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It's Inauguration Day! Welcome To The Grifters Ball

It's Inauguration Day! Welcome To The Grifters Ball

Legalized bribery is still bribery — and there is no other way to describe the celebration that marks the second presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.

With the menacing manner of a mob boss, Trump has extorted million-dollar contributions from dozens of corporations that fear federal retribution against their shareholders or management (as in the case of Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, who coughed up his million after Trump literally threatened him with "life in prison" not so long ago).

No doubt many of the corporate and billionaire donors are keen to prove their loyalty to a new administration that promises to uphold their interests. They know better than to worry about Republican proclamations that their party now represents "working class" Americans. Nobody who has glanced at Project 2025 or read Elon Musk's posts could harbor any such illusions — and surely the inaugural donors from outfits such as General Motors, the pharmaceutical lobby, Pratt Industries, Uber, Amazon and Microsoft do not.Many of the corporations currently greasing Trump withheld donations from his 2016 festivities, apparently repelled by the racism, misogyny and propensity for violence he had flaunted during the campaign. Some combination of fear and greed has overcome any such scruples this year.

Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, a nonprofit that monitors corporate influence, is tracking the payments of tribute, and even its jaded staffers are shocked by the Trump inaugural's brazen style. Said Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at the Nader group: "The record-breaking cesspool of special interest financing for the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee raises serious concerns about the ability of corporations and wealthy special interests to purchase influence over public policy or lucrative government contracts." Remember last spring when Trump told oil executives that they could have whatever they want, so long as they raised a billion dollars? He just appointed one of them, a fracking magnate and climate denier named Chris Wright, to take over the Department of Energy.

Estimates of the amount that the presidential inauguration committee will collect from both eager and reluctant donors range up to $200 million, a record sum that has prompted boasting from Trump and his minions. Impressive as it is, the inaugural hoard only represents a down payment on what portends to be four years of unprecedented and gluttonous corruption.

If you wonder why Trump needs $200 million for this little event, so does everyone who ever ran a prior inauguration. Due to frigid weather in Washington, the 47th president will take the oath of office indoors at a ceremony paid for by the taxpayers. Then the Trump-Vance committee will host only three inaugural balls — a tiny schedule compared with the number of balls held by his predecessors — plus a few events at his Trump National Golf Club, miles from the capital.

In other words, they're spending almost none of that big haul.

Yet while the actual expense of parties and fireworks will be nominal, the opportunities for grift are vast. As in so many instances during Trump's first presidency, those golf club events are siphoning big money from the inaugural fund into his business accounts. The Trumps ran a similar scam eight years ago, when the 2016 inaugural committee inked massively overpriced contracts for rooms and services purchased from the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

That pattern continued during his administration, with big profits booked from taxpayers footing the bills at Trump resorts for Secret Service agents protecting the president and members of his family.

Where will all the money go this time? In 2017, the Trump inaugural raised $107 million, a total far in excess of what the committee spent on its events. The committee — whose top staff included notorious crooks like Rick Gates and Elliot Broidy — never presented any accounting of its expenditures, let alone an audit. Tens of millions of dollars simply disappeared.

The official story is that funds not spent on this week's festivities will be transferred to the newly formed Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Fund Inc. — ostensibly to establish a repository and museum memorializing his presidency.

Maybe that will happen someday. But the sordid history of the Trump Foundation, ordered to shut down after the New York state attorney general proved its myriad abuses, showed that the Trumps are familiar with every trick for looting a nonprofit. Nobody audits the inaugural committees, which are not required to disclose their spending. The likelihood is that most or all of the tainted inaugural lucre will wind up somehow in their pockets.

Day One won't see a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, a drop in grocery prices, or anything else that Trump promised during his campaign. The customary grifting will resume promptly, however, as soon as he takes his hand off the Bible. In fact, it has already begun.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.






Why Veterans -- And Every American Who Cares For Them -- Must Beware Hegseth

Why Veterans -- And Every American Who Cares For Them -- Must Beware Hegseth

When Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense appears before the Senate Armed Service Committee, they ought to ask his views on the health care and other benefits provided to the Americans who serve our country. If he is honest, Pete Hegseth's answer may surprise or even shock many Trump supporters who naively believe the president-elect “loves our veterans,” as he often declares.

If Hegseth believes anything, it is that veterans’ benefits are wasteful and way too lavish – and because he is a veteran who promotes that canard, he has consistently enjoyed the support of wealthy benefactors and right-wing media outlets. That is probably why, despite his manifest failures and disturbing personal history, he is on the verge of taking over the Pentagon’s top position.

Trump reportedly chose Hegseth, a glib and telegenic figure decorated for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, because he “looks the part.” Presumably that is also why he appealed to the billionaires who elevated him to lead two conservative veterans’ organizations – Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and later Concerned Veterans for America (CVA).

Neither of those organizations could ever have been described as a “grassroots” group with organic roots among actual veterans. Instead, as The New Yorker magazine reported in its damning profile of Hegseth, each of these outfits was a synthetic construct financed by super-rich and ultra-right Republicans for specific purposes that had little or nothing to do with veterans’ own interests. To describe them as “veterans advocacy organizations” is bit like describing MAGA as an immigrant advocacy organization.

The actual purpose of VFF was to advocate for the expansion of the war in Iraq, a project that Hegseth eventually repudiated -- long after the American public and even Republicans who had supported the initial invasion (including Trump) decided that the war had been a terrible mistake. Far from helping veterans, VFF promoted a conflict that caused the deaths and grievous wounding of thousands of American soldiers.

Hegseth’s gross mismanagement of that group and its finances resulted in his ouster before it was folded into another organization to avoid bankruptcy. By then, however, Hegseth had established himself as a conservative talking head with a military resume.

The far-right Koch brothers, who have deployed their fortune in support of their politics under many guises, hired him as the public face of CVA, the “veterans organization” that is an integral part of their ideological network. CVA serves multiple purposes on the Republican right, putting a stamp of veteran approval on GOP candidates and causes.

Among those CVA causes is privatization of the Veterans Administration, which the Kochs apparently viewed as a way of driving down costs and cutting federal spending. Their general attitude is that everyone in American society benefits too much from government, which is funded with their money, which they shouldn’t have to pay in taxes.

