The fluttering you are hearing in early March of this year is not the wings of finches and sparrows and chickadees returning to your bird feeder after a long winter away from the cold. It is instead the sound of millions of dollars flying into the pockets of Donald Trump, who Wired magazine reports is holding so-called “candlelight dinners” for groups at the low low price of $1 million per head. If instead you want a private audience over burned steaks and limp fries with the president of the United States, you have to plunk down five million bucks, a tasty opportunity that is being signed up for by “business leaders,” according to Wired.

It's notable that these pay-to-play repasts are not being held in the White House -- which is after all a public building owned by the American taxpayer and not an event space that you can rent out at will -- either because they didn't pass the smell test of the White House counsel's office or it would be too unseemly even for the loosey-goosey standards of the Trump White House.

Instead, the chummy private dinners are being held at Trump's club/resort/residence in Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago. The fluttering bucks are not going directly into the pocket of the renowned grifter and cheapskate, but rather taking a detour into something called MAGA Inc., described by Wired as “a super PAC that supported Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.” What a campaign super PAC is doing still operating in the public sphere after the election is over is unknown. Sources told Wired that the money is “all going to the library.” If your reaction to that little nugget is Library? What fucking library? you're not alone.

The money Trump rakes in from the suckers who think they're buying access, when what they're actually getting is rubber chicken, will pass through the Byzantine accounts of one of the several Trump super PACs that came into being as he planned his return to the Oval Office. He might skim some off as admin charges, or he might make use of the capacious pockets of his sons and daughters whom he “hired” to work in various capacities in his reelection effort, who then passed their paychecks directly into the Trump Organization.

But it's a certainty that a massive quantity of dough he takes in will be charged as rent for space in Mar-a-Lago, and thence be transmitted directly to Trump himself as sole owner of that garish galump-zone squatting in tattered splendor between the Atlantic Ocean and Lake Worth Lagoon.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com -- from which this is reprinted with permission -- and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

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