The Biggest Grifter In History?

June 14th, 2022 by Tom Lynch

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow, writer, Nobel laureate.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.” – P. T. Barnum (maybe).

Yesterday gave us the second Hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, and it put a stake through the heart of any belief that the adults around Donald Trump following the 3 November presidential election actually thought he had won. They all knew that as more and more mail-in votes were counted, the curtain was slowly coming down on the Trump Presidency. And they all told him that.

He wouldn’t listen and turned for validation to the crazies in the room led by an apparently intoxicated Rudy Giuliani who told him, “Just go out and say you won.”

All the testimony yesterday, both in person and pre-recorded, confirmed that, regardless of what anyone told him, Trump’s need to stay in power “trumped” everything else. His minions would keep making wild accusations of fraud, and he would glom onto every one of them, one after another. His Attorney General Bill Barr testified this forced him into constant “whack-a-mole” investigations. Barr said he concluded Trump had become “detached from reality.”

None of this was surprising, although it was a little reassuring to realize nearly all the Republican professionals working on the election had an allegiance to the truth of the facts on the ground. Turns out that, with the exception of the Giuliani, Powell, Eastman cabal, Trump was just about the only off-the-rails person in the White House.

But what was surprising, what hit me like a high hard one to the side of the head, was the testimony of Amanda Wick, which the Committee saved until the end, their knock-out punch. Wick is the Senior Investigative Counsel for the Committee.

Wick laid out in exquisite detail how Trump saw his election defeat as a money-making opportunity of the first order.

Even before the polls closed Team Trump began sending out millions of email solicitations asking for money in order to “fight back” against the “radical left’s” attempt to steal the election. Millions upon millions of emails. Each telling supporters to “Step up” and “Fight back.” Wick testified, “Thirty minutes after the last email was sent, the Capital was breached.”

This tsunami of emails was easy for them, because the Trump campaign had been doing the same thing for the last couple of years. I know this because I would get the solicitations…every day, sometimes two or three times a day. Somehow the Republican National Committee (all the solicitations were signed at the bottom as coming from the RNC; maybe they did, maybe they didn’t) had my email and had decided I was a “top supporter of President Trump,” but had yet to contribute to his defense of our “American freedom,” and the President could “not understand why.” Now, they would give me “one more chance” to contribute, but it had to be done before 11:00pm that night, so President Trump could “see” my name on his daily list of “American Patriots.” In response, I would send nothing, and the next day they’d be back giving me “one more chance.”

Every one of the solicitations promised that my donation would be either 100%, 500%, or even 1,000% matched! By whom? They never said, and if I were a betting man I’d wager no such person existed.

I had never tried to cancel those things. They gave me a daily laugh. I would look at them and say, “Who falls for this stuff?”

Apparently a lot of people. Amanda Wick testified that between Election Day and January 6th those email solicitations raised $250 million for the Official Election Defense Fund.

Except there never was any Official Election Defense Fund, as campaign staffer Hannah Allred testified yesterday. Actually, the solicitations were “marketing tactics,” and the money went into a new Super PAC Trump had created right after the election, the Save America PAC.

Trump doled out some of the money to his political sycophantic cronies like Mark Meadows, who got $1 million for his Conservative Partnership Institute. Nearly a quarter of a million went to the Trump Hotel Collection.

As I watched this unfold, I realized all of this $250 million, and all the money raised from the daily solicitations prior to the election, had come in small donor donations from people around the country who had totally bought into the Cult of Trump. I pictured retired couples getting these solicitations as they sat around their kitchen tables telling themselves they were part of a great cause, and saying, “Let’s send another $25, honey.” People who were on fixed incomes and addicted to Fox News, Trump’s personal TV Network. Grandpas and Grandmas who were the soul of middle America and whose minds had been co-opted by Carnival Barker Donald Trump, and who now believed their way of life was being stolen by radical, leftist extremists in Washington, DC.

Donald Trump’s mythical Official Election Defense Fund was callous, cruel, disgusting, and the epitome of greed.

Has there ever been a bigger grifter in American history?

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