But Scrooge McDuck isn’t a great look for any corporate leader, so billionaires like the Kochs always need someone else to front for them, advocating benefit cuts and other policies that will probably be unpopular. No doubt that's why Pete Hegseth held onto those well-compensated jobs at VFF and CVA, even though he spent much of his time getting drunk and abusing women while employed by those Republican fatcats. Although his embarrassing misconduct became too big a liability for them, he had moved on to Fox News by then, where his misogyny and extremism were a perfect fit.

Whatever his sponsors may have felt about Hegseth as a human being, they appreciated his views on veterans’ benefits and health care – which closely paralleled their own desire to cut spending. As head of Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth pushed drastic cuts in Veterans Administration programs, so that the network of hospitals and comprehensive medical care would be provided only to those with “service-connected disabilities and specialized needs” – not the lifetime health benefits that veterans have long received. Many veterans would no longer qualify for VA care of any kind.

Now the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, and his billionaire pal Vivek Ramaswamy, have articulated much the same vision for their “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE. They want to cut a trillion or two from the federal budget, and the Veterans Administration is in their gunsights. Of course neither of them has ever served in the US military, nor has anyone in their families.

That is where Pete Hegseth has always played such a useful role. Having begun his career in politics and media as the servant of wealthy Republicans who wanted to slash veterans’ benefits, he serves the same purpose now, except with immeasurably higher status – and, given his extraordinary lack of qualifications as defense secretary, the potential to do grave damage to the security of the United States.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Stoking Division Amid Disaster, Trump And His Minions Betray America

Stoking Division Amid Disaster, Trump And His Minions Betray America

The solidarity of American communities in the face of catastrophe, whether natural or manmade, is an aspect of our national character that most of us cherish. We never tire of stories about our fellow citizens upholding each other at the worst of time. We venerate the firefighters, emergency service workers, law enforcement officers and ordinary neighbors whose endurance and sacrifice holds communities together against cruel circumstance – without regard to race, creed, color, gender, or partisan affiliation.

Or at least we did during much of our history. Yet as huge swaths of Los Angeles are consumed by wildfire, it is striking to see those traditional American values torched by a self-serving coterie of right-wing billionaires, whose loyalty to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement is nil: Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and of course their political avatar Donald Trump, the president-elect.

While the LA blaze rages on, all three of these men have used their gigantic public platforms to stoke a different but exceptionally destructive conflagration. Rather than encourage patriotic bonding and mutual aid, they broadcast messages of division, hatred, and suspicion, served up in a poisonous stew of blatant lies, conspiracy theories, and wretched nonsense.

Even as the Los Angeles Fire Department’s undaunted officers and leaders work around the clock, confronting danger and tragedy in every moment, loudmouths like Musk have the temerity to attack them, prattling on about “DEI,” the effort to mitigate decades of discrimination. Neither the Tesla mogul nor Murdoch’s blithering minions on Fox News Channel -- who are shocked that the LA fire chief is a lesbian -- have produced a shred of evidence to show that diversity hinders firefighting. They never will. For the purposes of right-wing Republican propaganda, facts and logic are irrelevant and annoying.

In the same vein are Trump’s attacks on California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom he disparages with his usual gutter vernacular as “Newscum.” Posting ridiculous falsehoods about the state’s water supply, claiming the governor is withholding water from burning communities, can only be regarded as an obnoxious distraction while state officials try to save lives and stop the fire. With reservoir levels at or above capacity in most of the state, there is no shortage of water, but its use has been hampered by the awful winds and other technical barriers.

Instead of seeking ways to support the scorched and weary Angelenos, the Trump gang aims only to fabricate myths that will overshadow the real cause of this disaster. On CNN, GOP spokesman Scott Jennings has repeated a fake story about budget cuts to the LA Fire Department, when in fact the department received a $50 million increase last year. Donald Trump Jr and various other clowns are whining over a tiny donation of equipment to Ukraine, which has no impact whatsoever.

They will literally say anything to avoid discussing the way climate change – the underlying cause of the hot, dry superstorm that turned a local fire into a regional inferno. They don’t believe in it, so it can’t be causing the fires. Except of course it is.

Trump’s impending return to power is awful to contemplate in these circumstances -- especially for those in California who remember how he behaved the last time he occupied the Oval Office. He denies climate change and oppose any program to stem its deadly impact. And he has repeatedly manipulated federal aid to punish states he considered politically hostile to him, including during the 2018 wildfires in southern California.

As reported earlier this year by Politico, Trump refused to approve critical assistance for those communities until aides showed him that Orange County had given him more votes in 2016 than the entire state of Iowa. Obviously, that is not what presidential duty requires, as if that would matter to him.

The incoming president appears to have no compassion, no instinct to help those who have suffered horrendous losses and terrible. As usual, he is thinking about himself, his partisan objectives, and his obsession with vengeance against perceived enemies.

The Trump years, which will now be extended for another presidential term, have inflicted awful damage on American morale, empathy, and unity. Restoring that spirit will take years and probably decades. It doesn’t seem accidental that Murdoch and Musk, Trump’s gleeful enablers, are of foreign origin. Like him, they display no regard for American ethics and customs. And like him, they are making America not great, but small, stupid, and mean.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.--


In Belligerence Toward Our Neighbors, The Real Trump Emerges

In Belligerence Toward Our Neighbors, The Real Trump Emerges

Anyone naïve enough to believe that Donald Trump is an “antiwar” politician -- or, more fashionably, a foreign policy “realist” -- must have been startled when he threatened the security of Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and Panama at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday.

But for anyone who has paid the slightest attention to Trump’s utterances and actions over the past ten years, his latest outburst is no surprise at all. Notwithstanding the incessant efforts by his fans on the far right (and far left) to shine him up, the incoming president is an unrepentant imperialist, warmonger, and international bully.

Trump lied about his military and foreign policy record throughout the 2024 campaign -- and Democrats somehow failed to point out that he was emphatically not the cautious, peace-loving opponent of intervention being sold to voters. “I had no wars,” he told Iowans last summer, as if that were the end of any further discussion. “I’m the only president in 72 years…I didn’t have any wars.”

But when Trump proclaims his pugnacious intentions toward America’s neighbors and NATO allies, he is merely expressing the same dangerously aggressive schoolyard attitude that always marked his rhetoric and then his presidency.

