifters, and their fellow traveler billionaires and neo-Nazis.

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.