The biggest grifter

Written By: - Date published: 12:21 pm, April 5th, 2021 - 17 comments
Categories: crime, Donald Trump, election funding, uncategorized - Tags:

Possibly the greatest grifter the world have ever seen has been caught out involved in the most spectacular grift you can imagine.  Basically his campaign team sucked in a whole lot of republican voters by asking for urgent donations but then treating them as regular rather than one off donations and requiring donors to understand small print and navigate through various pages to click on a well hidden check box to do so.

From the New York Times:

Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.

This tweet shows the extent of the carnage.

And how is Trump handling the transition from power and back into normal life?  Not well.

The Herald reports that he recently issued this message:

“Happy Easter to ALL, including the Radical Left CRAZIES who rigged our Presidential Election, and want to destroy our Country,” he wrote, in celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Trump is facing multiple legal problems and multiple law suits, the latest being one brought by two police officers who are suing Trump for inciting the riot that resulted in their injury.  Given what he has engaged in over the past few decades this is not surprising.  The only thing that is amazing is that he should not be wearing an orange jumpsuit in a medium security detention Centre.

17 comments on “The biggest grifter ”

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  1. Chris T 1
    5 April 2021 at 4:25 pm

    Who cares tbh.

    The dude is a nutter that is nicely confined to foot note as an embarrassing blip in US political history.

    They shouldn't give the bloke oxygen.

  2. Sabine 2
    5 April 2021 at 4:33 pm

    They are all grifters, he is just one without an iota of shame. As he said, he loves the poorly educated and many applauded him and his ascent.

  3. Morrissey 3
    5 April 2021 at 5:51 pm

    Is that Jimmy Savile in the red and white stripes?

    • Anne 3.1
      5 April 2021 at 6:28 pm

      I'm sure that's Edith Bunker from "All in the Family" . She's ageing well. Must be around 110 now.

  4. Chris T 4
    5 April 2021 at 6:19 pm

    Fact is the dude now has as much relevance as a pretty bad fart in a jar, so who cares?

    • Macro 4.1
      5 April 2021 at 7:15 pm

      Regretfully he still has a huge influence over the Republican Party. This may not seem to be a big deal to us here in NZ, but that influence matters a lot in US politics with a number of GOP congress people unwilling to move too far to accommodate the current initiatives of the Biden administration. Which means jeopardizing progress on such initiatives as:

      His proposal would replace lead pipes and service lines that have disproportionately harmed Black children; reduce air pollution that has long harmed Black and Latino neighborhoods near ports and power plants; “reconnect” neighborhoods cut off by previous transportation projects; expand affordable housing options to allow more families of color to buy homes, build wealth and eliminate exclusionary zoning laws; rebuild the public housing system; and prioritize investments in “frontline” communities whose residents are predominantly people of color often first- and worst-affected by climate change and environmental disaster.

      https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/joe-biden-2tn-infrastructure-plan-racial-justice

  5. Stuart Munro 5
    5 April 2021 at 6:35 pm

    He's important because he represents the nadir of representative democracy.

    The less informed need to be kept aware of the multiple ways in which he is unfit for office.

    And the complacent centrist left need to consider what parts of the left lunch he was eating to be even remotely electable, and how they can do their job well enough that such a manifestly useless contender does not become plausible among the exploited working class. The rise and fall of Billy TK is vaguely encouraging in that light – there are many fools in NZ, but neither so many nor as big as the fools in the US.

    And maybe even here among the ruins left by thirty years of unremitting neoliberal failure, life is not so bad as it has become in the wreckage of the former hegemon.

    • In Vino 5.1
      5 April 2021 at 8:14 pm

      I suspect that it does not suit Chris T's political attitude to remember important things like that. He wants it all thought of as a bad fart in a jar.

      Which makes me think about Chris T's contributions here.

      • woodart 5.1.1
        5 April 2021 at 10:32 pm

        yes, reading christys posts here made me realise that he is still wet behind the ears, age and life experience wise. one of the fresh shiny but not bright young things that DONT want to learn from history. he hasnt lived through the mad deregulated 8os and 90s, and now wants to quickly forget that for four yrs, a madman was in charge of a big red button.

  6. Adrian Thornton 6
    5 April 2021 at 11:43 pm

    Of course with the Democrats steadfastly refusing to learn anything from 2016 and now breaking election promise after election promise, who is to say the Americans don't get something far worse than Trump next time?

    And anyway, sure he was a horrible and uncouth guy, but how much worse internationally was he than the average POTUS in actual terms of human damage?

    And yes he was terrible on climate change, but then any Republican POTUS is going to be terrible, that is just a given , and not unique to trump.

    • McFlock 6.1
      6 April 2021 at 12:32 am

      In order to discuss outcomes using comparatives like "better" or "worse", one would need a shared value system. For most geopolitical aspects, this does not exist between us.

      But on the basis that we can probably agree that "covid deaths are bad", internationally I believe that the orange turdball provide unneeded leverage (and the little remaining gravitas attached to his office at the time) to every deranged crackpot with a covid conspiracy theory, and to any deranged country leader who was happy to see the poorer and browner bits of their country die. Globally.

      Can't put a number on it, sure. But if there had been a competent POTUS in office through 2020, I suspect the international effort (and individual national efforts) against covid around the globe would have been more effective.

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