Whenever the United States intervened in the Middle East, for instance, Trump has urged that our only objective should be seizing oil for ourselves, rather than seeking to stabilize the region or curtail brutal dictators. Although he lied about his own supposed opposition to the Iraq invasion, he has never tried to conceal the fact that all he wanted was Iraq’s oil. Several years later he repeated himself when the Obama administration moved against the Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. "I would take the oil — and stop this baby stuff," brayed Trump. "I’m only interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don’t take the oil, I’m not interested."

What draws his malign attention now to Greenland, Canada, and Panama is that they have enormous resources and strategic locations, all of which he evidently aspires to acquire, perhaps by force. While he complains about the border and the drug cartels, the same may be true of Mexico, another oil exporter. No such military adventures would be possible without grave costs in human life and American honor, but they would surely serve the interest of Trump’s admired friend and principal sponsor Vladimir Putin, justifying Russian imperialism against its own neighbors.

Those who minimize and excuse Trump’s bellicose rants are forgetting (or want us to forget) how close he brought us to a nuclear exchange with North Korea. Within less than a year after he took office, the inexperienced but arrogant president drove us toward the brink not only with his taunts against Kim Jong Un, but by ordering the Pentagon to prepare for an attack. As Fred Kaplan wrote in his book The Bomb, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. James Mattis oversaw planning that “assumed the United States would strike the first blow.”

In early 2018, Trump told his national security aides that he wanted to evacuate all US personnel from South Korea – an insane directive that would have sent an unmistakable signal to Kim of warlike intentions. Mercifully we never learned how far that might have escalated. His orders were ignored and he apparently forgot about the whole mess. It is still horrifying to think how a mindless, reckless president might have stumbled into a holocaust.

So as with everything else Trump, believe him when he displays ill intentions and bonehead ignorance. Don’t pretend that he’s just kidding or cleverly “negotiating.” We are entering an extremely perilous time for the United States and the world.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.--

Tesla Workers Say Musk Used H1B Visas To Replace Americans He Laid Off

Tesla Workers Say Musk Used H1B Visas To Replace Americans He Laid Off

Elon Musk’s aggressive defense of the H1B visa program --which permits his companies Tesla and Spacex to bring engineers and other workers from overseas – has aroused fury among his erstwhile admirers on the far right. Despite his ongoing efforts to identify himself with the most extreme nationalists, xenophobes, and racists both here and across Europe, they suspect that the world’s richest man is driven not by love of his adopted country, but by his lust for money.

Fresh evidence that Donald Trump’s new best friend is motivated by greed rather than MAGA fervor has emerged via Electrek, a popular website that covers the electric vehicle and green energy industries (and has sometimes been accused of excessive solicitude for Musk and Tesla, or worse).

Electrekreported this week that after a massive wave of layoffs at Tesla last spring, the company replaced many of its higher-paid American employees with foreign workers holding H1B visas. In the wake of Musk’s bruising online feud with other Trump allies – most prominently Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer – a number of whistleblowers reportedly showed up to expose the EV giant's alleged mistreatment of Americans working there.

“Over the last few days, several current and former Tesla workers reached out to Electrek to reveal that Tesla ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace US workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year,” according to a story by its editor-in-chief, Fred Lambert, that led the website on December 30.

Last April, Electrek reported that Tesla dismissed about 15,000 US employees, mostly in Texas and California – but then the company moved to fill those same jobs with imported labor at lower cost.

“Current and former Tesla employees said that many of the laid-off US workers were replaced by foreign workers using H-1B visas,” noted the website. “These claims are backed by US Department of Labor data, which show that Tesla requested over 2,000 H-1B visas during the time it was laying off US workers…Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay.”

Lambert offered his own nuanced view of the controversy, which is that H1B visas may well have a legitimate role in supporting US tech industries but can also be abused – which may be what Musk has been doing. He points out that the H1B rules afford corporations like Tesla enormous power over the visa-holding workers, who can only remain here as long as they are employed by the firm that sponsored them. In other words, those workers have far less autonomy and clout than unionized worker in auto – and we already know how much Musk hates unions.

One need not endorse the vicious bigotry of Bannon and Loomer -- nor their ridiculous views on immigration -- to acknowledge that they are probably right about Musk and other bosses lining up to exploit MAGA “nationalism” for their own power and enrichment.

As for the president-elect, of course he has been on both sides of the H1B debate, depending on whatever profits him at the moment. Various subsidiaries of the Trump Organization have hired thousands of foreign workers, using both the H1B and related H2B visa programs – and yet that didn’t stop candidate Trump from denouncing those programs as “very bad” and "unfair" for American workers when he was first running for president in 2016

Fraudsters like Musk and Trump are fortunate that the MAGA herd tends to be exceptionally ignorant and gullible – which is why Republicans can pretend to support American workers while complaining about the “globalists” and “elitists” who are lining their pockets.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

To Qualify For Trump's Cabinet, Grifting Is The Essential Credential

To Qualify For Trump's Cabinet, Grifting Is The Essential Credential

The trait most broadly shared by Donald Trump's nominees to top Cabinet posts is an utter lack of fitness for their prospective jobs. Most appear to be afflicted with negative attributes that would automatically disqualify them not only from these highly sensitive government positions but even from much less senior jobs in any normal administration. In that respect, they strongly resemble Trump himself.

Many of them share another outstanding characteristic with the president-elect. They are, like him, relentless grifters who keep monetizing their celebrity on the far right by ripping off the MAGA faithful with overpriced merchandise and other scams.

While right-wing scamming has a long history that can be traced back to the '50s Red Scare, Trump is the modern master of the craft. His persona as business genius always reeked of fakery, while his profiteering extended from the gross exploitation of his "charitable" foundation to multilevel marketing rip-offs and the "Trump University" real estate seminar swindle. More recently he deployed the "big lie" and false advertising to deceive his followers into sending hundreds of millions of dollars to his super PAC.

And during this year's presidential campaign, he roped credulous fans into buying hideous gold sneakers, tacky watches, autographed Bibles, junk digital images, souvenir coins and an array of similar junk. The man embraces avarice (and bad taste) with a zeal that any other head of state would consider shameful.

But such degraded behavior is now standard on the Republican right.

