He has even conned The New York Times.
After publishing, on Wednesday October 3rd, an eight page detailed description of the fraud and lies that culminated in Trump becoming President, on Saturday October 6th the New York Times stated “this may be the best week of his presidency”. This evaluation was based on the impending confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, plus the signing this week of the USMCA agreement with Canada and Mexico, which replaces NAFTA.
Both of these events typify the “Art of the Con’ which has enabled a business loser – and ignorantly wrong-headed genius self-promoter – to dramatically change the direction of America in less than two years..The finale of the pre-ordained Kavanaugh appointment was based on a sham FBI investigation, which Trump proclaimed as without limits except as to time, but which was so limited by the White House as to preclude interviewing anyone who might corroborate the testimony of Kavanaugh’s accusers. NAFTA, which Trump had excoriated as “The worst trade deal ever made’, was slightly modified (at the expense of damaging our close relationship with Canada}, and re branded by Trump as USMCA, so he could hail it as a great deal.
Bob Woodward’s book “Fear – Trump in the White House” provides insight into Trump’s way of operating. He holds strong views in his mind which are impossible to change and he has now surrounded himself with people who support those views. He dismissed as “Bullshit” the efforts by people such as Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, HR McMaster, Rance Priebus and others, who went to great pains to educate him on the real world consequences of implementing his views – and they are now all gone. Now he is implementing his misguided convictions. This includes his basic feeling that America is just a business and that we should only support countries from which we make a profit. He sees no need for allies. He sees America as being in conflict with all other countries (with the notable exception of Russia) and thinks that we need to be a winner against all of them. And he sees himself autocratically as the sole decider in every situation and resents interference from congress and the courts.
The frightening thing is that, through his incredible instinctual ability to say the right (most outrageous) things to the right people at the right time, he has conned everyone into making it happen. He has conned the Republican Party into blindly supporting his every move, (Witness Lindsay Graham’s transformation from a severe critic to an adoring cohort.) He has put two arch conservatives on the Supreme Court, including one who will prevent him from being subpoenaed while in office. And why should we be surprised that he has so ardently supported for the Supreme Court an accused sexual attacker who has lied to congress, when he, himself, is an admitted sexual attacker who is documented to have lied more than six times each day of his presidency?.
The New York Times study documents how Trump consistently conned people into believing that he was a brilliantly successful businessman who had used a “small” million dollar loan from his father, which he had paid back in full with interest, into a ten billion dollar fortune, when not one word of that is true. At the age of two he was receiving the equivalent of two hundred thousand dollars a year. By the age of eight he was a millionaire. All the early triumphs he claimed as a Manhattan developer were actually his father’s projects. His own ventures were frequently failures (e.g.:the Atlantic City casino’s, the Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel), from which his father bailed him out. Yet he conned NBC into making him the star of “The Apprentice”. He even tried to con his father, when he was in the early stages of dementia, into changing his will to give him outright control over his estate. And, finally, he conned his way to the presidency.
To those of us who have been fearing an “October Surprise” that would negate the incipient Blue Wave in the mid-terms – which could give the Democrats control of the House and possibly the Senate – he seems, incredibly, to have found a way to turn the Kavanaugh debacle to an electoral advantage, re-energizing Republicans and turning the blue wave purple.
So, please, heed the Presidential Alert in the above New Yorker cartoon. The “Action Required” is to vote. Unless some rein is applied to Trump by a Democratic-controlled House, who knows where the greatest con man ever will take us? What we do know is that it won’t be good.
Gerry Meandering 