Lately the grifting career of Pete Hegseth, Trump's troubled choice for defense secretary, has come under scrutiny in The New Yorker and other outlets. As a "veteran's advocate" (who actually advocated severe cuts to the Veterans Administration), Hegseth ran nonprofit organizations that evidently squandered millions of dollars to subsidize his drunken partying and philandering, without achieving any of their supposed objectives. He drove at least one of those outfits into near-bankruptcy before its sponsors finally ousted him.

Less notorious yet equally unedifying were the enterprises fronted by Tulsi Gabbard, who spent tens of thousands of dollars donated to her Defend Freedom political action committee on bulk purchases of her recent book For Love of Country, boosting it onto The New York Times bestseller list. Mother Jones reports that Gabbard founded another outfit, a nonprofit called We Must Protect, which sucked in almost $128,000, ostensibly to aid victims of the Maui wildfires — and spent scarcely a third of that amount on grants to the unfortunate Hawaiians. She also ran a couple of PACs that took in hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they devoted to candidates or causes, with their cash mostly going to Gabbard aides and consultants.

Then there's Kash Patel, the conspiracy theorist and former congressional aide named by Trump to run the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he has vowed to use as an instrument of vengeance against Democratic officeholders and other Trump "enemies." Patel has closely mimicked the classic Trump hustles by developing his own MAGA fanbase, mainly by using his tax-exempt "Kash Foundation" to promote himself and his partisan crusades. The online publicity subsidized by the foundation has enabled him to market "America First" branded clothing, a line of K$H wines, and a nutritional supplement that promises to "detox" anyone who has been vaccinated against COVID-19. (Not surprisingly, as revealed by menswear writer Derek Guy, the ultra-patriotic t-shirts hawked by Patel are manufactured in Central America and Haiti.)

Back in the day, at least a few conservatives were repulsed by this kind of hucksterism, which they saw as demeaning to their party. During the 2016 presidential primaries, Marco Rubio mocked the fakery of "Trump University," highlighted its cheating of veterans and seniors, and denounced Trump himself, declaring that the GOP "cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States."

Rubio's indignation expired long ago — and since then, of course, he has transformed himself into a sycophant who will soon be confirmed as the con artist's secretary of state. Endorsing the con — and, indeed, practicing the con — is the most important credential to hold office as a Republican, and it will be for the next four years.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.


Saudi Lobbyist Escorting Hegseth On Hill As He Pleads To Save Nomination

Saudi Lobbyist Escorting Hegseth On Hill As He Pleads To Save Nomination

While Pete Hegseth scampers around Capitol Hill – desperately pleading for votes to confirm him as defense secretary, despite his thin resume and ample scandals -- it’s easy to spot a white-maned wing man trailing just behind him. That would be Norm Coleman, the last Republican senator from Hegseth’s home state of Minnesota.

Beyond partisan loyalty and shared roots, Coleman has a powerful commercial interest in who oversees the US military and its mammoth budget. He happens to be one of the principal Washington lobbyists for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and, perhaps not coincidentally, a top fundraiser of dark money for GOP campaigns. And he also chairs the Republican Jewish Coalition, another dark-money outfit that spends millions backing GOP candidates with campaign ads centered around Jewish community concerns.

With this extraordinary network of political warchests and secretive donors behind him, Coleman exerts enormous influence over Republicans in Washington. He was a founder of the Congressional Leadership Fund SuperPAC, which he continues to chair, and also oversees the American Action Network, a tax-exempt “social welfare” group that uses tax-exempt donations from undisclosed donors to support GOP campaigns (as boasted by his bio on the website of his lobbying law firm, Hogan Lovells). Those two outfits, backed by tens of millions of dark-money dollars in every cycle, are wings of a single organization with a shared office and staff based only a block from the White House.

Despite Coleman’s longstanding service to the Saudi dictatorship, a spokeman for CLF has insisted that none of its funding comes from foreign donors. But as disclosed in a 2022 report by Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept, both AAN and CLF have promoted Saudi interests here. Between 2021 and 2022, those outlets reported that “Coleman wrote over 1,000 emails to House and Senate staffers…as part of his paid work for Saudi Arabia. Coleman and several of his law firm colleagues are registered as foreign agents of the Kingdom,” which pays well over $2 million a year to Hogan Lovells. The former Minnesota senator was among very few public figures willing to defend the Saudi regime publicly after the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist and democracy crusader Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate.

Should Hegseth prevail in his confirmation struggle, the Saudis and their premier lobbyist will enjoy renewed influence in the Pentagon and US decisions about weapons sales and America’s military posture toward Iran and other states in the Gulf region. But that would only reinforce the close and potentially corrupt ties between Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman and the Trump family, on whom he has lavished enormous sums of money through the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which gave a $2 billion investment deal to Jared Kushner and has a lucrative deal with the Trump Organization to promote its LIV golf consortium.

Trump’s Saudi grifting is even more open and brazen than Coleman’s conflicted lobbying setup. When the president-elect and his entourage attended an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at Madison Square Garden on November 17 in a post-election celebration, Yasir al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, was seated right next to him.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Nominated For FBI Director, Patel Is Just A Standard Issue MAGA Con Man

Nominated For FBI Director, Patel Is Just A Standard Issue MAGA Con Man

For organized criminal gangs and foreign espionage agents operating in this country, their most cherished daydream would be to cripple the law enforcement agency dedicated to curtailing them – namely, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ranked among those enemies of the rule of law, of course, are many of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s closest associates -- who are, like him, convicted felons -- from Roger Stone and Mike Flynn to Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon, always whining about the agency that arrested and arraigned them.

Now, with the announced appointment of Kashyap Patel as FBI director, Trump aims to realize their fantasy of ultimate vengeance against law enforcement. Like so many Trump appointees to top government posts, Patel has a resume devoid of any qualifcations for this position, one of the most sensitive and vital in the US government.

He has no comprehension of how to protect the nation from foreign adversaries or domestic threats and has scarcely even pretended that will be his purpose. Instead, he has repeatedly threatened to misdirect national security resources against “the enemies within” – anyone who has dared to hold Trump accountable.

Patel will be sent into the FBI headquarters to dismiss its key personnel, dismantle its infrastructure, and induce fear in its ranks – all of which can only impede its mission. The potential consequences for the United States are so dire as to raise once again the question of where Trump’s true allegiance lies – and who truly directs his actions.

The director-designate is a clownish figure who has made a business of prostrating himself to Trump every day in the most ostentatious style, often by concocting and advancing conspiracy claims that bolster the MAGA cause. He is also a former Justice Department attorney with an empty record, who has falsely asserted that he led the federal prosecution of a Benghazi terrorist – when the public record shows he had no role in the case at all.

He has associated himself with the most reprehensible cult propaganda campaigns, ranging beyond Trump’s fraudulent claims of 2020 election fraud and into the poisonous QAnon mythology that accuses prominent Democrats and Hollywood figures of such perversions as child sex trafficking and cannibalism.

In other words, Kash Patel is a standard-issue MAGA con man. He also appears to be a small-time grifter, again like so many around Trump. Two years ago he registered a tax-exempt nonprofit called the Kash Foundation, which outlined its grandiose mission on its website: “The foundation focuses on providing legal support for whistleblowers and media accountability; filling gaps in mainstream media coverage and educating the public on critical issues; providing assistance to veterans, active duty service members, and law enforcement; and providing scholarships and tuition grants for higher education.”

The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries. Looking over the website, the true purpose of the foundation seems obvious: to promote Kash Patel and his profile on the far right. Or as a spokeswoman put it, “The foundation turned the tables on the adversity faced by Kash due to disinformation and media targeting, transforming it into a force for good .The Kash Foundation’s latest IRS return is an amusing document, which reveals that “interested parties” have sucked in more of those tax-exempt revenues than any supposed charitable beneficiaries.

With annual receipts of around $1.2 million, the foundation claims to have given $5000 grants to nonprofits benefiting the homeless in Nevada, church women in Virginia, and Air Force special operations veterans, and another $157,000 in direct cash grants to 50 unnamed individuals. But the big winner is a director of the foundation who also runs a media consulting business – and glommed more than $275,000 for “marketing services” and merchandise.

In misusing a charitable foundation to promote himself, Patel is mimicking his idol, who created a template for that kind of avaricious abuse with the Trump Foundation – eventually shut down by New York state authorities, fined $2 million, and forced to disgorge its remaining assets to actual charities. As FBI director he would provide a sore example for the attorneys general in every state, whose duties usually include oversight of charities.

Patel’s appointment is a raised middle finger to every honest law enforcement official in this country, including every man or woman who ever served in the FBI or the Justice Department, and a looming menace to the nation’s security at home and abroad. As with the aborted appointment of Matt Gaetz, it’s an insult requires Senate Republicans overcome their usual cowardice to fulfill their constitutional oath.

Keep in mind that President Biden did precisely the opposite when he entered the White House in January 2021. Biden kept FBI Director Christopher Wray -- a lifelong Republican appointed by Trump -- as a sign that he intended to maintain the federal justice system's integrity. He didn't oust Wray to replace him with a Democrat, let alone a sycophantic stooge from his own political entourage.

No one should doubt Trump’s determination to install his lackey in this critical post. He already tried to place Patel in the FBI leadership during the final months of 2020 – but Bill Barr angrily rebuffed that outrage and Trump retreated. In his 2022 memoir, the former attorney general noted that "Patel had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency.”

That is why the criminals and spies who surround Trump are applauding so loudly.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

How Donald Trump Corrupted Pam Bondi

How Donald Trump Corrupted Pam Bondi

Newspaper profiles of Pamela Bondi — subbed in as President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general following the scandalous implosion of Matt Gaetz — often describe her with a phrase like "longtime loyalist."

The former Florida attorney general's unwavering fealty to him dates back to September 2013, when a political committee supporting her reelection campaign received a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation. And the story behind that check foreshadows four more years of exceptionally corrupt administration, when the first felon returns to the White House. It is a tale that revolves around two of the most notorious scams pursued by the president-elect during his career as a "successful businessman," namely the Trump Foundation and Trump University.

Rather than an institution of higher learning, Trump U was a for-profit real-estate seminar that promised easy wealth to the suckers who paid huge sums to learn the Donald's investment secrets and received no instruction of any value whatsoever in return. Over the years before Bondi got that Trump check, thousands of defrauded consumers had complained to her office, demanding action.

And just three weeks earlier, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman finally had announced the filing of a massive fraud case on behalf of New Yorkers ripped off by Trump University. According to Tristan Snell, the assistant attorney general handling the case, they hoped Florida would join New York's lawsuit "because it opened up the possibility that, if needed, we could pursue additional witnesses and documents" in the Sunshine State, where subpoenas would require Bondi's assistance.

Evidently that possibility also occurred to someone in the Trump Organization. Four days after the dramatic New York filing, Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff sent an email to the Bondi campaign finance director, seeking details of how to make a donation. Made out to "And Justice For All," the ironically named Bondi PAC, that donation arrived by mail on Sept. 13, 2013, along with a note signed by Trump that misspelled the candidate's name as "Biondi" and declared, "Dear Pam, You are the greatest!"

The check was drawn on the Trump Foundation — a tax-exempt nonprofit organization prohibited from giving money to political campaigns or partisan committees. That was merely one of many examples of Trump's abuse of his foundation's tax-exempt status.

You may have surmised by this point that the Florida attorney general blew off her New York colleagues in seeking justice for the Trump U victims. Snell recalls that after sending the case documents to Tallahassee, "we never heard from the Florida AG's office again."

None of that hindered the legal team led by Snell — one of very few officials ever to hold Trump accountable — from winning a $25 million settlement from the Trump Organization after the 2016 election. The proceeds reimbursed Trump's victims for roughly 80% of what they had lost. Two years after he coughed up that punishing payment, the New York attorney general's office came after the Trump Foundation again, charging that its charitable activities were nonexistent and that its expenditures benefited Trump himself.

In the humiliating conclusion of that lawsuit, his lawyers agreed their client would shut down the foundation and pay the remaining millions in its accounts to bona fide charities.

So egregious were the depredations of Trump U that Republicans felt obliged to condemn its swindling. The National Review ran a scathing investigative report headlined "Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam." Sen. Marco Rubio, then a Trump rival, denounced Trump U as a "con job," and warned that "we cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States." (The Florida senator's more recent sycophancy has now earned Rubio the opportunity to become secretary of state.)

Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bondi as the nation's attorney general knows the saga of Trump University. As Snell sardonically asks, "Did Trump just happen to want to make a donation to Bondi a mere four days after the New York AG's case was filed? Really?"

He goes on to demand that journalists and senators interrogate Bondi about this scandal — and explore its implications for her integrity, her subservience to the president, and her ability to carry out the attorney general's duties.

"We need to make sure this full story gets told — and any profile of Bondi or analysis of her nomination that does not include this story is itself another example of corrupt complicity." Nobody, in the mainstream media or the United States Senate, should be able to claim they did not know.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Senate

Will The Senate Save Us From Trump's Cabinet Of Horrors?

Among the sharpest conservative opponents of fascism is George T. Conway III. During a Nov. 14 appearance on CNN, the attorney and activist offered this pithy description of Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gaetz and Bobby Kennedy, the worst nominees (so far) to Donald Trump's cabinet:

"If you were seeking to destroy the country, the Gabbard, Gaetz, and RFK Jr. picks were exactly the ones you'd make. And that's not surprising. Because Trump is a malignant narcissist, and malignant narcissists, subconsciously or consciously, do seek to destroy." (I should note here that Conway is a friend who wrote the foreword to my most recent book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.)

There may be even more sinister explanations for what Trump is doing — he appears subservient to a hostile foreign power — but Conway's warning about the potential impact of his bizarre choices is no exaggeration. Many Americans, probably including the ignorant and arrogant Trump, have little idea what the major federal agencies do or why maintaining their operations is so essential to protecting our families, livelihoods, and security. They may be about to find out the very hardest way.

As many observers have noted, it is difficult to imagine a more absurd appointee than Gaetz to head the Department of Justice, which has jurisdiction over the FBI as well. He has no relevant experience whatsoever, except as an investigative target.

Like his master Trump, former Florida Rep. Gaetz publicly vowed vengeance on the FBI for daring to probe his alleged crimes, which ranged from drug offenses and theft of campaign funds to the sexual trafficking of teenage girls. But the nation's premier law enforcement agency has responsibilities that range far beyond probing the misconduct of a sleazy congressman. While Gaetz, Trump and many of their cronies may be perfectly content to disrupt the FBI's probes of public corruption, thus leaving them unmolested, the rest of us would surely suffer if it is no longer able to investigate violent gangs, prevent terrorist bombings and cyberattacks, and maintain a counterintelligence cordon against enemy spies (although that would surely gratify those Trump fans in the Kremlin).

The thugs, traffickers, and spies apprehended by the FBI are prosecuted by DOJ attorneys, either in Washington or by U.S. attorneys around the country, whose operations certainly need no interference from the likes of Gaetz or anyone whom he might choose as his underlings.

So when Gaetz proclaims his desire to dismantle the FBI and DOJ, he may have his own petty reasons — but the impact of this clown on the rule of law, public order and Americans' ability to conduct our lives in peace and security could be devastating.

In certain ways Gabbard resembles Gaetz. She too is a peculiar and discredited figure with no discernible ability to perform the role assigned her by Trump, overseeing the world's largest and most vital intelligence network. That network includes the CIA, the National Security Agency, the intelligence divisions of the armed forces, and the FBI (which she can assist Gaetz in wrecking). She is a veteran and a former member of Congress, but perhaps just as important is her pedigree as an acolyte of a destructive cult that spun off from the Hare Krishna organization.

Worse still, she has repeatedly demonstrated her allegiance to some of this era's bloodiest dictators — not just Vladimir Putin, whose propaganda about Ukraine she tried to spread, but Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian despot, mass murderer, and Russian client, to whom she provided similar assistance. Russian state television, which has often garlanded Gabbard with favorable coverage, is celebrating her appointment — but allied intelligence agencies around the world are being forced to reconsider their ties with American counterparts, potentially crippling our capacity to obtain information vital to U.S. national security.

Kennedy, the conspiracy monger and anti-vax profiteer, presents a different kind of menace to our future. He is a proved and inveterate liar, who now claims he isn't an opponent of vaccination when there are hours of video and other indisputable records confirming that fact. More than once he has sat stone-faced while someone played that proof in his presence, and then continued to lie.

Should he actually be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services, with jurisdiction over such agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, the likely damage he will inflict on our health and safety is incalculable. We know what he is capable of doing — what he yearns to do — because he has left a legacy of human wreckage over the past two decades. His campaign against vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic helped to foster the fears that left millions vulnerable and eventually dead. Although Kennedy alone cannot be held accountable for those excess deaths, as statisticians call them, he definitely did his worst.

We may somehow avoid another pandemic, despite the imminent threat from bird flu, but Kennedy's anti-science ideology could soon bring on an epidemic of measles, if he can get the vaccination rate low enough. He and his anti-vax cronies achieved that deadly goal in Samoa several years ago — with lethal consequences for dozens of little children. If he can scale that campaign here, the toll could be in the tens of thousands.

Bobby also seemingly aims to increase tooth decay among children by doing away with water fluoridation. He plans to undermine our decades-long effort to cure cancer and other modern plagues with a mad eight-year "moratorium" on scientific research. He has a roster of likeminded kooks he wants to name to top positions in the federal health agencies — and it's mostly comprised of far-right quacks, discredited academics and supplement grifters, with a couple of neo-Nazis sprinkled among them. If he is confirmed, he will bring this rogue's gallery with him.

What stands between our country and the national wreckage portended by these abominable Trump appointees is the U.S. Senate. There is no more important function outlined in the Constitution for that deliberative body, and there has never been a more urgent need for senators to stand up and protect the nation. There are only a handful of Republicans with the courage, integrity and wisdom to stop this catastrophic process — but only a handful need to act. Nothing less than the fate of the nation is at stake.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Kremlin Sends Trump Congratulations -- And A Thinly Veiled Threat

Kremlin Sends Trump Congratulations -- And A Thinly Veiled Threat

As Donald Trump prepares to dismantle American national security – already badly compromised by his first White House stint – his allies in the Kremlin haven’t hesitated to remind the incoming president of his “obligations” to them.

Certainly Vladimir Putin is thrilled by the notion of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a 37 year-old Fox News commentator with a checkered background, or Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose scant qualifications include little more than her skill in shooting a puppy. These are ultra-partisan hacks who will do whatever Trump orders.

But who will be telling Trump what to do?

On Russian TV’s most watched network, the hosts of a popular show immediately “congratulated” Trump on his victory by broadcasting images of his wife Melania in the nude that appeared in GQ magazine decades ago. Propaganda presenter Yevgeny Popov smirked as introduced the explicit photos, noting that in one shot, the future Mrs. Trump was “only wearing her underwear, lying on a blue carpet with the United States seal, as though the editors of the men’s magazine knew something in advance about the future of their model.” His co-host Olga Skabeeva ostentatiously suppressed a cackle.

Evidently Vladimir Putin didn’t think that message of domination was sufficiently clear, because on November 11 his top aide Nikolai Patrushev made the following remark to a Moscow newspaper:

“To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations,” Patrushev told the business daily Kommersant in response to a question about whether the outcome of the presidential election would bode well for Russia. “As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them” -- rather than any fleeting campaign promises or an oath to defend the United States against hostile foreign powers.

The Kremlin news agency Tass then made certain to distribute Patrushev’s statement globally.

But to make certain that Trump got the point, Patrushev went out of his way to raise an even more sensitive subject. “We know of two cases of attempts on his life during the election campaign,” said the Putin aide. “In general, throughout the history of the United States, attempts have been made on the lives of presidents and candidates regularly—more than 20 times. Four U.S. presidents have died at the hands of assassins while in office. Therefore, it is extremely important for U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent a repetition of such cases.”

By the way, acording to the Wall Street Journal, it was Patrushev – like Putin, a former Russian intelligence officer – who oversaw the aircraft explosion that killed rebellious Kremlin warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in the summer of 2023.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.


No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Meet 'Jack D. Ripper,' Trump's New Health Czar

Over the few days since Donald Trump's election victory, America has gotten a foretaste of the wreckage likely to ensue when he returns to the White House. His promise to endow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with plenary authority over health and food regulation — and to let him "go wild" — shows once more how little Trump really cares about anyone or anything but himself.

As Trump and his associates surely know, Bobby has no qualifications whatsoever to direct or oversee any federal health office, no matter how small, let alone a major agency like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration. Their corrupt deal with the anti-vaccine activist — who has made millions from his attacks on public health — was premised solely on his sycophantic endorsement of Trump and his perceived influence on the crackpot segment of the American electorate.

So confident is Kennedy of Trump's unconditional support that he has already announced his first policy directive, effective on Jan. 21, 2025: an attempt to curtail the municipal fluoridation of American water that has been in continuous effect in most places for decades. Cities and counties dose their water with tiny amounts of fluoride, a naturally occurring substance, because study after study has proved that it prevents dental decay in children, who are saved from the grave health impacts not only of rotting teeth but the infections and disabilities that can follow.

Yet Kennedy somehow has come to believe fluoride is a poison that must be removed from water systems immediately. Perhaps he was influenced the John Birch Society, which has promoted the idea that fluoridation is part of a left-wing plot against Americans since the '50s. (Stanley Kubrick satirized this nonsense in his 1964 film "Dr. Strangelove," which featured a rant by the fanatical right-wing Gen. Jack D. Ripper, justifying a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union that will end the world: "Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?")

Although it's true that excessive consumption of fluoride can lead to ill effects, the levels of fluoridation in U.S. water systems are nowhere near such levels. That's why the American Dental Association and every other health authority have long supported fluoridation policy.

Whatever the source of his bizarre misapprehensions, Kennedy will sooner or later have to confront the simple fact that the scientific evidence shatters his baseless speculations, as it has on so many occasions. The most recent study of fluoridation's impact on human beings, and especially young children, comes from the University of Alberta in Canada. It was produced in the context of a decade-long debate in Calgary, that province's largest city, over whether to restore fluoride to its water supply after removing the chemical in 2011.

Published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health last February, the study of thousands of children in the cities of Calgary (with non-fluoridated water) and Edmonton (where water is fluoridated) showed that lack of fluoride had serious adverse effects on children's health. It had led to thousands of children suffering tooth decay so severe that they needed surgical care under general anesthesia, which is perilous for young kids and led to lasting impact on their health, schooling and emotional well-being.

Of course, the likeliest victims of Kennedy's conspiracy-mongering are the poor — including many lower-income Americans who voted for Trump at his urging. Should he succeed in outlawing fluoridation in water systems, it is poor children whose teeth will rot and whose lives will be blighted. More affluent and educated families will be able to provide fluoride treatment for their kids to save them from Bobby's destructive obsession.

The idea that such a radical scheme would go into effect on the first day of a new administration, without due process or reasoned consideration, is exactly the kind of maladministration we can expect from Trump. We've seen it before, after all.

But before any such anti-fluoridation scheme proceeds, perhaps someone should demand that Kennedy uphold his recent vow to restore our public health agencies to "their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science"-- instead of allowing him to impose his wacky views about fluoride on the entire country, without any study or evaluation.

Naming a health czar who parrots the superstitions of "Jack D. Ripper " is a bad omen of Trump's intentions. We're about to find out how far the new administration will veer into chaos, how much human misery this president will cause on a whim. The prospects are not reassuring.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Charlie Kirk

The Grift That May Cost Trump The Election

If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the White House on November 5, the Democrats may owe their triumph to the notorious character flaw that plagues the Republican Party of Donald Trump: an irresistible urge to grift.

In an election likely to be determined by a very narrow proportion of votes in a few states, the difference between winning and losing could very well depend on what politicians have long referred to by the initials "GOTV" — getting out the vote — a process that involves calling people at home, knocking on their doors, letting them know how and where to vote, and perhaps even providing transportation to the polling place. It is a complex, demanding and essential campaign function that requires literally tens of millions of individual interactions to be orchestrated with exceptional attention to detail. To perform those tasks poorly (or not at all) can transform incipient victory into certain defeat.

It is also a potentially expensive element of a national election, even when most of the job is undertaken by volunteers. That's where the opportunities for grifting arose in this cycle, after members of the Trump gang realized his campaign's field operations would attract big money from wealthy supporters. And at the forefront of the would-be chiselers in the 2024 campaign was Charlie Kirk, the aging leader of the MAGA movement's youth organization, Turning Point USA. (Kirk's personally profitable stewardship of Turning Point is examined in my new book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.)

While the "ground game" for a Republican presidential ticket has been traditionally overseen by the Republican National Committee, Kirk used his close connections with the Trump family, especially Don Jr., to seize effective control of the party apparatus. (No doubt the president's eldest son was grateful to Turning Point for bulk buying copies of his book "Triggered.") He succeeded in pushing out RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and promoting his Turning Point PAC as the Trump campaign's principal field operation. He also persuaded Trump to install daughter-in-law Lara Trump, with no discernible credentials, as RNC chair so she could fire the competent RNC staff -- and advance his fortunes. He announced he would raise $108 million to "chase every vote" in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

The wholesale abandonment of McDaniel's extensive election planning provoked deep skepticism among veteran GOP operatives. They saw no reason why Kirk would need so much cash to get out the vote in three states — or why anyone should invest in his dubious project. They noted that Turning Point's previous election organizing efforts in Arizona's elections in 2022 had not ended well: Every Republican running statewide that year lost.

But Turning Point's lousy midterm results didn't discourage Trump, who was drawn to Kirk's emphasis on turning out "low-propensity" far-right MAGA base voters, rather than seeking to persuade the unaffiliated or undecided. That strategy has lately devolved into a crusade for the support of alienated young men, who may or may not actually show up at the polls. How Kirk plans to motivate them is unclear.

Not long after McDaniel's ouster, Kirk and his allies began to pressure state and local Republican officials to shift their voter outreach and canvassing programs onto a new platform — an app marketed by Superfeed Technologies, a private firm that happens to be owned by Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA's chief operating officer. Just to keep it all in the family, Kirk's mother-in-law sits on the Superfeed board of directors.

Now perhaps this web of conflict and profit is all perfectly legitimate. And maybe the Superfeed app and Kirk's ambitious vote-herding plan will prove to be a brilliant success. But election experts told the Associated Press in early October that they doubt Turning Point can mobilize enough new or infrequent Trump voters to affect the outcome. They pointed out that record numbers of voters cast ballots in 2016 and 2020, which doesn't leave a large share of likely voters to be organized.

Another sign of weakness is that Turning Point has turned over its outreach campaign in Michigan, which reportedly collapsed, to Elon Musk's America PAC. The Musk effort has suffered from its own widely mocked technical glitches and flaws — including a scam that allowed its employees to falsify their canvassing records.

Contrast all that sleaze with the Harris-Walz campaign, bolstered by tens or even hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. They are motivated not by love of money but love of country.

We don't know which side will win yet — but we already know who deserves to win.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Elon Musk

When Republicans Warn Us About Their Ruinous Agenda, Better Believe Them

It’s a lesson that we all should have learned many years ago: When Republicans tell you what they mean to inflict on you and your family, better believe them.

The most painful example in recent years of the public’s failure to comprehend what was coming -- despite dozens of announcements -- is the Republican right's successful assault on reproductive freedom. Donald Trump loudly and repeatedly promised a majority of Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, as did the Republican senators who confirmed them. And still many Americans seemed to be surprised when the high court ripped down principle and precedent to undo that fundamental right.

Now, in the final days of this election campaign, we are hearing from Republicans (and their billionaire masters) what they plan to do if Trump returns to the White House. They have a sweeping agenda to impoverish the middle class while pursuing power and privilege for themselves.

House Speaker Mike Johnson just issued a clear warning that they still yearn to cripple America's health care system in the name of their "free market" utopia. While he and Trump both deny that they will try again (for the 62nd time!) to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Johnson vowed that “health care is going to be a big part of the agenda” should Republicans win – and that their aim will be “massive reform” that “takes a blowtorch to the regulatory state.” This blather portends the end of the reforms that protect people with pre-existing conditions and allow the young to get coverage on their family’s insurance until age 26. Neither those nor other crucial ACA protections would survive those massive changes that neither Trump nor Johnson will specify before the election.

And that’s merely the opening gambit in the Trump Republican scheme to ruin their fellow Americans.

The far-right financiers surrounding Trump have realized that his obsession with tariffs can be repurposed to line their own pockets – so they’re suddenly eager to abandon the principles of free trade they once cherished. For billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the tariff scheme is attractive simply as a form of regressive taxation, siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary consumers in the form of far higher prices. Those tariff revenues could replace the proceeds of the progressive income tax – which the rich hate to pay -- while shifting the burden onto middle-class and poor families.

But Musk has even more nasty surprises in store, as he recently suggested on his X social media platform. He has invested vast sums – upward of $75 million or more – in Trump’s campaign, for which he expects to be named reichsmarshall of "government efficiency,” with unaccountable power to slash programs and fire employees. The world’ richest man breezily advised middle-class Americans that we should expect to suffer “hardship” in the early days of a Trump presidency, owing to the enormous cuts and layoffs he will dictate. (Of course he also promises a “sustained recovery” in the wake of economic disaster, although historically that isn’t how things work out under Republican administrations. You can look it up.)

According to Musk, his objective in a Trump regime would be to cut $2 trillion from future spending – even as Trump has promises trillions more in tax cuts for the billionaires. How does that math work? It doesn’t work at all unless, as J.D. Vance recently confided to a podcast host, Musk’s “government efficiency commission” sharply reduces Social Security and Medicare payments. “I’ve spoken with Elon a little bit about [the task force],” said the Republican vice presidential nominee. “And the thing that’s complicated about this, man, is it’s going to look much different in, say, the Department of Defense versus Social Security.”

We know Trump won’t cut defense spending, which he has always sought to increase with his Space Force and other boondoggles. The only alternative will be enormous cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which account for about $2 trillion in spending annually.

Optimists may imagine that Musk, who no doubt considers himself a “stable genius,” will come up with new ways to save trillions without harming the American people or the economy. Unfortunately his record as an executive is not reassuring. Upon purchasing Twitter (later renamed “X”), he dismissed about 80 percent of the staff and turned the site into a haven for neo-Nazis and the other extremists and conspiracy theories he apparently admires. The company's market value has never recovered and his investment has roughly the same value as if he had put a blowtorch to $44 billion in cash.

The truth about Musk as a businessman is that his profits have depended heavily on government subsidies from the beginning.

But that arrangement can still prop him up, so long as he and his cronies control the government. Musk, Thiel and the rest of the MAGA billionaires will tell you they are backing Trump because they want to “kill the woke mind virus” or “protect freedom” or some such cliched piffle. In fact they are driving a campaign to further enrich and empower themselves – and the rest of us are just road kill.